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The Trinity of Agile Leadership

Published by Marcus Raitner

No matter what you might think of Scrum, the Scrum Guide beautifully describes three aspects of leadership in the context of agile product development. At the center of value creation is the development team, which works autonomously and self-organizing. As the “CEO” of the product, the Product Owner leads the product and thus gives the autonomy a common vision and direction. And finally there is the Scrum Master, who serves the people and helps the product owner, the development team and the rest of the organization to work together effectively. A traditional manager is not described there, because his different tasks are distributed among these roles.

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Dynamics of Effective Teams

Published by Marcus Raitner

Building on the success of the Oxygen project, where Google has been exploring the characteristics of good leadership, in 2012 they launched Project Aristotle, using the same data-driven methodology to unravel the mystery of effective teams. The name says it all, because Aristotle is known, among other things, for his saying that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And at the same time this also describes the essence of the results of this investigation: a group of superstars does not necessarily become an effective team.

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Agile as Concentrated Feed to Increase Employee Performance

Published by Marcus Raitner

There are many good reasons to consider agility. For instance, you could believe in the largely untapped creativity, motivation and self-responsibility of employees. Or you could recognize that a plan-driven approach to tackle complex problems is less suitable than an empirical one. And, of course, you could have the desire to radically focus on customer value and optimize the value stream accordingly. However, if you prefer to stick to the old ways of thinking, you certainly should avoid these considerations. Instead book titles such as “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” by Jeff Sutherland (a book worth reading and helpful by the way) lead to a fatal fallacy: Agile methods are sort of concentrated feed that will boost the performance of your employees.

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The Five Principles of Lean Management as the Basis of the Agile Manifesto

Published by Marcus Raitner

In order to understand agility from a historical perspective, it is important to go back to the principles of lean management. Agility in the sense of the Agile Manifesto from 2001 can thereby be seen as the application of the five principles of Lean to software development. The focus of agility is on the rapid delivery of customer value through working software. And the optimal flow for this comes from an interdisciplinary and self-organizing team that covers the complete value stream from the idea to operating the software.

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