Kaveh Kalantar's Blog

 To collocate or not to collocate? Most companies that are new to agile have been "consulted" by a "Scrum" Agile Coach, who suggested that they must break their organisation and have cross-functional teams to sit together in one location. Is that the recipe for success?.. Is it really? Even though collocation has its benefits, it is not the necessary condition for a successful delivery team. Collocation as a dogmatic view may hurt you more than you think, and will not necessarily help you to deliver more successful products. I am neither for nor against collocation, but I have experienced and worked with both approaches. And each sometimes worked very well and sometimes failed. All the variations of teams geolocation (collocated, fully-dispersed, partially-dispersed, or distributed) can work. It all depends on how the collaboration model is setup, what is the context and conditions, and how much the team and organisation are aware of each other, and are aligned....

At Fundamentals of Change Management post   I described four key concepts of change management that any logical and rational being can agree with immediately. But when it comes to applying those concepts and causing a change, the model breaks and the change agent encounters a bunch of emotional and irrational beings. They see proposed changes as an attack to their existence. It turns out that these two types of beings (logical/rational and emotional/irrational) are in fact the two sides of the same being. They are intelligent and emotional beings with strong logical and cognitive ability, and they belong to a group, tribe or family. They have their own dreams, self-image, self-esteem and ego. With this, they each create their own identify in the society they live in. Our guy (in above picture) is a human who is emotional with cognitive ability, has unique individual identity and belongs to one or more social groups. When we don't pay attention to that, then no matter ho...