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Sustainable Agile Change

Image of game board built using Team Space

Serious gaming to encourage and nurture an agile mindset, beyond just software and product delivery teams, using jargon-light agility cards.

A collection of Essence Activity Space Cards

The Activity Spaces are an often-overlooked aspect of Essence. These 15 descriptions of types of common activities that all software development teams will do are often overshadowed by the specific activities from Practices. But as this article shows they have value in their own right and can be a powerful tool to help teams improve.

Welcome to the amalgamation of a short series of articles on crafting effective, well-formed objectives as part of the SAFe® Program Increment (PI) / Big Room Planning activity. We have seen a lot of confusion surrounding the use of PI objectives; confusion that often results in: Resistance to their use and; The production of poorly formed team objectives that appear to be completely redundant as they just list the Features being addressed. The first step to creating well-formed, useful objectives is for everyone to understand why they are so important. Covered in this document: Why do we need PI Objectives when we have Features? Writing good PI Objectives PI Objectives and the PI Planning Process PI Objectives Beyond PI Planning: Reaffirming and Monitoring Your Commitments  

Picture of the Holy Grail

Our industry loves a fad - and in particular, we love to discover the Next Big Thing in development approaches. Each time we are promised a new (or improved) framework or playbook that will solve all our problems, and that we should immediately roll out to all our teams. And each time, we end up disappointed, without the results promised or anticipated, needing to look for a new Next Big Thing to repeat the cycle. It doesn't have to be that way, and the alternative needn't be as scary as it may seem. And it isn't another big framework!

Image of some of the cards from the Essence based Method Agnostic Agility Cards used to help people learn about some key agile principles.

The following blog provides a set of free, downloadable agile coaching cards that can be used by Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters and teams working in many different contexts. These cards have been developed while working outside of software and product development with government Defence teams and I’ve used these cards to teach agility and help develop an agile mind set.

Image of the Hapag-Lloyd corporate logo.  Provides access to an IJI case study explaining how Hapag-Lloyd Used Essence To Drive an Agile Transformation.

Hapag-Lloyd are using Essence to provide proven agile practice options for teams to adopt and adapt, enable coaches to facilitate practice adoption and improvement, provide for tailored approaches for different types of project, and achieve transparency of status and health for effective governance.

Image of the Liverpool Victoria LV corporate logo.  Provides access to an IJI case study explaining how IJI helped Liverpool Victoria LV establish lean portfolio management LPM and launch Agile Release Trains (ART's)

One of the main goals for LV= GI has been the need to accelerate the pace of getting their products to market. It was essential for them to get in front of opportunities, be proactive and stay ahead of the curve. To survive in a hugely competitive marketplace, they must also keep moving in the right direction to remain a front runner.

Image of the Skandia corporate logo.  Provides access to an IJI case study explaining how IJI helped Skandia undertake a full-scale transformation to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

In August 2017, Skandia began their transformation to a Scaled Agile way of working using SAFe® with the support of Ivar Jacobson International (IJI). Prior to the programme, Skandia's work culture was very much a centralized, plan driven over analytical approach. Since the introduction of the Scaled Agile Framework from IJI, they have changed to a 'let’s get going', experiment, trim and adjust approach that has impacted the entire business in very positive ways.

Image of the SimCorp corporate logo.  Provides access to an IJI case study explaining how IJI helped SimCorp undertake a full-scale transformation to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

Better quality and better predictability of delivery The entire product division talking the same language using the same concepts More responsive delivery with the ability to demo features to clients as the teams are developing them

Image of the Fujitsu corporate logo.  Provides access to an IJI case study explaining how IJI helped Fujitsu move towards agility with an Essence based agility workshop.

In a recent blog by Fujitsu’s Rob Devlen, Fujitsu and IJI go Agile with Essence, Devlen describes how Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) worked with Fujitsu to create a workshop to build an understanding of Agile for their top 100 executives and senior managers in the EMEIA region. The blog article describes how we created that interactive workshop with them, facilitated the session and the results obtained. In this article we’ll show you a flavour of some of the content.

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