Self-organized Kaizen

September 23, 2013 — Leave a comment

While “self-organized team” is a well-known Agile concept that’s very much sought after, having teams that truly self-organized do require often a mindset change from both the team members and their manager.

Usually that means getting the team to self-manage the backlog, work out the task dependencies among themselves, pull through issues together as a cross-functional team etc. I’m sure you have read enough about getting teams to self-organize in their delivery work. But what about self-organizing outside of the delivery process?

Let me share with you some recent initiatives taken with the team where they practice their own self-organization outside of an Agile delivery team.

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An interesting post from Don Peppers in LinkedIn today on how fragile or otherwise a business is brought my attention to this book “Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder“. I’ve been following Don Peppers since his classic book “The One to One Future” but this is something else.

We probably understood “fragility” but what’s “anti-fragile” especially from a business context? Taleb, the author of the above book states that “anti-fragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.

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TedXKL 2013

July 19, 2013 — Leave a comment

When I came across this event, I’d thought I was late to the party. Glad they’ve sold only about 2/3 of their 1,500 seats. 🙂

TED is well-knowned for it’s inspiring webcast which have touched most of our lives. I like TED because it’s not a technology-centric community and you don’t get to hear just IT fellas talking on a stage (not that I’m saying IT fellas are boring).

It’s thru TED I discovered Daniel Pink and his book “DRIVE“. If you are looking for a book that explains how to drive intrinsic engagement & motivation in an individual, you should check out his book or better still, just watch this TED webcast from Daniel.

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RALLY and AgileZen

July 10, 2013 — Leave a comment

A few years back when I was working on a project where I needed to form a team with a group of people from 5 diverse nationalities – Malaysian, Indian, Filipino, Norwegian, and Polish – to realign and standardize their localized business processes, I was searching for a tool that would enable me to keep everyone focus on a stream of work yet acts as simple info radiator to keep me abreast of everyone’s progress (without needing to micro-manage).

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Been close to half a year since I took on this new job. They have a Purple theme and somehow it reminded me of Seth’s PURPLE COW book which was one fascinating read years ago.

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