AgileDotNet Dallas - Eliminating Barriers

Photo by Sasan

A coworker shared a link a month ago with a group of us coaches, and her timing in doing so was fantastic--the article helped provide grounding to the presentation that Ty and I are co-presenting at AgileDotNet Dallas today.  

The article is "Your Path through Agile Fluency," by Diana Larsen and James Shore.  Our presentation gives a high-level overview of the agile journey that development teams take, and the article provides a more vivid image of what each level of agile fluency looks like.  The highest level--level four--is the bleeding edge of agile, and it's what we as coaches strive for each day.  Radical self-organization and alignment with the rest of the organization.  Transparency and innovation.  Rainbows and unicorns.  Ok, maybe not rainbows and unicorns, but certainly amazing results.  The best example that I can think of for this type of team and organization is Valve--their employee handbook paints a dramatic picture of level four concepts that I find challenges conventional thinking about how organizations are structured and function.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on agile fluency and examples of the highest level teams!

Update

on 2013-03-02 03:19 by Allison Pollard

I neglected to mention that our presentation was originally inspired by Jeff Patton and Mary Poppendieck; both spoke at DFW Scrum meetings last year, and their ideas really resonated with me.  Mary talked about the Product Owner Problem that relates to the need for team learning from actual results delivered and how teams are not order-takers.  Jeff has coined the term 'comaking' to describe how products should be developed, and it feels like getting back to the original purpose of software development.  

This evening I found this awesome quote that I wish was in our presentation:

"There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer." --Peter Drucker