Alexis Monville (en)

Back to School

For a lot of people, September means that we are back to school! Or maybe that we are not in school anymore, and so we need to take care of our learning path. I learned a lot from your feedback on Changing Your Team From The Inside. Keep that coming! It is very useful! I am working on a revision of the book that will be available by the end of October.

If a friend sent you this message, you can subscribe to the mailing-list following the link, yes you will have to scroll a little bit.

The planning of my trip to Europe is nearly done. I will be traveling to Germany, Switzerland, and France. I will be speaking at Agile Rennes on November 23 and 24, and Agile Grenoble
November 14 and 15. Add the sessions to your agenda!

As it is two agile events, people asked me if I will speak about agile. The answer is yes and no 🙂

If you read the UncleBob’s post reacting to Martin Fowler’s keynote at Agile Australia, you can see that the tension is about values and principles. The roots of the agile movement were about team members having the autonomy to deliver excellent work. Uncle Bob (Bob Martin) wrote in a sort of conversation with himself:

“But aren’t Scrum Masters kind of like project managers?

Heavens no! Scrum Masters are coaches, not managers. Their role is to defend the values and disciplines. Their role is to remind the team of how they promised themselves they would work. The role was supposed to be shared by the team, not usurped by managers. Every few weeks a new team member would volunteer to act as coach – if needed. The role was supposed to be temporary. A mature team doesn’t need a permanent coach.”

And yes, I have seen that level of maturity happening more than once. The frameworks, the tools, the practices, are useful things that you can use and improve along with your transformation journey.

About framework, I love the approach Agnostic Agile, and I encourage you to have a look at the principles.

“As experienced agile practitioners and as people responsible for agile change and transformation, we should recognise the importance of being agnostic with agility at any level. This means one size does not fit all, one framework is not the answer, and the ‘what’ and ‘how’ should be suited to customer context and to a wider strategic vision.”

As usual, I will be happy to hear from you, please answer to that message, or send me a message on Twitter or LinkedIn. I will be happy to answer your questions or read your feedback.

Thank you!

PS: Your comments, like and share are really helping the message to reach more people. Please, help me share those articles on opensource.com:


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