What is the value of an agile organization adopting the CMMI?

Hey CMMI Appraiser – Our software engineering organization is the only one in our company that uses agile. But now we’re being asked to adopt the CMMI. Other than satisfying a customer requirement, is there any value for an agile organization to have a SCAMPI appraisal? ~ Jason A.

Hey, Jason,

For an organization like yours that cares about agile, another way of phrasing your question might be: “How do we maintain and scale our agile approach, while having the resilience to withstand the intense pressure to change as we get larger?”

Because THAT’S the value of an agile organization having a SCAMPI appraisal. Adopting the CMMI allows you to strengthen and scale agile, and make agile resilient to outside forces that would try to force you to change.

You may not have heard this before, but agile and the CMMI are 100% compatible. In fact, CMMI is an important tool for helping agile scale. So the real value of having a SCAMPI appraisal is that it’s a great way to test the strength and resiliency of your agile values, methods and techniques.

I would recommend that agile organizations adopt CMMI, even if your customers weren’t requiring it.  But you have to do it right.

As far as the market, you are correct that most software organizations at defense industry contractors are not agile. Some agile adoption is taking place,  with some experimentation at the small team level. But most have not embraced an agile approach to software development, and I’d say a big reason has to do with their customers.

True, we have seen the federal government show some interest in agile, but it is still a long way from true agile adoption - especially when it comes to agile values like “high-trust,” “collaboration,” and “fail-fast.” As a result, we’ve seen some contractors adopting ceremonies from frameworks like Scrum and XP, but they are more “Scrum-But” than Scrum.

I'ts not the adoption of ceremonies or techniques that makes you agile. It’s whether or not the business has embraced agile values.

Adopting the CMMI will help you find clarity in this regard. During your SCAMPI appraisal, your Lead Appraisal Team will be asking questions that will help define agility in your organization, including:

Are you really agile? What are your values?  How does the team demonstrate them?  Who attends sprint demos?  Your Lead Appraiser will be looking to find out if you're doing it well - or if you're Agile in name only.

Agile is something that you are. It’s a philosophy; it’s a way of thinking; it’s a way of life. To be agile is to adopt agile values, the values of collaboration of personal responsibility, of having the right team members, of failing fast, and the other agile values from the Agile Manifesto.

By contrast, the CMMI is not something you are. The CMMI is something you use to strengthen what you are. In the context of agile, the CMMI helps you strengthen what you are by helping you build a resilient framework. And by embracing lessons of CMMI with agile (or Waterfall or Spiral – or whatever your methodology of choice is) you move closer to being a better company.

So it’s a good thing your customers are asking you to adopt CMMI. Take it as an opportunity to align your agile organization with greatness.

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information about running a successful CMMI program.

SPaMCast Interview: Leading great organizations

Jeff, how do you define great leadership? ~ Tom Cagley, SPaMCast 

[Editor's Note: Over the coming weeks, this CMMI Appraiser will be sharing excerpts from a recent conversation with Tom Cagley on the Software Process and Measurement Cast (SPaMCast) about leadership, and whether leadership is more or less important in today’s Agile world. Listen to the full interview at SPaMCast 456.]

Tom,

Earlier in my career, I spent about a decade at Ernst and Young. If you work for a firm like that, you are always interested in becoming a partner, and I remember going through some interviews to become a partner. I was at the very final stages in that process, and some of the senior partners asked me, “What do you think it takes to lead great organizations?”

I spoke at some length about inspiration, leading people, getting the best out of people, putting people in a situation where they are empowered to do the right thing, without you hovering over them, giving them tasks and measuring them every minute. I could tell at the end of my answer that, if I hadn’t failed the interview, I had come close to it! Because what they were apparently looking for was P&L, metrics, cash flow, etc. Of course, these things are very important.

They asked, “What do you think is the number one thing to make leadership successful?”

I said, “You can increase profitability and customer satisfaction more by leading people to lead themselves, than you can by making sure utilization is as high as it can be.”

I really believe that. I think leadership is less about accounting numbers and managing the administration and the bureaucracy than it is about motivating people so that they don’t need leadership as much.

As you know, I’m very interested in self-organization, and a lot of the methods that are out there. I see this every day with some of the clients that I've worked with: Their leadership isn’t leading. They are some great managers, some great administrators, and some great people that are doing great things with financials far beyond anything that I’m capable of, but in terms of actually leading people so that they don’t need day-to-day leadership? There is very little of that going on. That’s something that I’m the most passionate about.

#     #     #

I hope my readers have enjoyed this segment of my interview with Tom Cagley on SPaMCast #456. We'll be talking more about leadership, and whether leadership is more or less important in today’s Agile world, in the next segment. Please check back soon.

And if you're interested in a deeper dive into learning about Agile Leadership, you are invited to join me and other agile leaders at The 2017 Agile Leadership Summit, hosted by AgileCxO.org on September 22nd in Washington, DC. I look forward to meeting many of you in person for the first time!

Here's how to register for The 2017 Agile Leadership Summit.

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information about engineering strategy, performance innovation, software process improvement and running a successful CMMI program.

Where do you get the inspiration to successfully lead agile teams?

Hey, CMMI Appraiser – we came across your blog while searching for practical information on how to become more agile, and how to maintain our agility. Where can I get some inspiration for leading teams to embrace all things agile? ~ Zach M.

Hey, Zach – It’s always a pleasure to hear from engineering and software professionals like you who care about agile, engineering strategy and performance innovation.

When searching for inspiration, I turn to Charlie Parker.

Charlie “Bird” Parker was a brilliant, though seriously flawed, pioneer of the American jazz scene. While his personal challenges are well documented, Parker is known as the undisputed master of the idiom, who understood that being great was not simply about being talented. His legacy, regarded by music historians as one of the most powerful in the history of American music, was not an accident. It was arrived at through years of disciplined study, practice, and experimentation, which resulted in the very definition of the art form. But it was not simply about study, nor was it only about a disciplined adherence to structure. Parker knew what so many in software engineering still struggle to understand today: that great accomplishments are achieved through mastering and synthesizing all three elements — talent, learning, and discipline.

What really set Bird apart was his ability to master these concepts with extraordinary agility. When he performed, he heard something very different from the music of his predecessors. While standing firmly on the shoulders of the giants who came before him, he created a new, agile style that catapulted jazz into an entirely new dimension. With its short bursts of creativity, rapid real-time adaptations, and incremental, iterative improvisational character, this style — which came to be known as “be-bop” — would be better described as real-time composition.

Unlike the music that preceded Parker’s 1939 debut, his was incremental and iterative in three dimensions:

The first was internal to the skills of any accomplished musician, who learns to hear the sound in the split-second it takes for it to escape his or her instrument, and then incrementally inspects and adapts the tone, inflection, and pitch — sometimes before the sound wave has even reached the audience.

The second dimension was the real-time collaboration among and between the members of his group: between saxophone and piano, between drums and bass, between piano and guitar, and a continuous build of those collaborations across the ensemble. The magic of be-bop is in the real-time composition created when a group of accomplished players collaborate as a team, fail fast, and deliver the minimum viable product throughout the course of the composition.

Finally, Bird would collaborate with his audience — reading their reaction, inspecting and adapting, and recalibrating his compositions to meet the desires of his fans.

If it sounds as though I’m saying that agile methods have been around a lot longer than Scrum, XP, and the spiral model, I am. While I have immense respect for the authors of the Agile Manifesto, they were 60 years behind Bird.

The lessons from Charlie Parker are as relevant to agile teams today as they were to musicians in the 1940s — most software organizations still struggle with the synthesis of talent, learning, and discipline. It’s not for lack of trying. The landscape is littered with models, techniques, and tools in search of software’s perfect chord, yet we continue to struggle with the processes required to improve productivity and increase the predictability and stability of software projects.

Here's a way to learn more - quickly and easily!

The 2017 Agile Leadership Summit on September 22, 2017 in Washington, D.C. offers a solution to this problem, by presenting a first: A framework for adopting, transforming, and mastering Agility.

At the Summit, you’ll experience a live jazz performance that demonstrates agility, iteration, and excellence right before your eyes. To deepen your learning experience, there will be two fantastic keynotes by industry leaders, and six entertaining vignettes on Agile leadership, craftsmanship, and teaming. Lunch will be served, and you’ll have opportunities to network with other Agile leaders.

Inspired yet? Then join us at the Agile Leadership Summit! You’ll learn from your peers about how to take agile leadership, and your organization, to the next level of agile performance.

More information is available at agilecxo.org.

Portions of this article originally appeared in the Cutter IT Journal.

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, ScrumMaster, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff pioneered agileCMMI, the leading methodology for incremental and iterative process improvement. He has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information about engineering strategy, performance innovation , software process improvement and running a successful CMMI program.

To download eBooks about CMMI, including the complete “CMMU Users Stories,” visit Jeff’s Author Page on Amazon.

How do we satisfy our State Government client who is asking us to “be more agile?”

Hey CMMI Appraiser,

We are working with the CIO of our State Agency, who is a big believer in organizational performance improvement and is always pushing us to be better. He just came back from NASCIO and heard that vendors need to start being "agile." Our team is smart and talented. We do daily meetings, collaborate, and meet with our customer all the time. Isn't this ok?  If not this, what is agile? ~ S.T 

Hey, ST,

Thank you for writing in.  Different people mean different things when they say they want to be agile. Let's dive into this.

When people say, "be more agile," sometime they mean, "deliver faster and cheaper." And when (too many) software engineers and developers think about "being more agile," they sometimes think it means, “no oversight or documentation!”

What does it ACTUALLY mean? Agility’s greatest strength, and the reason for its extraordinary success, is an intense focus on learning and adapting. Your customer probably wants you to keep learning and adapting your service to meet his evolving needs.

For you to be agile, then, you need to approach Agile as a student.

OK – now what?

In order to study and learn the discipline of agility, it helps to think of the approach as a three-tiered architecture of Agile Values, Agile Methods and Agile Techniques.

1. Agile Values

This tier defines the values that we agree to embrace. Our values are the things that are most important to us. These are the things that your organization needs to stay focused on, and your customer wants you to stay focused on.

Some of these agile values are transparency, collaboration, hiring the right people, fail-fast, inspect and adapt, share the work, and others.  The most commonly discussed values can be found at http://agilemanifesto.org/.

Side note: recently when I presented about Agile Values at a conference, a skeptical manager approached me and insisted that traditional Waterfall-style projects can easily have these same values.

I said, “That’s true. And guess what? When they do, they just called well-run projects!”  These values are universal. Unfortunately, "waterfall" methods and techniques don't always align well, or "trace," to the values.  So that's why we have . . .

2. Agile Methods

The second tier in the Agile architecture defines the WAY we do work - sequence, events, and ceremonies - and that WAY is derived from the values in Tier 1. All of the methods selected should adhere to the values. We call this having "values traceability."

Clients who work with Broadsword often hear me talk about "the WAY." Your "way" is derived from the values and methods use choose to select and embrace

Methods describe the sequence, interfaces, style, and the workflow of much of what we do. In this context, I use the words "method" or "framework" while I'm working with our clients. I think of them as synonymous.

In an Agile environment, the most common methods (frameworks) are Scrum, Extreme Programming, Spiral and Crystal, with the first two being the most prevalent.

For example, Scrum defines ceremonies, artifacts, and roles, and presents a basic sequence  (sprints, et al) for us to deliver our service or product in the context of values.

3. Agile Techniques

Techniques are the things we do every day, within the selected method, in adherence with the values. There are some techniques that are unique to methods, and some that span the entire family of Agile frameworks.

Techniques normally associated with Agile methods include:

• retrospectives
• Backlog grooming ("story time")
• User Story development
• Story Point estimation
• Planning Poker
• Fibonacci estimation
• Sprint Review (Demo) 
• Refactoring
• Test Driven Development
• BDD
• Spring / Iteration Planning

Being the third tier of an integrated architecture, a technique alone, without the corresponding methods and values (such as "we do a daily meeting") does not make you "agile," although it's better than NOT meeting everyday.

As I said above, you need to approach Agile as a student.

If you want to become a student, join us on November 7th @ 8:30 am – November 8th @ 4:00 pm (2 days). Here’s the link: 

Sign up for the Agile Scrum Learning Experience!

Hope to see you in class!

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author, and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information about running a successful CMMI program.

Discount code -- $400 off! -- for Agile Dev East Conference

Hey, CMMI Appraiser, I saw a Tweet that you'll be speaking at the Agile Dev East conference. What topic will you be addressing? ~ John B.

Hey, John - thank you for following me on Twitter!

Yes, I'll be presenting at the Better Software Agile Dev East Conference, which takes place in Orlando in November.  My topic is agile leadership, and I’ll be introducing folks to a new model for evaluating high performing teams, the Agile Performance Holarchy. The Agile Performance Holarchy is a late-binding, soft-coded performance model for adopting, transforming and mastering agility within your software or technology organization.  With the Agile Performance Holarchy, current and future leaders now have an object-oriented model for building and assessing agile capability.

I’ve assessed hundreds of agile teams over the last 15 years, and I’ve learned that there are two impediments that exist to successful and scaleable agile adoption. It’s not that we need a new method. We don’t need to turn Agile into Waterfall.  And we certainly don’t need lower trust or more command and control.

What we need is for leadership to understand, embrace and project agile values, and how they trace to the ceremonies and techniques that we’re using. And we need teams to execute those ceremonies with discipline and integrity.

The Agile Performance Holarchy is a clear definition of great agile for leaders and teams alike, and it provides a sustainable path to agile capability, while preserving the value of high trust and empirical process control.

I hope you can stop by the session, John, and learn about verifiable agile performance.  For those who haven't registered yet, here's the link: Agile Dev East Conference.

Feel free to use my code (BE17JD25) and get $400 off!

It will be my pleasure to see you there.

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information.

When is the best time to adopt CMMI?

Hey, CMMI Appraiser --  Our company just performed a self-assessment, and we are looking at CMMI as a way to push process improvement across our entire organization.  What are some of the factors we should consider as far as timing ... i.e., when is the best time to adopt the CMMI? ~ Brian G.

First of all, Brian, congratulations on completing a self-assessment.  That's the first step to improving you company, your products, and the satisfaction of your customers.  You are on your way!

For a lot of organizations, the best time to look at adopting the CMMI is when you identify the need to change behaviors and establish an environment for operating like a great company – for the long term.  For example:

If you are having trouble with estimates, CMMI can help make your estimates better.

If you are having trouble with late projects, CMMI can help improve predictability.

If your bosses are micromanaging you, CMMI can give them more information to help them understand what is going on with projects.

If you have a lot of tedious rework, CMMI can help avoid that by bringing clarity and validation to the process by making sure the requirements are right when you get them.

If you have unhappy customers, CMMI can help put a framework in place that helps you manage their expectations.

If you experience a lot of chaos in your business, CMMI can help you bring stability to that as well.

If you are interested in defining the Way you do business as a group, the CMMI can help you define your Way and be the great company that you are.

So what should you do next? 

I recommend learning everything you need to know about CMMI as a large collection of lessons learned and best practices.  You can get this information for free on our next webinar, "CMMI: Everything You NEED to Know," on Friday, August 18th at 2PM.

Click here to register for "CMMI: Everything You NEED to Know!"

After watching the webinar, you'll be that much closer to getting started with CMMI. Please check back if we can offer further assistance.

In the meantime, I look forward to seeing you on the webinar!

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information.

Check out Ask The CMMI Appraiser TV!

That's right!  We're now have our own YouTube Channel!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYOtm0XSGzxoxy8O4ME9XMQ

Below, you’ll find a list of current "Ask The CMMI Appraiser" episodes. Click on the title to view the video, or use the link above to see them all!

Video 1:  Should We Make Everyone Follow the Same Process

Video 2:  Don’t Run Your Business by Process Models

Video 3:  What’s the #1 Problem We Face With CMMI?

Video 4:  If We Buy a CMMI Level 5 Company, Are We Level 5?

Video 5:  How Do We Convince Management to Buy Into CMMI?

Video 6:  On Building Airplanes and Observing Process Infrastructure

Video 7:  What are the Generic Practices For?

Video 8:  Making Scrum Stronger With CMMI: The Generic Practices

Video 9:  Introduction to CMMI-DEV Training

Video 10:  CMMIxs for Xtra-Small Companies

Video 11:  CMMI Myths for Xtra-Small Companies:  Episode Two

Video 12:  The Large Adopters Will Change Agile!

Video 13:  CMMI and Agile are about the Same Thing!

Video 14:  How Disciplined is Agile?

Video 15:  Are You Really Agile?

Video 16:  What’s Different about Documentation in Agile Projects?

Video 17:  Do Agile Teams Use Process?

Video 18:  Be Agile by Tuesday. Huh?

Video 19:  What Can We Do About Organizational Type Mismatch?

Video 20:  Can We Run the Company Using Scrum?

Video 21:  What Should Our Process Architecture Look Like?

Video 22:  What’s the big deal about planning poker?

Video 23:  Will Our Agile Values Translate Company-wide?

Video 24:  How to Develop Requirements in an Agile Setting?

Video 25:  What Is CMMI?

Video 26:  What’s the Secret to Passing an Appraisal?

Video 27:  How are music and technology alike?

Video 28:  How do you create competencies as a business?

Video 29:  How do we create competencies as a team?

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information.

CMMI: Do you know what "done" looks like?

Check out this video to see it all drawn out for you: https://youtu.be/_eM1FVFH-04

About once a week my phone rings with a request to "get a level" of CMMI "as soon as possible."

Some of my friends in the CMMI community would chastise me for even entertaining the question and engaging these callers in a helpful conversation - one in particular (you know who you are)  might even slam down the phone (do people even still do that with cell phones?) while yelling "DUMMY!"

It goes without saying that the true purpose of CMMI is to serve as a model for performance improvement, and many say that companies who chase a certificate or plaque (we call this "plaque buildup") are doing nothing good for themselves, and probably damaging their company in the process.  

But I'm not with them on this.  Here's why.

These callers, often company owners, are in a very tight spot. Often they are qualified for the work, sometimes they're even ALREADY doing the work, but then the government (or customer) throw the CMMI requirement at them as a pre-requisite for keeping their revenue coming in.  Many of them have never even heard of CMMI.  I can excuse them for thinking this a tactic meant to unfairly exclude them from winning work for which their are qualified.

Frankly, asking how fast they can get to CMMI MLx is a fair question.  Especially since they don't really have a good feel for what CMMI even is.  They deserve an answer for how to "get it done."

So what does "done" look like?

We recommend starting with an independent, unbiased assessment.  This is a great way to get at the "single source of truth" and bypass all of the emotions, opinions, and roadblocks.  The CMMI has hundreds of nooks and crannies where performance weaknesses can hide, and we want to make sure you understand exactly what is in front of you and what needs to be done.

Once you have that under you belt, you'll have everything you need to put together a "plan-to-achieve." The data tells us that it's not a short process, but if you treat it like a project, and take a deliverable, purposeful approach, it can be done by any company.  Duration depends on a lot of factors: where you are today, resources commitment, sponsorship, and company culture.  I've seen companies take 5 years to get to ML2, and others take 6 months to get to ML3.

As we like to say in our business, "it depends." It's impossible to know without getting into the details.  Anyone who tells you otherwise ("sure, I can get you there in 2 months...") is lying.  Or unethical. Or both.

Once the plan is defined, there's some work to do.  You'll design some processes, develop some training, deploy both, and have your projects adopt the improvements.  In some cases, you may change the way you're working altogether.  Along the way we usually provide some training (Introduction to CMMI), workshops, and consulting, and when you're ready.....

We plan your appraisal(s) by selecting projects and people to sample, developing a schedule, documenting the plan, and reviewing/approving it with key stakeholders.  In the background we'll register your appraisal with the CMMI Institute, and make other key preparations.

About 30 days before your scheduled "onsite," we'll conduct some Appraisal Team Training with four or more of your team members, and conduct a Readiness Review.  That's where it all starts.  From there there will be same data collection in preparation for the big day arriving!

The "onsite portion of your appraisal (known as "Phase II") will take place over a week or more, and will include interviews, artifact reviews, and characterization of practices (a kind of "scoring"), all leading up to the development of a final findings report that will spell out the result.

Did you "pass?"  Well - that's up to you.  Good luck!

Check out this video to see it all drawn out for you: https://youtu.be/_eM1FVFH-04

Like this blog? Forward to your nearest engineering or software exec!

Jeff Dalton is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, Certified CMMI Instructor, author and consultant with years of real-world experience with the CMMI in all types of organizations. Jeff has taught thousands of students in CMMI trainings and has received an aggregate satisfaction score of 4.97 out of 5 from his students.

Visit www.broadswordsolutions.com for more information.

Adopting Agile frameworks and techniques doesn't make you Agile - does it?

It's undeniable that "agile" is all the rage and is growing exponentially, and that frameworks and techniques that are frequently associated with "agile" (Scrum, XP, TDD, BDD, Planning Poker, et al) are being adopted at a furious pace.  But its growth is horizontal *across projects* and not vertical from projects up to the C-Suite.  This is a problem.

In other words, management isn't really on board.  In most cases, they're still running a "waterfall" operation.  And Agile values? Not so much.

The adoption and projection of Agile values are what provides the necessary culture and state-of-mind that enables true agility.  Without leadership on these, enterprise agile will never happen.  Ever.

So adopting frameworks isn't enough, is it?

I've lost count of the number of companies I've worked with that started out by telling me that they were "agile - sorta."  By that they meant they were working "a little more iteratively" (whatever that means) and holding "daily meetings." Good stuff, for sure, but it's just the beginning.

Most of these companies were diligently trying to adopt agile frameworks and techniques, but they were doing it in a vacuum - without leadership support.  They were doing yeoman's work without leaders fertilizing the crops with a solid demonstration and projection of Agile values - especially high trust, transparency, fail-fast, and collaboration.

"Sure - be agile.  Just make sure to provide a 24 month program plan."

"Sure - be agile.  Just don't bother the customer."

"Great!  We love agile.  Can you fit this new feature into this sprint?"

I wish I could say this is rare problem, but it's not.  I've assessed more than 100 "agile" organizations and 90% of them had leadership that was not actively engaged in agile adoption.

Nothing against the folks who are doing great work at the team level, or the people leading the industry with new and innovative techniques for enterprise agile, SAFe, or DAD  (great stuff, really), but the real impediment is more basic - leaders need to get up to speed on what great agile is, better understand what they're role is in the agile ecosystem, and change the way their leading!

Until they do that, we're pushing rope uphill.

To make matters more complicated, there hasn't been an industry model for them to lean on to check themselves - until now.  Check this one out.

I'll be speaking on the of Agile leadership, values, and more at the upcoming 2017 Agile Leadership Summit in Washington, DC on September 22nd, 2017.  There will be eight great speakers, and networking with other Agile leaders who are looking to address this problem in the industry.  Why don't you join me?  agilecxo.org.

The first keynote is Kevin Fisher, VP at the Nationwide Insurance Advance Development Center.  Kevin is responsible for the capability lift of their 225 Agile teams.  Talk about Enterprise Agile!

The second keynote is our good friend Tom Cagley from SPaMCast.  Tom's interviewed 100s of Agile luminaries, and will be sharing his lessons on Agile leadership.

Register for the Agile Leadership Summit at www.agilecxo.org.

Jeff Dalton is an author, coach, and instructor for Agile leaders.  He is President of Broadsword, a Performance Innovation company, and Chief Evangelist at AgileCxO.org, a resource an development organization that provides models for Agile leaders.