Abstract: Organizations and departments outside of software are being driven to adopt agile approaches to keep up with information technology and competitors. They are often get stuck trying to apply practices that aren’t a fit for them. We should be focused on the organizations work, purpose, flow of value, and incrementally improving that flow rather than on practices that are not effective. In this session, we will look at the ways organizations view and structure their work, common impediments to the flow of value, and potential improvement ideas we can inject to mitigate impediments.
We will explore an Incremental Improvement Board to make improvements transparent. The Board includes provisions where we decouple (a) Improvement Ideas, (b), refinement and research of improvement ideas, and (c) actions that can be taken to incrementally improve - which is the goal! We will work through examples and exercises to create a Board for each attendee and discuss options to slice improvements into actionable 2-week chunks. To make it fun, we will use the sample improvement: “make all meetings effective, efficient, and waste free!” Of course, this can’t be done in 2-weeks, but researching it for 6-months is absurd! Instead, as with all improvements, we want to slice it into actionable 2-week chunks that can be used to incrementally improve and learn.
Learning Outcomes: - Assess how your organization views and structures work.
- Understand and practice a 5-step approach to incremental improvement for agile companies.
- Create and leave with an incremental improvement board with actionable improvements.
- Learn steps to slice improvement ideas into less than 2 week pieces of work.
- Understand how to inject impediments will small improvements to improve.
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