Rather than employing flat fees or hourly rates, the fees for our coaching packages are driven by our success in helping you achieve specific, measurable results. Our approach is designed to accelerate good practices and help you avoid common traps and pitfalls.

Kickstart

The Challenge: Easing the initial adoption of lean and agile practices without overwhelming employees with new ways of working and disrupting existing productivity.

Our Solution: Assess current systems and practices, design an implementation roadmap, lead with a minimal schedule of on-site training and follow-on with a combination of on-site and remote coaching touchpoints with select teams and middle managers to guide a successful transition.

Scaling Lean & Agile Practices

The Challenge: Scaling successful experiences across multiple teams and systems.

Our Solution: Successfully scaling practices beyond a few successful teams involves more than just lather, rinse and repeat. Every context is different, and introducing program and portfolio management capabilities is critical. Our experts will help you discover the best approaches and practices for your environment.

Building Internal Capabilities

The Challenge: Rely less on outside coaching and create an internal capacity to lead and execute the continued evolution of lean & agile practices.

Our Solution: We actually begin doing this on the first day we're engaged to work with you. We accelerate "cutting the umbilical" through "train the trainer" type programs for internal candidates (identified during our engagement), ongoing consultation, and access to core training & coaching tools.

We regularly offer public workshops on lean and agile practices in a variety of venues. All of our public offerings can be contracted for private in-house delivery at substantially lower per person costs (we also tailor content to your specific needs).

Scrumban & Kanban Workshops

1/2 Day Kickstart: The perfect program for quickly ramping up teams and employees to new lean and agile practices. Teams walk away with what they need to immediately get started in a manageable and sustainable way. Assumes some familiarity with Scrum or other Agile frameworks.

1-Day Bootcamp: Our kickstart program with expanded instruction on core principles and practices (can include orientation to Scrum).

2-Day Foundations: Our Bootcamp program plus expanded instruction on core metrics and basic project management tools within the chosen framework.

1-Day & 2-Day Advanced: For experienced teams and managers ready to begin implementing more sophisticated approaches to risk management, disciplines around continuous improvement, and more reliabile forecasting techniques.

We are all teachers and students. To this end we organize and support a number of peer learning groups in the Greater Boston and Worcester regions:

Boston Limited WIP Society

Gathering five times a year, this group meets to share, discuss and debate improved ways of managing knowledge work. More info and details about upcoming events can be found at: www.meetup.com/Boston-Limited-WIP

Worcester Web Tech

Gathering four to five times a year, this group meets to share, discuss and learn about a variety of technologies relevant to web and mobile application development. More info and details about upcoming events can be found at: www.meetup.com/Worcester-Web-Technology

We regularly lead public presentations and workshops on lean and agile practices (mostly around Scrumban). We invite you to join us at these upcoming events:

• Kanban 101 (at Agile New England)

  October 2, 2014

• Kanban 101 (at Agile New England)

  November 6, 2014

Based upon two years of research and case studies, this book is a pragmatic guide to adopting Scrumban in your team or organization and leveraging more of its capabilities as mastery of its principles and practices grows. This book is being published by Pearson and is scheduled for release sometime during the first quarter of 2015.

What You'll Learn

Our book is organized into 3 sections:

• Foundational Principles: Starting with the end in mind. Understanding why organizations seek to become lean and agile, and the reasons why their efforts to do so often stall or fail.
• Execution: Putting Scrumban into practice. How to get started, and how it can be used to overcome challenges associated with adopting Scrum at both the individual team level and at scale.
• Continuous Improvement: Advanced practices and models that can be used to further improve decision-making and value delivery.

If you'd like to place an early order, send us an e-mail. You'll receive your copy as soon as it's released and we'll throw in an early-bird discount, to boot!

Lean and Agile thinking represents a big shift for many organizations. It's one thing to try out new practices that you read or receive training about. It's quite another to fully benefit from them.

Our expert consultants / coaches are knowledgable about both practices and the principles behind them. They are able to quickly recognize what approaches are likely to work best in a given context (and why). We know what to look for when results do not meet expectations. And we know these things from experience in a number of different contexts.

As active coaches, we also bring a wide community of practice to the table. This enables us to more rapidly discover solutions to uncommon issues their customers will inevitably encounter.

Our Approach

Like our favored process frameworks, we employ a results-oriented approach to our engagements. Rather than employing flat fees or hourly rates, our compensation is set based upon our success in helping your teams or organization achieve specific, measurable results.

Interested in learning more? Contact us to discuss the possibilities.