The new Scrum Guide has been released this week and I felt obliged to share my review of this document with you.

Link to the scrum guide here.

Changes between 2017 and 2020 Scrum Guides

They are 7 major changes:

1. Less prescriptive …. which I challenge and disagree because of the wording
2. One team, one Product is a good reminder
3. Product Goal instead of Vision will lead to a lot more upfront thinking and analysis to define such a goal
4. A Home for Sprint Goal, Definition of Done, and Product Goal: that’s a lot of goals, a lot of constraints ….I feel processes, controls here
5. Self-Managing over…

In these COVID-19 times, anxiety and fear are freezing our ability to respond to any threats or opportunities in our business environment.

We are in surviving times where our reptilian brain takes over rationality. Stopping the engine instead of moving forward sounds to be the only action feasible. Brain and guts, reflection and action are disconnected. In cognitive psychology, that phenomenon is called a reverse locked-in syndrome where the brain commands to fight the fire without any possibility to start fire prevention until your company becomes an empty nutshell unable to respond to any new opportunities.

These lines intend to…

I was introduced to Clean Language three years ago through Olaf Levitz and Judy Rees. At the beginning I was intrigued, then I discovered an impressive tool to improve my coaching.

During a U-Lab session in Heidelberg, we had to perform some personal development coaching on some candidates. The workshop was organised in a set of small groups. The coachee and the coaches were sitting in a circle and each of the coaches proceeds to a five-minute session.

I thought this could be a good opportunity to use Clean language for mine.

The coachee had a high dream of sustainability…

Like many of my colleagues, I´m looking for new assignments in form of hiring or contracting. Last thirteen years, I experienced agile in many contexts from start´ up to global finance. I have the arrogance to believe that I have an average good understanding of what agile coaching is and what an agile coach has to do. My arrogance leads me to train people to become agile coaches or better agile coaches. Unfortunately, the market sounds not be aligned with me or I´m not aligned with the market. Another side effect, many senior agile coaches with huge experience and proven…

Working on several projects and facilitation, I was each time confused about how professionals are addressing emotions.

Everyone has to be happy, enthusiastic, nice and gentle. Loud people even jokers and rude people are contained. Under the umbrella of “be yourself”, that yourself sounds more and more to be “like I expect from you to behave”.

Don´t misunderstand me, I´m not writing about behaving like punks. I´m writing about not behaving like puritans.

From a systemic coaching perspective, positive behaviour is the expected outcome and not the corset of forcing fake positiveness.

Let´s take an example with children. Your child…

In my previous article, I wrote to you about the importance of alignment and that agility is only one answer to a constantly changing environment.

Today, I’m going to share with one of our most essential tools: the “ORPO”. It is a snapshot of your business, a polaroid for those of my generation.

Watch how information flows through your business.

Ask the operational staff if they know where we are going and why?

Go back to management and look at the strategic plan. Ask if each member of the board is in phase. Go ahead and measure the deviations. In…

While working with one of my customer on designing the vision of his organization as an agile enterprise, came the question, and how do measure it? In front of that whiteboard, I began to explain the following:

• UX — User Experience is what the user is expecting while using your solution by improving its usage. UX is the reason why people love using iPhones or Apple Computers. The strategy was to increase the usability by just accessing all your apps with a single thumb.
• CX — Customer Experience is a sequence of actions that creates trust between the enterprise and its customer. It is also the process of caring first about customer´s needs and not the enterprise´s requirements. It is the way the enterprise provides “hospitality” in its relationship with clients. It is about considering them at…

Making sense and value-driven are undoubtedly the most used two words in Agile. All the people aspects (PX), customer-centric issues (CX), and process optimizations (SX) are well documented. But in a business context, you find a lot of incoherence when considering budgeting, funding and return-of-investment.

One of the most common misleading assumptions I meet in my consulting is that a line of business is a service for the organization. That idea is one of the oldest and most resistant beliefs in enterprises. It assumes that those lines are at the service to the “real” value creation flow or to clean up the enterprise from all risks and threads. That’s a valid argument. The problem comes when the budget run starts.

Budgeting is a weird process if you are looking deeply on it. You have to know much you spend a year to run. You have…