Scaling is a hot topic. New frameworks and certifications are emerging like mushrooms. But without understanding the deep system dynamics of your organization any scaling framework would be just a patch on the skin of your organization. In this talk, we’ll review the reasons why each company tends to grow, to become slower, and more bureaucratic.

A project manager walks into a bar. The bar is called “organizational design”.

He tries to order beer but can't figure out how. Then disappointed he is about to exit the bar, but can't locate the exit.

Apparently he looks around and notices a lot of other managers around in there. "That’s a trap." - he thinks. "It is a complex system" - echo the others.

This week I spoke at Agile Tour Vilnius 2016 and PM Day Kyiv 2016. In November I'm visiting Lean Kanban France 2016.

This is my third increment of this talk and now I'm happy how it goes: spaghetti, Japanese poetry and complexity seems to be a good combination for any talk.

Below are some photos and selected slides. Down below are a full slide deck. Video is in post-production. Enjoy.

"You should do more jenkins than jira"

Ron Jeffries.

Below are the slides from a lightning talk I made recently at #agile2016 and #ale16. It describes a problem of relying on jira-like tools for backlog management.

One of my clients recently stopped a jira license and when back to paper. This was so inspiring that I decided to share the story to the world.

Below you find some ideas can you can do this as well.

And again one historical video. Probably the best recording from a talk I was travelling with in 2012-2013.

The talk answers several key questions to understand why most companies have project managers and project management offices (PMOs).

• How organizations develop?
• Why are they tend to become so complex?
• Are managers coming from Mars?
• What are the three types of managers?
• How the bands like the Beatles are managed?
• And how does it all related to the self-management concepts of Agile?

Back in 2011 and 2012 I was actively speaking about the problematism of offshore and outsource product development and how the agile methods could help. I think still they do. I see it all around.

Surprisingly, this year (2016) several people have mentioned to me that they still remember the "blah blah blah manifesto" I used to present.

Suddenly remembered it too! Here it is:

Read Alistair Cockburn commenting on this.

The message I was trying to convey was that the first value of the Agile Manifesto "Individuals and Interactions" is the key one. And the rest would follow if this one is done right.

And vice versa: if this one is not there - good luck with getting to the working software, adaptive planning and customer negotiation.

Relationships is the key.

Some years ago I formulated the Manifesto for Offshore Agility.

What do you think of it?

Enjoy one of my talks back at the Agile Tour in Vilnius:

"Two out of five members of a development team are constantly failing to finish their stories. A sprint after a sprint. Which impediment is Scrum making visible?

This is a card from my impediment exercise I ran at a CSM class. The right answers of course are:

• This is not a team but a group of developers since they don't share work...
• The team is likely doing proper sprint planning as they are not having a shared sprint backlog...
• The team does not understand the concept of team work...

Sadly, in 8 out 10 times I hear from my ScrumMaster-candidates the following: "the estimates of the two guys are constantly wrong".

This makes me sad. And hopeless.

And I've just found a talk I did at #agileee2013 on the fallacy of estimates. I think it is still quite relevant as our brain hasn't evolved that much since then.

Estimations are always wrong, that's why we call them estimates in the first place. So of course we can justify almost any project issue to wrong estimates. But it won't change a thing. It is like blaming a weatherman for your poor life choices.