Servant Leadership is often used to describe how people lead internal teams. Leadership that inspires, enables and encourages success. That focuses on removing obstacles. That promotes collaboration. Providing people with what need to be successful and achieve their best outcomes.
Customer-facing implementation teams have always been Agile
When Agile and Scrum first disrupted the IT industry, they were thought of as something that changed how we managed software development projects. Over the years it has continued impacting the other teams that work in technology based companies – implementation teams and operations teams. Albeit at times in a blended fashion, where some agile concepts are adopted or morphed variations have emerged. Such as the emergence of DevOps, an Agile practice that focuses on collaboration and cooperation between development and service operations teams. Still, I find it ironic that the origins were in development, while in truth the other teams are probably better suited to an Agile philosophy.
Do you truly understand what it means to be Agile?
The Agile Manifesto was published more than a decade ago in 2001. Since then, the industry has sometimes morphed the message of what it means to be Agile. Sometimes confusing or merging it with Lean development, Scrum and Kanban manufacturing (which all add great things to the mix). Though with any real truism, the wisdom in it still rings through today.
Delighting the Customer should always be the higher goal between corporate Silos
Problems occur in the gaps between people. Often issues occur between individual people, teams and silos, companies and customers because of miss understood lines of responsibility and unmet expectations. How often have we all heard the expression that a problem arose because “things fell through the cracks” He then went on to explain that the ideal solution to these problems is not reorganization or rewriting of agreements, but in finding the higher goal that the separate sides would benefit from, and forge a joint resolve to accomplish that goal.
Agile – Bringing down the cost of change
For this post, I’d like to step back a moment. Instead of looking at the why’s and how’s of the methodology, I would like to instead consider one of the key benefits that Agile brings to both us as product creators and to our customers. What you might think of as the “Value” with a capital “V” of Agile. This is that it brings down the cost of change.
