I stumbled across Pawel Brodzinski’s blog on Software Project management. In “Why Kaizen Boards (Typically) Don’t Work” he talks about the importance of having the right culture that will support using and taking full advantage of the tools (Agile, Lean or otherwise) that people try to introduce to organizations. He notes that when the culture doesn’t permit experimentation without permission, introducing any kind of continuous improvement effort is almost always doomed to fa

Recently I’ve been challenged by the question, “Can you change culture?” I think this is pretty common for folks who work in large organizations. The question of culture and how it blocks or allows us to get things done is a thorny one. There seem to be two opposing schools of thought in the agile community on the subject of culture: You can’t change culture, you can only adapt to it (customize your process to fit) You can change culture (through influence, good looks, and th

I stumbled across Pawel Brodzinski’s blog on Software Project management. In “Why Kaizen Boards (Typically) Don’t Work” he talks about the importance of having the right culture that will support using and taking full advantage of the tools (Agile, Lean or otherwise) that people try to introduce to organizations. He notes that when the culture doesn’t permit experimentation without permission, introducing any kind of continuous improvement effort is almost always doomed to fa

Last week I led a session at Agile Open Northwest called, “Slowing Down”. The idea for this session was inspired by my own struggles with becoming quite over-committed to a variety of things (my job, my hobbies, etc.) and the resulting stress and crisis it has created for me. You see, the funny thing about it all was that even though I was perfectly aware of what I was doing by over-committing like crazy, I couldn’t seem to stop. The Introduction So I came to this session, no