Are modern organizations ready to pay the price for increased demand for their leaders? Countless companies and organizations are currently changing how they work internally. Some experience a growth spurt in the wake of digitalization, others want to be more flexible in reacting to change. And a lot of these organizations struggle with these transformations. They got the agile framework of their choosing in place, they got the teams set up and maybe they even streamlined their portfolio and technological infrastructure. At first, everything looks good, but after a while, all the shiny new things start to lose their gleam and things become tedious again. Decisions take ages to be put into action and once a course is set, people find it hard to deviate from it. All the fluffy stuff like empowerment of the teams and people somehow does not seem to happen. These symptoms might hint that an organization is suffering from “leadership debt”.
Scrum is hard and tedious! It’s like groundhog day for software projects! Ever noticed that scrum does the same thing over and over again? Plannings, retrospectives, dailies, backlog refinements… Each sprint we do the same thing! Especially for long running projects this becomes boring. Programmers follow the Don’t repeat yourself paradigm, so why we do differently in processes? There has to be room to optimize, right? There is a solution to it: Scaled Single Sprint Scrum - It’s like scrum but totally different!
SAFe is the worst implementation of “corporate agile” that is out there! Over the last few months I heard this sentence or a variety of it a few times. There is some truth to it, but it is not the whole truth. The SAFe-framework is far away from what I imagine when thinking “agile”, but there are some aspects which are pretty neat. Despite all the critics it is a very popular framework that is implemented in a lot of bigger companies. So there has to be something good in it, doesn’t it? Let’s have a more differentiated look at it!
A good product vision is the cornerstone for being successful at delivering software products1. Having a product vision that is tangible and accepted by your developers is one of the most important things to have, if teams are supposed to work in an empowered and self-organized way. A vision is not just a good advertising tool, but it is the foundation to creating a purpose for everyone’s alignment towards what the product shall be. It is a common pattern, that companies that struggle with creating good product or company visions, find it very hard to create alignment and motivation in those employees who are building and delivering their products.
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Actually this is true for any product in development, not just software. ↩
Most hobby projects die at the idea stage - Mine do not. A while ago I decided to revive an old idea of mine to implement the International System of Units as a strongly typed C++ library. In order to try to bring this project forward I tried an experiment: I would make at least one commit each workday for a month. A month later I am somewhat proud to say, that I kept this promise to myself with only one “comittless” day. But how does my pet project look now?
How good are your decisions? - Every day we decide a lot of things small and big. At work or any professional setting we often have clear deciders. This can be a senior subject matter expert, the traditional “boss” or some collaborative process in an empowered team - it does not really matter. Contrary to our private live, in business we often have to make decisions more explicit and documented, for instance in the form of meeting minutes. Some people are good at deciding, others find it very hard.
Die neuen Standards haben die Programmiersprache C++ merklich modernisiert und teilweise ganz neue Programmierparadigmen in die Welt von C++ eingebracht. Die “grossen” Änderungen wie Variadic Templates, auto, Move-Semantik, Lambda-Ausdrücke und weitere haben für viel Diskussionsstoff gesorgt und sind dementsprechend weit herum bekannt. Nebst den Sprachfeatures hat auch die Standard-Bibliothek eine merkliche Erweiterung erfahren und viele Konzepte aus Bibliotheken wie boost wurden so Standardisiert. Nebst diesen sehr spürbaren (und teilweise auch umstrittenen) Features gibt es eine ganze Menge an kleinen-aber-feinen Spracherweiterungen die oft weniger bekannt sind oder übersehen werden.
The core capital of modern companies are their employees. This fundamental truth is even more important for companies operating in areas that require highly trained and motivated people with a high degree of initiative. It is not just software companies that fit perfectly into that scheme, but almost any engineering-driven company and many, many companies outside classical STEM fields. After all as Humphrey Watts said: “Every business is a software business”. In the article “The James Bond Package” I wrote how having someone with the skills and mentality of James Bond in your company helps a lot when solving complex problems is daily business. However getting James Bond to work for you and then be able to unlock his full potential needs a company culture that fits the modus operandi of a secret agent.
Due to his combination of skills, motivation and initiative James Bond is the perfect agile problem solver. Agile working requires empowerment of teams and individuals, self-organizing and a different mentality than classical command-and-control structures. This is not just the case for the leaders but also for the people actually solving the problems and delivering the products. To perform in such an environment it helps if each and everyone of us shares a bit of what I like to call the “James Bond Package”.
“It is really demotivating, nothing gets done here.” A complaint I heard a few times in various settings. Sometimes just as a exclamation to vent steam, sometimes with a sigh and an edge of desperation to it. Surprisingly most of the time I hear this, it is from people that I esteem as far from lazy and quite capable of actually doing and completing things. But lack of motivation can strike the best of us.