Management Management, Business, Leadership, Agile, Lean, etc.

This article attempts to put together a summary - a coherent basis for a modern-day organization to reassess the full value of its human capital. Businesses that restructure to foster happy and healthy employees always outperform the traditionally dispassionate and inflexible configurations.

Part One: Dark Ages

In one possible future, books will be written, and courses will be taught, all trying to intellectualize how it was at all possible for reasonable people to be so beguiled and betrayed by their own emotions as to run any business in the backwards format that we consider normal today.

We will look back in astonishment and horror at the time when unnecessary personal sacrifices that broke up families, and shortened lives by decades were the norm, and we will be grateful that those dark times are in the past. Alas, at the moment of this writing, these times are now.

Industrialized countries possess technological infrastructure that makes 95% of all labour heuristic i.e. requiring a degree of creativity and independent thought, while the continuously dwindling 5% of jobs are algorithmic, where tasks are repetitive and require little ingenuity or individuality. There exist, however, hardly an occupation where task...

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TL;DR Rules and tools are secondary as they emerge to support the organizing principles in a company. The difficulty lies in motivating organizations to arrive at those deeper principles when all we have are the rules.

So, which one is the real Scrum? Where do we go looking for the Scrum that we want to find? Is it Scrum.org, Scrum Alliance? Perhaps the volumes of the SBOK(tm) Guide contain the recipe for the "right" Scrum?

Or, maybe the question is stated incorrectly: it's not Scrum, per se, that we want. We want to have a humane and efficient workplace where innovation and passion thrive while delighting the customer by delivering the right product at the right time. We can do this by checking in with the customer as often as possible so that we can make frequent course corrections to align with changing business needs.

In short, we want to be happy and successful. We choose to use evidence based empirical approaches to inform our planning and development.

Still though, all Agile frameworks cannot be equal at bringing forth these objectives. So, to clarify, we are discussing which set of rules (Agile framework) the current set of rules (classical PM) should be replaced with in a way that would bolster the principles characteristic of efficient development. This will, in t...

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This is part 2 of the article on Agile transformation. This article was written back in the summer of 2014, and then it was misplaced and forgotten for four years. Lots of things changed in the last four years, and I know I would have written this differently now. Besides missing a proper intro, there were tons of thoughts and ideas that didn't make it into this text for reasons of time.

Part Two: Renaissance

One might say that these are the realities of life such as bad weather or the flu - we have no choice but to accept some inconvenience at work, that's why the pay is sometimes called "compensation". While accepting things we can't change, and focusing on the ones we can is a wise advice, not all work environments are immature and bad for your health. Companies with happy, passionate employees produce better results, are more competitive, and will endure for longer. The immature conception of social organization and the expectation of an oppressive climate, however, is the contaminant spread by the employees, majority of whom simply cannot imagine anything different. Companies where these destructive anti-patterns are perpetuated by the leaders and the employees alike usually have a high turnover rate, serving as thought-virus factories t...

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