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In this webinar we share our own story of what Agile has meant for u as individuals and our career. We talk about why Agility is needed today, and what a Learning Organization is and how it can support Business Agility. We also share some tips and tools you can use in your work as well as a glimpse of what it means to be an Agile Team and how you can become an Agile Transformational Leader. You will also gain an understanding of the content of the Online Agile Trainings from Dandy People.

A new live session of this webinar will come, but until then you can enjoy the recorded version here.

You will also gain an understanding of the content of the Online Agile Trainings from Dandy People.

Visit our online training center here to access the online trainings that are part of the webinar: https://www.agileonlinetrainings.com/

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In this webinar, Mia will share ideas and examples that enable Agile change and Agile ways of working, making any organization high performing by removing hindering structures and empowering the employees to deliver customer- and employee value.

In the world of today speed and flexibility is even more important than ever before. Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what our organizations have been constructed for.

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Det här är en inspelning av det webinar som vi höll den 2a april med ca 75 deltagare.

April 15 I will do this webinar in English too, please join that here if you are interested >

In this presentation, Mia will share ideas and examples that enable Agile change and Agile ways of working, making any organization high performing by removing hindering structures and empowering the employees to deliver customer- and employee value.

In the world of today speed and flexibility is even more important than ever before. Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what our organizations have been constructed for.

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Many organizations are in need of leveraging Agile across the organization to improve collaboration, shorten lead times and improve quality. One great way to do that is to use Agile online trainings and facilitate the learning journey in different ways and embedding learning in your every-day work.

Since we will only get the impact of doing trainings when people actually use their learnings, starting to act and think differently all online trainings should focusing on driving curiosity, shared learnings and action.

To support organizations in tactics on how to engage and activate people through online trainings we created this poster that shows some ideas on how you can enable continuous learning and growth.

FREE DOWNLOAD: Download the Continuous Learning poster in High Resolution (PDF)

Strategies of how to enable continuous learning in the organization

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Webinar med Joaquim Linder från MittMedia/Bonnier News och Mia Kolmodin som facilititator.

Själva webinaret startar 09:00

BAKGRUND & INNEHÅLL
I många organisationer är det svårt och stökigt att jobba med KPIer på ett effektivt sätt. Känner du igen dig i att olika delar av organisationen har olika KPIer (Key Performance Indicators), som ofta mäter det som ”ser bra ut” i stället för vad som egentligen är viktigt, som kanske drar åt olika håll, och ingen agerar på vad de visar?

Om man har ambitionen att skapa en Agil organisation så kan det här vara en viktig systemförändring som behöver ske för att låsa upp organisationen ur dödläget som ofta finns och möjliggöra samarbete och iterativt arbete tvärs över hela organisationen. Välkommen på en djupdykning in i mätbarhetens härliga värld. Lär dig hur rätt KPIer kan hjälpa er att nå visionen genom att möjliggöra effektiva leveranser på strategin.

JOAKIM LINDER
Joaquim Linder är ansvarig på MittMedia för att tydliggöra strategier och göra dem tydliga och möjliga att agera på för de Agila teamen. Hans passion för att leverera kund- och affärsnytta har lett honom till att lära sig allt om hypotesdriven utveckling, KPIer och experimenterande i stället för att leverera lätta men ineffektiva lösningar. I den här sessionen kommer Joaquim att dela med sig av lärdomar, tankesätt och metoder som du själv kan använda för att aligna organisationen, se sanningen och leverera det som skapar värde tillsammans.

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To handle the speed of change, complexity, and ambiguity in this challenging situation with the COVID-19 outbreak many of us are in now, we believe an Agile mindset can help us find new innovative solutions together.

Our mission at Dandy People is to support individuals, teams, organizations and societies to overcome challenges and become better together every day. This is why we decided to pre-launch our Agile Online Trainings, before we have all trainings on the platform. So, during this time we offer a 30% rebate to anyone of you who are interested in learning how to enable Agility, plan for the unknown and work and deliver in an Agile way.

Please use the code: PRELAUNCH (valid until March 31st) to get the 30% rebate.

Visit the Agile Learning Center here >

The Agile Online Trainings you can access now are:

  • Agile in a Nutshell – Live
  • Agile Team in a Nutshell – Live
  • Agile Leadership in a Nutshell – Coming soon

These trainings contain videos, infographics, games, interviews, business cases, canvases, workshops, articles and lots of material free to download. Everything to support you in your personal learning journey to leverage Agility. Understanding what it is when it is needed and get you started to work as an Agile team – or improve your existing team, to deliver awesome results together.

We are also moving our live events to an online webinar format, and continuing to building our online Dandy Community

Visit the Agile Learning Center here >

Please use the code: PRELAUNCH (valid until March 31st) to get the 30% rebate.

We have been able to create these trainings with support from the Agile global community and we are so happy to be able to give back to you all in times like this. Thank you so much to everyone involved <3

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For the first time in modern history, most of us have to learn how to work remotely and collaborate online to continue with business as usual and not close down the business just because we close down the office. This is a huge experiment and we should look at it as an opportunity to adapt and learn how to handle the unexpected.

Working remotely from home with kids dressed up for work 🙂

We need to explore how can we run our business just as before, or even better. How can we make people feel like we are sitting and working together with our peers and teammates and do what we usually do to get stuff done, focus, enjoy our workday, have fun and deliver together?

Don’t forget, to get started quickly, try something out and improve from that is way much better than making the perfect plan, and never get started. Just make it good enough for now, and safe enough to try.

Here are some tips on how to do just that based on learnings from the Dandy People-team.

Top 5 Digital Tools that get you started Working Remotely

When making big changes in your ways of working and context it is wise to shorten the feedback loops and focus on making smaller improvements more often. Support your teams in whatever they might need and give them access to tools and coaching in the beginning, but let it be up to them to decide HOW to do the work. If you prioritize feedback and improvements you minimize the risk of disturbing the pace and quality of work and you can more easily adjust to what is happening.

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This is a way to use Cynefin in the team to support their planning and everyday work to foster a culture of innovation. 

The Cynefin Sense-Making Story can be used instead of regular user stories and together with the Cynefin Context Cards.

Download & Print the Cynefin Sense-Making Story for FREE (PDF) >

Make sure to have the Product Owner and everyone in the team in the room when the team pulls in new work to the sprint. First, ask them to name what it is, and talk about what the outcome would be – what should change? What are the details, ask them to describe it. 

Then you can ask the team in what domain of complexity the works are, obvious, complicated or complex, and mark it on the card. Then depending on the domain ask them to agree on a story points, size or timebox and mark that. And then what capabilities would be needed to do the story. 

When this is done ask the team to write down what needs to be done to deliver the story, these are your tasks – and the team can get started to collaborate and deliver innovation

Here you find all the content we have on using Cynefin >

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The Cynefin Context Cards have helped many teams get started to work cross-functional doing both discovery and delivery in the teams. This is a version of the deck of cards with fewer cards, still keeping the same functionality to make it easy to print and use them. If you prefer to have the regular decks you can still buy them in our online store >

Free download of the Cynefin Context Card Mini Printout (PDF) >

All the needed information on how to use the cards is included in the printout file.

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This poster was created to cater to the need we see in many organizations today to create a shared understanding of what a well-functioning Agile team is and how you can build that team to get the value you expect from an Agile organization.

Download the Agile Team in a Nutshell Poster (PDF) >

What is a team and how do you become high performing?

Is your team even a team?
There are two things needed for a group of people to be able to become a team. Without them, the group can never be a team. The two things are: 

  • A common goal
  • Needing each other

Stable Teams

Keeping teams stable overtime is needed to become and stay well-functioning and high-performing teams where smooth collaboration and innovation take place. Any change in the team setup may cause the team to go back to where they were as newly formed. Teams of 5-7 people who are kept together and get to high-performance are 100% faster.

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Some months ago we had a meeting at Dandy trying to figure out and agree on who should be responsible for what, and how to divide our internal work in a better way. We needed to find a way to scale sustainably and figure out what capabilities we were looking for to expand our team in a good way also for the future.

We started to map the work we do and group it in different ways. But whatever we did we seemed to end up in traditional boxes, “this is marketing stuff, this is sales, this is finance, this is HR”… And then fighting over what the difference was between sales, marketing and finance… Everyone with their own ideas on what was right or wrong. That was of course not what we needed, another silos-based and ineffective organization :o)

Download the Cynefin Decision-Making Board (PDF) >

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Andreas Nordlund who is an Agile Coach at the payment provider iZettle came by the Dandy office to buy the Cynefin Context Cards to his team. I was curious and asked if he would like to share how he was planning on using the cards.

This picture is from another company using the cards.

Mia: How come you want to try the Cynefin Context Cards?
Andreas: We are a group of Agile Coaches at iZettle who meet and share learnings and tips. Some of the other coaches have been using the cards and said they were good. I just got back from a training with Dave Snowden in Berlin in how to use the Cynefin Sense-Making Framework and I felt I wanted to try the cards.

Mia: What purpose do you see that the cards will serve?
Andreas: We often talk about the work we do as if we are in the complicated domain, but often realize that we are in the complex domain. I want to help my team to put words on that, to facilitate that discussion in a structured way. Support the team to more easily come to the conclusion experiments are needed when they are in the complex domain.

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In the IT department of the telecom company 3 of around 200 people, we worked with improvements on team-level and had a forum for improving the whole, but the overall improvements had come to an end after we met our previous change goal. Since we believe in experimentation, we decided to try Objectives and Key Results, OKRs, as a model to set the objectives.

Johan Hjort presenting the new OKRs for the Journey to Awesome for the people involved in creating them.

How do you create a change journey that matters? That involves the people in the organization in the why, what and how? That goes beyond the teams for long term agility and continuous improvement? This was something we needed to figure out, and we found a pretty cool way to do it that served us well, perhaps it can inspire you too to try something different.

The use of OKRs started in the ’70s in Intel, in 1999 Google was introduced to OKRs by John Doerr, and it’s still a key in how they run the business.

Before starting the work with the OKRs, we had created a common vision of how it would feel to work with digital services and products at 3 in about 5 years, a description embracing change and innovation,  awesome collaboration on all levels, and IT stack that enables business value with short time to market and most important, high customer focus. 

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Many organizations right now are moving from viewing the organizations as a machine to a people first culture,  enabling valuable collaborations, strategic flexibility and customer focus. The Stairway to Business Agility can be used as a tool for self- and shared reflection. It is based on experiences from many different organizations and their journey towards a well functioning and high performing organizations. You might have totally different experiences, and thats fine too.

Where are you and your organization today?
Are you doing Agile – or being Agile, and what is your ambition? You will probably find that you partly might be on different steps at the same time, in different parts of the organization, and that you might have done some things that in this visualization “belongs” on another step. That is not wrong, we should work in parallells and not in a waterfall implementation manner. Perhaps you can find even more things that you can do to enable business Agility by looking at this as inspiration and take some time to reflect together. Please skip the steps in the bottom now that you know they don’t bring the value we usually are looking for when going Agile.

stairway to business agility

Download the Stairway to Business Agility as high resolution PDF here >

Let’s start at the bottom of the stairs where we are non Agile.

1. Big projects and command & control

Resource optimization and command and control. Everyone focuses on optimizing their own part of the process, running bigger and bigger projects and making sure everyone is as occupied as possible. Complexity grows, you are hiring more people – but it takes longer and longer while you deliver even less with worse quality. We suffer badly from decision latency and can no longer meet the customers’ needs. The management models that have served the organization well the past 100 years is no longer giving us what we need and we are starting to feel the pain of it.

2. The machine – doing Agile

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We believe in visual models that support common views, transparency and collaboration, that helps us as individuals and teams shift towards a growth mindset.

The system shift poster was initially created due to our need within Dandy People to find common ways to think about and work with Agile transformations without getting fixed to specific frameworks – and also in an efficient way communicate how we work towards our customers.

The poster is our combined experience within the team at Dandy People, condensed into one page of goodies.

Questions we wanted to answer in this poster

  • What are the different choices we have on where to start?
  • What structured ways of moving towards Agility do we see?
  • What type of leadership is needed to enable an Agile organization?
  • Why do we start with structures and not just training?
  • How do we enable sustainability in change that never ends?

the system shift in a nutshell
Download the System shift in a Nutshell poster for free here (PDF) >

What are the different choices we have on where to start? – Holistic view to achieve Business Agility

We have seen many organizations start their agile journey within one part of the existing organization, mostly within IT (component teams). For traditional organizations to become more innovative, have shorter time to market and stay relevant as employees and for their customers, that is no longer enough. We suggest that you work “bottom up” – and “top down”, and that you create cross functional feature teams on both operational level AND on leadership level, as far up in the hierarchy as possible. A cross functional leadership team is needed to give focus to the organization and to remove impediments from the operational teams as quickly as possible. Traditional structures are too slow and will not suffice.

holistic view for business agility

What structured ways of moving towards Agility do we see? – The Agile Transformation Ladder

The ladder is helping us see the necessary steps that traditional organization need to move through to become flexible and highly efficient.

The change process happens in 4 dimensions:

    • Individual
    • Team
    • Organization
    • Leadership

Visualized in the ladder you can see that leadership runs like a red thread from the bottom to the top. Leaders need to go first to act as a role model and enable improvements of the system. You will be able to read more about the ladder in an upcoming post.

Agile Transformation Ladder by Dandy People, inspired by Agile Fluency Model, Copyright by James Shore & Diana Larsen. 

What type of leadership is needed to enable an Agile organization? – the Leadership Shift Model

The Leadership Shift Model shows the paradigm shift in leadership today where new leadership behaviours are needed in a VUCA-world to be able to improve business. Instead of traditional ways that focus on managing people we need to shift towards growing people to enable business growth. Traditional conventional leadership focuses on striving for agreements and to make interventions if needed, and if even further down the use of “carrot and stick”, reward and punishment and being over controlling is common. These conventional leadership styles (and systems) are holding people back as well as holding their ability to innovate and solve real customer problems. In the short term it might look as your organization is delivering, but long term your business will suffer.

the leadership shift model (more…)

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This spring I had the great pleasure to jon the ACE! 2019 conference in Cracow as one of the speakers. It was the 10th anniversary of the conference with over 500 people joining from many different countries. This is a true role model for modern conferences where they have focused on diversity and customer experience in many different ways. They are supporting all speakers paying their travel and hotel costs if their companies does not – or you can choose to pay for your self and become a sponsor for the conference, what a great idea! I bring with me their truly inspiring and nice way to handle these things. As a speaker it was also amazing to meet the other speakers, organizers and visitors in the different socializing activities they had planned. One of the fun activities except for the actual conference it self was the open “dinner with friends” that they had arranged where anyone who wanted could join in at different restaurants each night.

My talk “Customer focus and Agile Mindset”

With customer expectation changing rapidly and an increasing demand for better digital products and services organizations need to find new ways to work an organize them self to be able to deliver customer value more frequently. To manage this, there is need for change in mindset in management and a strategic leadership decision. This seminar is directed to curious leaders who want to support customer focus. I will talk you through trends and strategies in how to organize and lead customer focused product organizations in a way to enable brain power in cross functional and autonomous teams that faster can deliver products and services that creates expected business impact.

I will also show models for how organizations can work structured with innovation and customer focus to choose to become a shark and not a snail, and real examples from this type of transformation from different type of businesses and organization.

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I was so happy this morning when I found this article in my favourite magazine, the Harvard Business Review. As always all articles are based on research and as many times before I see a strong connection to my work with Agile organization, teams and innovation.

In the fresh research done by ADP research Institute 2019 on employee engagement and published in the Harvard Business Review they discovered the power of well functioning teams and trust to engage employees.

The sad state of Employee Engagement in organizations today where the vast majority of employees globally aren’t fully engaged in their work. This research concludes just as many other before that the engagement level generally is alarmingly low in most organizations – only 16% feel fully engaged in their work and 84% are just coming to work to get their pay check.

The researchers also concludes that the share of employees who are fully engaged more than doubles if they are on teams, and not just any teams but well functioning teams.

The power of trust. As noted the share of employees who are fully engaged more than doubles if they are on a team, and it MORE DOUBLES AGAIN if they strongly trust the team leader.

These are the powerful questions asked in the research

  1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.
  2. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.
  3. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.
  4. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.
  5. My teammates have my back.
  6. I know I will be recognized for excellent work.
  7. I have great confidence in my company’s future.
  8. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.

 

ADP research Institute 2019 and published in the Harvard Business Review. Read the article on HBR here >

 

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Avanza is a tech company with bank licence (you can call them a bank) here in Stockholm. A few years back they started their journey from a traditional silos based organization to a cross functional product organization organized around the customer journey – IT, Product, Marketing and Operations working as one. Here we want to share their own story in the video they recorded at their Avanza Tech Meetup – and as a Case Study.

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Why Agile – in a Nutshell Video

This video covers the value of working agile, some of the differences between the traditional plan driven ways of working and Agile as well as key principles. All this to make your organization adapt quickly to meet new customer needs.

The content of this video is part of the poster “Agile in a Nutshell” which you can download for free and use in your daily work. The poster has been translated to many different languages and has now over 45.000 downloads.

Ways of Working Agile – in a Nutshell Video

This video covers some of the key koncepts of ways of working agile as presented in the Agile in a Nutshell poster. Why competences are more important than traditional roles, the concept of T-shape and how it helps the team collaborate and build innovative and high quality solutions, how we find value together in a x-functional team as well as key principles och Lean UX and Modern Agile. All this to make your organization adapt quickly to meet new customer needs. The content of this video is part of the poster “Agile in a Nutshell” which you can download for free and use in your daily work. The poster has been translated to many different languages and has now over 45.000 downloads.


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This years State of Agile Report from Version One is out!

The report is based on over 1.300 answers 17% Version One customers. New for this year is that cost reduction is primary driver for Agile change and that respondents are clear on that Dev Ops is VERY important as well as investment is vital for success in scaling Agile.

Biggest obstacles for adopting Agile 2019

  • Organizational culture at odds with Agile values
  • Organizational resistance to to change
  • Inadequate management support and sponsorship

Investment is vital for success in scaling Agile

When asked what has been the most valuable in helping to scale Agile practices the top three responses were “Internal Agile coaches”, “Executive sponsorship”, and “Company-provided training”. All three of these point to a commitment to invest in success. In last years survey, Executive sponsorship ranked fifth, and company provided training did not rank in the top 5.

Version one state of agile report

Looking for a shift towards engagement and empowerment as a driver

I personally hope that moving forward transformation to Agile will be the long term strategy for organizations that want to empower their people and reach really high employee engagement and customer happiness – instead of cost reduction. Two sides of the same coin of course, one long term and one short term. To make this happen we need to support the managers to find the way to create safe environments, restructure the system to create flow and connect people with the purpose enabling them to succeed. If this is what you are looking for in your organization we are happy to join forces with you and support you on this journey as partners.

Read the full report on the State of Agile from Version One here >

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design principles for agile office spaces
At Spotify they did an analysis of all Spotifys RnD offices, how the people move, sit, collaborate and what they like or not.  The analysis has been used to build and renovate all Spotifys new offices.

 

Here are some of the key takeaways I have made from visiting Spotify and talking to them about their RnD office space and what it means to them and how they are looking to redesign the BJG RnD office in Stockholm. This is my interpretation of their thinking expressed in 10 Agile design principles for office spaces to allow aligned autonomy. You can read more about that visit in this post >

 

If you have Agile teams in your organization, or if you are planning to evolve in to an Agile learning organization, these design principles are for you to use to create an environment where Agile teams can thrive.

These are the 10 key design principles for Agile office spaces inspired by Spotify

  • No walls between teams – Instead they use string walls which has become a signature design for the Spotify spaces, allowing the teams to feel just enough separated but still getting the benefit of viewing and listening in to conversations – or they use sofa areas as natural separators. Also the string walls gives the possibility to put up work or fun stuff which makes the space even more personal and visual.
  • Only one coffee machine and kitchen per floor – so that people meet and interact with others outside of their squad (team) and tribe (teams).
  • Every employee should have their own desk – people tend to be very attached to their desks. Especially the developers that have several screens or people with a lot of other equipment or personal features.
  • Desks should be big enough for two people – this is to cater for easy access to pair work, wether it’s pair design or pair programming. High performing Agile teams do this a lot.
  • Sofa area in every squad area – it’s a great place to sit and discuss, and anyone can join in if they have a solution or more information. People also love to lie down and work by them selves during the day. Also they act as separators of space in a nice way.
  • Meeting rooms included in all squad areas – it’s one of the keys to efficient team work at Spotify to never have to book a meeting room to collaborate with people within the team. At Spotify squads have a 2 people meeting room to talk with someone face to face in private, a full squad meeting room – and in the new renovated space they will also have meeting rooms for 4 people.
  • As  much whiteboards as possible – it should be possible to collaborative and brainstorm and leave stuff on the walls on as many places as possible near the squads, but also in collaboration areas. It can never be too many whiteboards in an Agile organization.
  • Big screens accessible in all squad areas and meeting rooms – to make daily meetings efficient all squads have their own screens to use for meetings – and others to use to visualize their data.
  • Video conference equipment in all meeting rooms and squad spaces – it should always be possible to dial in to an office and join an conversation in a good way.
  • Space for fun and relaxation – strive for that everyone should feel at home and that they can find spaces to relax and have fun in, also in their spare time. Invite employees to come to the office with friends on weekends and of course to bring their kids.

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A few weeks ago me and Frida Mangen did a talk on Activity Based Seating for Agile teams for the WE network, Workplace Evolutionaries. Afterwards we invited them for a visit to the old Spotify BJG RnD office to experience and learn more about the mindset of Agile organizations and how the interiors can support high performance teams and aligned autonomy.

The group visiting Spotify consisted of office interior experts off different kinds, designers, architects, scientist and change makers. We met up outside the office at Birgerjarlsgatan. We were warmly welcomed by Zuza Majkowska who was acting as our guide for the tour, and at the end of the tour also Becca who is a team engeneering manager and part of the renovation committee also joins and tells us more about the teams perspective and their work with the ongoing renovation.
This post is mostly a transcription of these conversations during the viewing.

 

The Spotify building consists of 11 floors, and Spotify are renting all floors but one. The tour started in a common space in one of the few big meeting rooms where the group of 22 ppl squeezed in to learn more about Spotify first before viewing the space.

 

Striving for aligned autonomy in everything – also in the office space

Zuza: We are always striving for aligned autonomy at Spotify in everything they do, also in the space of our office.

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I´m so happy to share the Agile Coaching in a Nutshell poster also with all the Russians 🙂 Thank you so much to the wonderful Anton Serzhantov who has translated this poster.

This poster is aiming ro visualize the different perspectives, ways of working and competences in the role of an Agile Coach. feel free to download it and use it to develop yourself or others, increase collaboration and collective outcome or to help others understand what we can help with 🙂

FREE DOWNLOAD: Here you can download it for free in high resolution (PDF)

Agile Коучинг В двух словах

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This is a canvas you can use with your team to visualize some of the key concepts, facts about the team – but it is also a part of the process to build a high performance team to do the activities needed to fill out the canvas with the team. Keep it visual by the team and bring it with you on important team meetings.

Download the Team Canvas for free in high resolution (PDF) >
team canvas 1

Team Name
It is always great for the team spirit to come up with a nice and cool or funny name by them selves, don’t let any one else set it for them.

Purpose or Mission
It is crucial for the team to set a clear mission to enable them to focus and give clarity. It should be in connection with user- and business strategy and it is usually a job for the Product Owner if the team has one. What the team delivers and prioritizes depends on their mission. (more…)

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