Practical Systems Thinking: Elevate the Constraint
Practical Systems Thinking: Elevate the Constraint – The saga continues! If subordinating to the constraint is the most challenging, elevating the constraint is the easiest…to get wrong. Elevating the...
View ArticlePractical Systems Thinking: Don’t Let Inertia Become the Constraint
Congratulations! You’ve gotten to the fifth step in the Five Focusing Steps of the “Theory of Constraints”. That means you’ve broken the constraint in your system! But, your work is not done. As a...
View ArticlePlanning Horizons: Decision-making within Agile Frameworks
Organizations need to plan, it’s not a “nice-to-have option”, and they need to do it effectively at multiple levels. In the end, this planning needs to feed an enterprise’s ability to do financial...
View ArticleThe Essence of Agility: Becoming Safer by Controlling Less
The other day, I presented at Agile India 2014 on the topic of “Pivoting Your Organization to Become Agile Testers”. Near the end, when I was tying up all the points in the talk, I was speaking about...
View ArticleBut It’s Just a Simple Matter of Coding – How Hard Could It Be?
Many times, I hear business people (such as Product Owners) bemoan how expensive software development is. And the brutal truth is that for anything non-trivial, software costs a ton of money to...
View ArticleStay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And Don’t Be Afraid to Say “Our Process Has No...
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Many people remember those words as a quote from Steve Jobs made during Jobs’ Stanford commencement address in 2005, where, among other things, he spoke about the Whole...
View ArticleCuriosity as a Leading Indicator of Agile Adoption Success
As I reflect on how engagements go, I’ve come to ask myself, “Why do some teams and organizations take to agile adoption better than others?” It’s a tough question. But one that is important to me as...
View ArticleThe Dangers of The “All or Nothing” Plan
There is a pattern seen in the business world and especially in the requests that come into IT departments. Customers, stakeholders and product management provide a list of features. The list is “all...
View ArticlePaying Attention: A Critical Capability for Organizational Agility
An agile organization is able to rapidly notice and effectively respond to extreme change while shaping the future in the midst of that extreme change. Without that capability an organization is like a...
View ArticlePractical Systems Thinking: Subordinate to the Constraint
Subordinate to the constraint?? That doesn’t sound right! But that’s the third step in the “Five Focusing Steps” of the Theory of Constraints. It’s possibly the most challenging part of the process...
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