Almost one year ago, Marc Lainez took a very nice initiative for the Belgium Agile Community. He launched the Agile Belgium Drinkup.
What’s the Agile Belgium Drinkup ? I will quote what you can read on the invitations:
This is an informal meetup of the Belgian Agile and Lean community. Come after work and meet people you usually only meet at conferences. Anyone interested in Agile or Lean can join.
I’ve been there a few times and it’s really interesting to meet people from different companies, disciplines.
The 30th of May it will be our 1st anniversary. #abdup (official hashtag) will be one year old.
Well…on Belgian National Television, but anyway, we are proud of it ;-)
RTL-TVI (Belgian National TV) did a coverage about the status of e-commerce in Belgium. In this coverage, you can see one of my clients using Agile methods.
It’s the opportunity to see Visual Management in action. You can also see one of the teams doing his Scrum “daily-meeting”.
Part about us start around 2’15″. Coverage is French speaking.
In my early days of Agile I’ve been quickly intrigued by the Visual Management concept. I knew I liked it, but I did not always knew why. I have a tendency to enjoy the techniques that seems silly at first sight and then reveals to be extremely powerful. So maybe that’s why.
So I was working with my client. At the time, they were preparing themselves to implement Agile and at first I helped them to better organize their releases. And what’s the best way to do that ? Visual Management of course.
If you are coach, IT Manager or just an Agile passionate…in my opinion it’s good for you to know that implementing Agile has several risks.
It’s important to know it and to handle it. So here is a (non-exhaustive) list of global risks you should discuss in advance with your Management or your client, before starting being Agile.
A first reminder:
The starting point of an Agile initiative is that we realize that the actual system doesn’t give us satisfaction. We have new expectations and we want to change to a new system.
Usually when I start an Agile “Mission” my first concern is to understand how the company works. How the different business departments collaborate together.
A few months ago I was just in this step. I met 30 people from all departments of the company. And so I was there with plenty of feedbacks wondering “How will I use these information”.
Basically I just asked them to explain me their job and how they contribute to a project within the company. I also asked them what works well and what are the main problems.
The key to effective problem solving is to first make sure you understand the problem that you are trying to solve – why it needs to be solved, how you will know when you’ve solved it, and what the root cause is. This what A3 thinking is all about: http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/cause-effect-diagrams.pdf
Almost one year ago, Marc Lainez took a very nice initiative for the Belgium Agile Community. He launched the Agile Belgium Drinkup.
