Values

Our core values are:

Depth

Nobody can become a "master" of anything by taking a two-day class and getting a certificate. Allen has a deep understanding of process forged over years, and his advice is based on real-world experience, not theory. We don't just teach classes, we help you integrate your new knowledge.

Independence

Our goal in any consulting engagement is to make ourselves unnecessary. Our focus is on making your organization as effective as possible, as soon as possible, not on extending our engagements. Continued reliance on us is a failure.

Learning

We believe that the best way to achieve independence is to learn new ways of thinking. We don't do the work for you, we teach you how to do the work.

Culture

Every part of the organization has to be focused on working in an agile way for agile to succeed. That's not to say that practices are unimportant, but unless an effective culture permeates the organization, adopting effective practices can be very difficult.

Pervasive

We believe that agile/lean principles must pervade the entire organization, and we are skilled at working at every level, from the CEO to the individual developers.

Agility is all about welcoming change. Our primary measure of success is your ability to do that.

Approach

We are strong believers in both Lean and Agile principles.

Lean is a business process. It is customer focused, and concentrates on eliminating waste by identifying and then developing the best possible product for your customers in the shortest possible time by focusing on customer needs. Lean principles include short cycles, constant feedback, customer pull, and basing business decisions on experimentation and appropriate metrics.

Agile, on the other hand, is a product-development (usually software-development) process that depends on the complex interaction of many interconnected concrete practices. Agile is, by far, the most effective way for a Lean organization to develop products.

We believe strongly that the success of Lean/Agile depends on organizational culture, and that no single process is appropriate for all organizations. Without a supportive culture, it's not possible to succeed at any any Lean/Agile practice, and organizational change is almost always required. That's not to say that the individual agile practices are not important, but those practices must be supported by the organization as a whole.

The scope of agile extends far beyond the borders of the Engineering Department.

Though any process that conforms to the Agile Manifesto and Principles is agile, you can't just make stuff up and expect success. Agile practices are interdependent, and interact in complex ways.

Process-Agnostic Agile

Agile is an adjective, not a noun.

Agile means flexible, but all “named” processes are based on rigid rules. We believe that the notion of agility must apply to the process itself.

Process-agnostic agile looks at agile holistically. Drawing from all of the agile processes, we work collaboratively to customize a process to your needs.

The canned processes (Scrum, SAFe, etc.) all make significant compromises based on the perceived inability of their target markets to be truly agile. Scrum, for example, can accept ineffective old-school practices like time-based planning and customer surrogates. These canned processes are attractive because they can be adopted without significant disruption, but the very fact that they're not disruptive means that they don't embody the fundamental change that you need.

We strongly believe in the Lean principle of team empowerment. Our approach is to help your team develop the most effective processes for itself rather than imposing a single way of working that we tout as "right.