Agile? We‘re Playing The Premier League

How we got visited by a founder of the Agile Manifesto — Arie van Bennekum

The whole world is talking about Agile and every day blogs and social media are flooded by a never-ending stream of new articles about how to become agile. It has a catch, though: Quality gets easily lost in this maze of ideas, recommendations, messages, methods, experience, advice, tips, and tricks. After all, demand for agile coaches is massive and companies often cannot be picky. We at ableneo, however, are picky and are proud of it :) People say that one should learn from the best and that‘s why in March 2019 we invited to our Bootcamp nobody else than one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto — Arie van Bennekum. This blog shortly describes his visit.

Let‘s start with a small curiosity — few people know that Arie is the only European signatory of the manifesto. In fact, the document was signed by American developers, consultants or coaches. It is no surprise that Arie used his rich experience and founded one of the leading agile consulting companies in Europe — Wemanity. He has been its key thought leader and coach for agile transformations since its start.

The Agile Manifesto — available in different languages at https://agilemanifesto.org/

We invited Arie to learn the very best of what global Agile offers and to apply it to our own project practice as well as to offer it to our clients. In other words, continuous improvement. And so on the 15th of March 2019, Arie appeared in front of us and for a day and a half dragged us into the fascinating world of the Agile Manifesto, Scrum, team coaching, change management, organizational transformation or agnostic Agile.

Our team at the Bootcamp. By the way, can you spot Arie van Bennekum?

Presentations and discussions brought a lot of engaging ideas and concepts, for example:

  • how DSDM, Extreme Programming or FDD influenced modern Agile
  • regular weekly meetings with the client and other stakeholders (not just PO) — so-called weekly heartbeats that are focused on the content of the solution under development
  • analysis and visualization of stakeholders, roles, and responsibilities during project delivery through the so-called Snowman (see the picture below)
  • Arie‘s organizational transformation model — Integrated Agile Transformation Model™ — that also includes an assessment of organizational agility
  • Agnostic Agile philosophy that calls for breaking free from a specific agile approach and using everything that Agile offers
  • funny but very true warning about the biggest group in every organization — people that are not apriori against, however, they like to say ‚yes but…‘ so that in the end they can find a problem for every solution‘ :)
Snowman — how to visualize a project in terms of different roles

Bootcamp is not the end, though. Arie‘s presentation serves as ongoing inspiration for onboarding as well as growing our product portfolio. Because in the end, we want our clients to benefit from Arie‘s visit. And not only that. We are already preparing a visit from another Agile ace. Will share more details in a different blog :)

Interested to hear more about how we live and breathe Agile? Follow us on Medium, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or simply contact us and stop by for a cup of coffee in our brand new office in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Agile? We‘re Playing The Premier League was originally published in ableneo Process on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.