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Event description

Disciplined Agile: A Lean-Agile toolkit to optimize your way of working (WoW)

A fundamental philosophy from the early days of Agile, and particularly of XP, is that teams should own their process. Today we would say that teams should be allowed, and better yet, enabled to choose their own way of working (WoW).

This was a powerful vision, but it was quickly abandoned to make way for the Agile certification gold rush. Why work hard to learn your craft and continuously improve your WoW, when you can become a certified master of an Agile method in two days or a program consultant of a scaling framework in four? It sounds great and certainly is great for anyone collecting the money, but 18 years after the signing of the Agile Manifesto as an industry, we are nowhere near reaching Agile’s promise. Now here near it.

We had it right in the very beginning, and the Lean community had it right all along teams need to own their process. They must be enabled to choose their WoW. To do this we need to stop looking for easy answers and reject the simplistic solutions that the agile industrial complex wants to sell us. Most importantly we must recognize that we need #NoFrameworks.

Takeaways:

1) Learn why Agile teams need to choose their Way of Working (WoW)

2) Understand what "guided continuous improvement" is and its benefits

3) How to improve agile team performance with guidance for retrospectives and coaching 

Klaus Boedker

Klaus Boedker is the Training Lead for Disciplined Agile at the Project Management Institute (PMI).

He has over 10 years of experience helping organizations to be successful with project delivery using Agile, Lean, Traditional, and Hybrid approaches. Klaus has a record of increasing organizations’ business agility enabling them to rapidly and continuously deliver value to their customers and stakeholders. Klaus is a Certified Disciplined Agile Coach and Instructor.

Q&A 

What is the achievement you are the proudest of in your career? 

Setting the goal of becoming an agile coach earlier in my career and reaching that goal through hard work, courage, and persistence.  

What’s one advice or tip would you tell your 30 year old self? 

Follow your passion.  

 How would you describe what you do in a single sentence to a stranger? 

I make people happier. 

 What is your favorite quote? 

“Be the change you want to see in the world” Arleen Lorrance paraphrasing Gandhi in “The Love Project”. 

 What is one book that has inspired you the most that you would recommend to others? 

Lots of books have inspired me. Three books stand out for me right now: “Play” by Stuart Brown, “Why we Work” by Barry Schwartz and “Habits of a Happy Brain” by Loretta Graziano Breuning. 

Can you think of any failure that later set you up for success? 

Not a failure per se. There was a previous job where the constraints of the culture propelled me to learn more about an Agile way of working and explicitly choose that path.