Hi there! Maybe you’ve been wondering what we were up to lately! Many of you have asked us why the heck you had to wait so long for our next post! Thanks guys, we take that as a huge compliment!! 🙂 . Did our adventures come to a stop? Nothing left to explore? Did we suddenly lose our inspiration? Don’t worry, agile adventures is back! We took a little break due Read More …
Have you ever seen “Fight Club?” Brilliant movie in my – Marijke – humble opinion. How messed up is that guy played by Edward Norton, having multiple personalities? Seems like something that only happens in movies or mental health institutions right? Well, think again! I experience several personalities every (working) day. But hey, don’t worry! It’s nothing clinical. Not even something to worry about. I like it and it’s a Read More …
Starting this blog Saloua and I made a vow not to become one of those lovy dovy blogs that treat agile as a new religion (Yep. There are some hardcore believers out there. They can be scary!). We also vowed not to become a pretentious known-it-all agile blog. We díd however vow to write about our journey. And a journey can be hard at times. There are the great highs and Read More …
I – Saloua – remember being a child and joining my mother to the market place – souq – in Rabat, Morocco. Holding her hand tightly, I can still hear, smell and feel the buzzing of that central square at sunset. The noise – mostly actual shouting – of the the bargaining, the striking smell from the spices and the bright colors of the many stands. Such a special sensory experience and such a dear childhood memory Read More …
If you read about my – Marijke – introduction to scrum, you know there’s probably a voodoo doll somewhere with my face on it. I wish I could tell you that there’s only one of those and I’ve bettered my agile life since then. But like many wishes, one can only cross fingers… Let me tell you about the second time I drove a scrum team (actually in this story: multiple. I Read More …
Nobody wants to feel alone, right? Everybody wants to be part of something larger than themselves. Whether it’s the popular group in high school or the rowing club during their student years (yes, this is autobiographical. One of these goals was achieved. You guess which one 😉 ). At our company the organizational structure has been changed in a revolutionary way. No more traditional teams and value chains but volatile squads that come and go. Read More …
I, Marijke, applied for a job called chapter lead. Pretty intensively I would say. I studied the job description, the required personality traits and expertise, I even reached out to Spotify to hear their experiences with it. Managing without being a traditional manager! An organization without hierarchy and no more bureaucracy! To me, it sounded like heaven! Well I got the job and June 15th was the big day. I was so Read More …
Wondering why I, Saloua, associate agility with morning sickness? Let me tell you all about it! It was 3 years ago, we were struggling with the vendor for one of our core systems. We were faced with a planning by which it would take one year to upgrade the software. One full year! The plan was that after receiving our signed off -with blood- specification, the vendor would go under Read More …
Don’t they say a picture is better than a thousand words? Well then, here you go. This is the Spotify model in a nutshell, by Henrik Kniberg: Oh and wait, that was only part 1. Ready for part 2? Impressive eh? Inspiring even! That is exactly what we thought. And after playing and working with it for a few months – and by that we mean the whole shabam, IT, Read More …
I guess the first thing I, Saloua, should explain here is what is a COTS. It sounds very alien but a COTS is actually an off the shelf commercial software (think Microsoft WORD). The idea behind agile is that you build your little piece of software and you make it better every single sprint. And if you made it worse by mistake, you can easily fix that in the next Read More …
