Communicating "The Agile" to Leadership and Middle Managers

andycleff · 2018-01-12 17:31:25 UTC

@thostaylor and I were just riffing about ways to help those outside of the IT/Software team get their minds around “The Agile” - I passed on a funny story that @johannarothman shared during a recent podcast recording… The particular VP said they didn’t need to know anything about The Scrum or The Kanban, but wanted Johanna to teach him all about The Agile.

While we have a few threads here on the topic, I thought I’d start a fresh one…

I’ve got a deck that I’m playing with that you can check out:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1LglTxUnXZTQ9yaWt0DacL1T4m1skpM0k

Screen Shot 2018-01-12 at 12.30.54 PM.jpg1216×912 137 KB

What have you tried? (success and failures both invited :P)

What books could you casually leave lying around?

A few of my fav’s:

Jen · 2018-01-15 03:05:42 UTC

Andy - there’s a venn diagram image (which I can’t find the original at the moment). It has the three circles (operational, strategic and cultural) to represent the three domains of agile. I use this a lot and it really resonates. if some-one has the orginal let me know so I can attribute!

I explain that all the language they are hearing about rituals and ceremonies are belonging to Operational (Big A agile). Examples of Strategic can be found in stuff like Lean Start Up / Innovation as a strategy driver. I always give David Marquet’s material to leaders to explain Cultural agility.

Its very helpful in underscoring why just moving to an Agile operating model will not bring success eg you need to ensure there strategy is driving it and the leaders are down with the cultural implications.