Why Steering Committees Can’t Steer
The steering committee for a big core-system program meets once a month. The program manager walks through the status deck: milestones completed, budget on track,… Read More
7 vs 7: Comparing Two Modern Delegation Models
“I wish I had that delegation model 50 years ago when I founded this company–things might have gone a lot better!” -End of day quote… Read More
What Does It Mean to Be an Agile Company?
This summer, we led CAPED Agile for Teams training for more than 100 people at one of our clients. On the final day, one of… Read More
“But What If We Need That Later?”
A product owner I’m coaching recently pushed through the hard part of a backlog overhaul. They organized a sprawling pile of stories into features, put… Read More
Two Moves When Everything’s Priority #1
“This is our top priority now. Everything else falls by the wayside.” A leader at one of our clients said this recently to a product… Read More
The Suggestion Box Retro (and the ORID fix)
Most teams judge a retrospective by the energy of the conversation and the number of action items on the board at the end. Full board,… Read More
8 Problems That Masquerade as ‘Our Sprint Is Too Short’
In our coaching, we often hear, “Our sprint length is too short. We want to change it from X to Y weeks.” The time box… Read More
Claude’s Plan Looked Completely Reasonable
I recently built a small internal app with Claude Code to solve a longtime pain we’ve had. The results were great in the end, but… Read More
Don’t Build Workflows Left-to-Right
Workflows. They’re at the core of most business systems. And they have a common shape: gather data (from humans and/or various other systems), process the… Read More
Two Months to One Week
Last week, I shared results from our poll on cross-functional teams. Only about a quarter of respondents said their team was set up to deliver… Read More