Agile

The 3 pillars of transformation & change

You can talk a lot about agility and transformation etc. – I believe there are 3 basic pillars and EVERYONE can contribute to “change”:

People who dare to speak up
People who listen to it
People who are willing to change

Those three tings alone are already a turbo for many small things that are simply super boring in the masses.

But also the other way round: if one of the three points is missing, save the energy – it won’t be successful.

The bonus is public praise for everyone involved in the project (project participants != only project managers) – but let’s start with the basics 😉

How to make efficient status meetings

Do you know these horrible status meetings? Every week, every two weeks or – when it is critical – 2x a week? Especially with multiple members? And you never know whether it’s important to go there or not? But you need to go there because there might be a relevant information?

The myth: “If there’s nothing to say, we can quickly close the meeting after 5min”. Seriously – I’ve not seen this happen very often. It quickly drifts into a common chitchat or Q&A. Don’t get me wrong: socializing is important – but a status meeting isn’t a socializing event.

Don’t just ask for Feedback and Improvements

“Every employee should feel encouraged to give feedback and contribute ideas for improvement!” Who has heard this before? Probably everyone!

My (slightly provocative) opinion: “The effect was probably close to zero. So Forget it and don’t do such a shout out!”. Unless you want nothing or barely anything to change. Then do a big shout-out and send people back to work! Great show – with no effect! Of course, I made the mistake myself and didn’t notice for quite a while (years, actually). Every now and then an idea or suggestion came along (or I had one myself) and we were proud of the improvement. At some point between Retros and PostMortems I got the point: “It needs the right framework!”