Agile Coaching at RAC

Posted on October 2, 2019March 26, 2021 by Steve Barrett in Align, Engage

RAC Insurance reached out to us to see if we could help one of their teams face into some challenges that they were experiencing.

This was a relatively new team with a number of new people who had joined with diverse experiences of agile from different organisations. They were not on the same page around some agile practices and some even wondered how agile as a team they were actually were.

As with all new teams they were also wrestling with how to work well with each other, dealing with many of the normal challenges you might expect a new team to face into.

In addition, they were changing their technology stack and their mission was very technical in nature. This increased the complexity for the team and even made it hard to understand how some of the agile practices might work for the technical challenges they faced.

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Delivering Agile 101 Training at Curtin University

Posted on November 6, 2018June 14, 2020 by Steve Barrett in Train

Friends reached out for some training for a few people in their teams at Curtin University, they were initially looking at about maybe six people. Fast forward a month and we had delivered three runs of our “Agile Essentials” course for just short of 60 people across Technology, Marketing and People & Culture. Wow, what fun we had!!

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Experiences on the Organisation & Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) Intelligence Course

Posted on September 20, 2018June 7, 2020 by Steve Barrett in Train

Last week I attended the ORSC Intelligence course in Singapore, the second in the ORSC™ series. This blog is about my experiences which I found very valuable for Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters working with change in Organisations and Teams.

This was the awesome group of coaches I got to work with lead by our awesome facilitators David Darst and Abi Shilon.

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Delivering Goal Orientated Scope

Posted on April 25, 2014March 26, 2021 by Steve Barrett in Scale

Abstract

My last blog was focused on what I learnt about the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). The theme quote for that blog was:

“If you’ve lost the ability to do small things then you’ve not scaled, you’ve just gotten big and slow!!!”

So what are the small things we should do well at the team level or at scale? Breaking the work up, avoiding big batches, and letting the work flow was one of the recommendations.

This blog will focus on the integration of techniques to deliver goal-orientated scope (that breaks up the work) and take a look at how you might start to visualise and manage the flow at the portfolio level.

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Scaling Agile using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

Posted on April 9, 2014March 26, 2021 by Steve Barrett in Scale

“If you’ve lost the ability to do small things then you’ve not scaled, you’ve just gotten big and slow!!!”

Abstract

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has become a hot discussion topic in the agile community as a solution to scaling agile in the enterprise. Amongst the options available to scale agile, SAFe appears to be leading the pack as the popular choice for consideration and implementation. The framework has got its critics and some prominent respected people in the agile community have spoken out against it. With everything you read you have to consider motivations beyond the narrative to evaluate how impartial a critique actually might be. I decided I needed an education in SAFe to develop an informed opinion on the advantages and disadvantages of the framework and when it might make sense to use it. Last week I flew to Melbourne to undergo the SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) certification training. This blog gives an account of what I learned (the good, the bad and the ugly), the opinions I have formed and what recommendations I would make.

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