Jeff Sutherland (@jeffsutherland) came by our office in Munich in February and gave an inspiring talk about Getting Started with Scrum by Descaling the Organisation first. You can watch the whole performance including a rather extensive Q&A session below
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If Jeff's talk wasn't inspiring enough already to start you thinking about how to improve your organisation here is another one by Dr. Russell L. Ackoff given in long gone 1994 about continuous and discontinuous improvement and systems thinking in general. Even though the following words have been spoken by Dr. Ackoff more than two decades ago we feel they are still true today and will be for many more generations to come: "If we have a system of improvement that's directed at improving the parts taken separately you can be absolutely sure that the performance of the whole will not be improved ... The performance of a system depends on how the parts fit, not how they act taken separately ... Doing the wrong thing right is not nearly as good as doing the right thing wrong."
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In case you still didn't have enough already and have about 35 minutes left that you would like to invest into finding out more about innovation in organisations here is another talk, this time a rather new one given in 2015 in London by Barry O'Reilly (@barryoreilly) about Lean Enterprise and Enabling Innovative Culture in organisations.
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If you are more of a reading kind here is something valuable for you as well. In the following interview about Water-Scrum-Fall Andy Hiles (@Yolandy) explains the important difference between "doing" agile and "being" agile. If you want to find out more about why some contracts in our industry are to be seen as an "iron triangle of doom" and what they have in common with Donald Rumsfeld himself go on and enjoy the interview. If we were forced to pick only a single quote from it we would probably go for the following one: "Unfortunately as we know Scrum is seen as a development only practice by organisations and not a ‘how to handle uncertainty and change in your end to end product development’ practice."
In case you want to read even more about the lean and agile topics in general and especially find out what lean ist all about and how one could define it, this rather easy to read book by Niklas Modig (@LeanOnMyself) and Pär Åhlström called "This is Lean" should do the trick. It will help you put Values, Principles, Methods and Tools into the right perspective and explain why one should prioritize flow efficiency over resource efficiency when trying to "lean" forward.
Last but not least we would like to point you to a very nice graphical representation of what the role of Agile Coach and Scrum Master is all about.
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Thanks to Sebastian Radics (@SebastianRadics) and the effort he put into creating a downloadable version of the according poster you can download it for free here and now: http://www.ontheagilepath.net/2016/02/tasks-of-an-agile-coach-as-poster.html.
Take care of both your discovery and delivery and don't forget to have fun!
