Kaveh Kalantar's Blog

For many new to Lean and Agile, the concept of self organised teams or self managed teams is very hard to understand. They simply can not comprehend it.  Because they have never experienced it and never thought it is possible. This includes not only senior leadership and managers, but also programmers as well. When I talk to some ScrumMasters about servant leadership, it is also hard for them to really understand it, especially when they come from traditional project management world of command and control. In the past couple of days, I was discussing with clients and management about autonomy and self-organised teams a lot. And I thought, I share here a glimpse of a real example of a self organised team. Fresh, hot from today Slack communication of one of the teams I serve happily. Context : This team is 7 people, Let’s call them Team X, They work with another team on the same backlog. Let’s call them Team Y. Team Y is 6 people. Both teams are cross-functional, and they w...

I was thinking what the title of this blog post could be, I had couple of options to select from and decided to use a title that uses Disciplined Agile (DA 2.0) Lifecycle. Other options for titles were: Moving From Scrum to Kanban From High Performing Scrum Teams to Hyper Performing Kanban  The bottom line is that at some point you may want to move away from Time boxes to a flow of work and service oriented teams and improve performance and throughput without massive and sudden organisational change.  As always, I only share my experience and this may not apply to all situations, context is important.  Another reason that I selected “Moving from Basic DAD Scrum Based LifeCycle to Continues Delivery (Kanban Based) Lifecycle” as the title, was that for many it is a question mark how to navigate through DAD life cycles. and I think this blog post could be one of the ways to navigate.  Context: A Delivery Team started with Type A Scrum with 2 weeks Sprin...

Elliot Goldratt suggested a Strategy Tree for project based companies. While that may work for some companies, it will not work for knowledge based workers or Software Development Companies, or Digital Agencies. On the other hand traditional resource planning and resource allocation is also not effective despite all the effort one put into it to make it less of a command and control model - Here I assume we know who are knowledge workers and how their productivity works, Peter Drucker has a fantastic article about Knowledge Workers that I highly recommend you to read, if you have not read it yet:  http://www.forschungsnetzwerk.at/downloadpub/knowledge_workers_the_biggest_challenge.pdf   Also, it has been proven that stable teams work better together on long term projects in software development. However, almost majority of software development companies or digital agencies break teams and reassemble them based on new projects or clients. This creates unnecessary complic...

It is an exciting and tiring time at Actum.  We are growing and changing at rapid pace, such a growth brings on new challenges and experiences that none of us, including founders had before. Most of the experiences are new to us all. None of us experience 300% or more growth in couple of months, and this is what is happening to several teams and departments currently. Right people and right attitudes are key factors in our growth and success so far.  In any traditional organisation, growth brings on new hierarchy - more Directors, Team Leads, VPs and etc. However, we decided to go the opposite and reduce hierarchies as we grow. One of the Founders is leading such change initiative. He is brave enough to experiment it and allows the rest of the organisation to shape the idea into a more practical one.  Actum is a project based company, we develop software, consult on digital strategy and customer experience, and we also help clients with processes (Lean, Agile, De...