Delivering bad news

Posted on May 5, 2014 in Agile Methodology

You have two choices. You can wait until someone seeks you out, or you can be forthcoming. If you’re forthcoming you have the opportunity to earn trust. If you wait until you’re hunted down by your co-worker you demonstrate a major lack of readiness for responsibility.

Make a habit of hiding the truth, and you convert your co-worker into a status hunter. This not fun for anyone; neither ambushing you in the hallway, nor being ambushed, is a particularly enjoyable experience.

Either way the news is delivered, and you can’t hide forever, so why not choose to be a leader?

Tags: Happiness, Leadership

Speaker: Lean Startup Circle

Posted on April 25, 2014 in Agile Methodology

I had the pleasure of sharing my experience with analytics frameworks and metrics at the most recent Lean Startup Circle (DC). This was a part of their “Back to Basics” series. Presentation below.

Lean Startup Analytics/Metrics from Elliot Susel

Tags: Agile, Culture, Leadership, Lean Startup

Are you a leader, or a victim?

Posted on March 31, 2014 in Authenticity

Take your pick: leader or victim. You can’t be both, and we’d all rather that you choose the former. Make things happen. Get things done. It’s far more interesting to take ownership of your situation than to claim that you’re helpless to change it.

Hint: If you’re struggling with this one, recognize that it is a choice. If you truly see no path to leadership in your current situation, then perhaps it’s time to change your situation.

Tags: Leadership

Fight Ambiguity!

Posted on February 11, 2014 in Agile Methodology

I had the pleasure of presenting at Lean + Agile DC today. I was surprised at the positive feedback around how we’ve tackled the challenge of creating a transparent and SIMPLE Agile PMO. The words from another presenter were, “I hope that you don’t mind, but I’m stealing all of this for my teams. This is exactly what we needed.”

Fight Ambiguity!

Agile teams are constantly faced with uncertainty and ambiguity.

In these situations, your unspoken responsibility as an Agile Team Member, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, or Program Manager, is to fearlessly seek out clarity. Elliot will present a series of visualization tools that will help you to fight uncertainty and ambiguity in the following scenarios:

1) The product backlog is unknown, poorly defined, or not well-communicated

2) Realistic delivery dates are unknown

3) Cross-team dependencies are unknown, hidden, or not yet defined

You’ll look like a super-star when you show up at the office with these handy tools, clear up ambiguity, and help your team to better deliver.

Tags: Agile, PMO, Startup