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Newsletter on Product Development, Agile, Innovation and Large-Scale Scrum.

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Welcome to newsletter 52  
 
 
Past 3 newsletters:

Empirical Coach weekly newsletter #51: User story is not a format

Empirical Coach weekly newsletter #50

 Empirical Coach weekly newsletter #49: “Special Forces” Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems

 




Interesting Articles

Scrum Guide: 7 things to change in the 2020 update
 
Changes to the Scrum Guide is coming soon. Several Scrum trainers have been writing articles about it online and one of them here
Only when we see the changes, we would know if all these changes have been implemented.

1. Rename Development Team to Team
Because 'development' is still confusing, also implies Scrum is for IT only, so let's call it just Team, this would be also LeSS-compatible.

2. Rename Scrum Team to Product Team
The 'Scrum Team' is a weird constellation, like an artificial container. 'Product Team' highlights the purpose of its existence and can be widely understood.

3. Make a comment that a Product Team can contain many Teams
Yes, finally add clarity on how Scrum scales. It is 2020 outside. Let's be real, most companies have more than a single team working on a product...

4. Make a note that that the Product Team all its Team are working on a single Product Increment and guided by the single Product Backlog re-prioritized by the single Product Own
Yes, it will make it LeSS-compatible as this is how Scrum scales.

5. Also state that the Product Team must have one or many Scrum Masters carrying about optimizing on the whole Product
Scrum Master doesn't belong to the (Dev) Teams but rather need to serve the higher purpose. See my article on this.

6. State that Product Team is in constant contact with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Stakeholders to clarify the purpose, learn market and customer value. Yes, simply because this is how the things are.

7. State that the Product Team is led by the Product Vision creation of which is facilitated by the Product Owner based on Stakeholders’ interests, Customer Value and Beliefs of the Product Owner and Team Members.

Alexy has captured this in detail here.  
 

 
Ten Reasons Why Big Firms Stick With Obsolete Management
 
“Most [firms] today are run on the basis of ‘legacy’ management systems that have become obsolete,” writes Menlo College professor Annika Steiber in The Silicon Valley Model. But why?

Even though 20th Century management is a coherent and consistent way of running a company, it is an increasingly poor fit with today’s fast-moving customer-driven marketplace. It has difficulty changing direction. It lacks agility. Here are ten reasons why 20th Century management still dominates.

1.    20th Century Management Operates As An Unstoppable Flywheel
 
Since 1970, 20th Century management has been preoccupied with a single-minded goal—to maximize shareholder value. The goal leads to a very specific way of running the company. Because the goal is uninspiring to those doing the work, workers need to be closely monitored.


2.    A Head Fake Doesn’t Change A Corporation
 
Amid growing public concern over low-quality  jobs, economic inequality, and left-behind communities, the goal of maximizing shareholder value—which even Jack Welch called “the world’s dumbest idea”—eventually came under such heavy fire that in August 2019, more than 200 chief executives of major corporations signed a statement of the Business Round Table (BRT) publicly renouncing it. The BRT declaration stated, “Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities, and our country.”
 
3.    Executives Are Paid To Keep Things The Same
 
A key reason why 20th Century management remains supreme in most big companies today is that extravagant executive compensation depends on it. An important accelerator of shareholder value was the 1990 article in Harvard Business Review by finance professors Michael C. Jensen and Kevin J. Murphy. The article, “CEO Incentives—It’s Not How Much You Pay, But How,” suggested that many CEOs were still being paid like bureaucrats and that this caused them to act like bureaucrats. Instead, they should be paid with significant amounts of stock so that their interests would be aligned with stockholders.


Read rest of the article here  
 

 
"Dangerous animals of Product Management"

This pic is trending quite a bit on the internet and thought would share it below...


 
 
 

 
Large-Scale Scrum(LeSS)

Recently I had an opportunity to have a video podcast(campfire chat) with TameFlow community.. We discussed about LeSS and TameFlow

Check out this link

 

 
Systems Thinking Snippet from Scaling Lean and Agile Book
 
Systems Thinking is a set of thinking tools to help...
  • see system dynamics—a development organization is a system of people and policies with subtle feedback loops and unintended consequences   – we can learn to see and thus improve the system with causal loop diagrams created in a workshop
 
  • see mental models—one reason behind suboptimal decisions is mistaken assumptions and faulty reasoning
    – casual loop diagramming and Five Whys expose these
 
  • see root causes—real improvement requires learning how to find root causes of problems and see deeper relationships
    – causal loop diagrams, 5 Whys, and Ishikawa diagrams reveal these
 
  • see local optimization—another source of suboptimal decisions is local optimization, making the ‘best’ decision from the viewpoint of a person or department, rather than global optimization for the lean systems-level goal of deliver value fast with high quality and high morale.
 
 

 
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Upcoming Events

Look forward to public courses in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and India in 2020.  Possibly expanding to other countries. 


I have conducted several online training for Certified LeSS Basics and Provisional Certified LeSS Practitioner till date.  I recently completed a few and would be announcing a few more soon. Keep an eye on this newsletter. 


Many might not know that I also offer Certified LeSS Executive training. This is specifically for senior leaders who might be interested in learning the intricacies of management and structure to influence the culture. 


Please reach out:  venky at agileworld.com.au for further details.
 


About Empirical Coach
 
If you are interested in Agile coaching, mentoring and training services, please reach out to me (venky@agileworld.com.au). We have a team of passionate coaches collaboratively working together and could help. 


Our team has deep expertise in Agile, Lean, Systems Thinking and Complexity science. We look at challenges from different angles and apply tools from various schools of thoughts. This is different from the cookie-cutter approaches you see around.  We are proud to be different.


I have been deeply involved in many of the initial experiments that lead to the birth of LeSS, one of the countable number of people globally.  

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