Steve – Page 3 – Steve Randall

Executive support is mandatory for agile

Over the past 25 years of delivering solutions in multiple countries and multiple organisations I have never had the support from exec like I do from my current client. From the board, to the CEO to the executive directors, to the business… we are backed and supported.

This stacks the odds of makes top down, bottom up change, success heavily in our favor.

It is common for the CEO to walk into the program room, sit down with me and ask Continue reading Executive support is mandatory for agile

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
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Find yourself in this situation? Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Leadership Tips (series) Wake up!

Recently I am being asked a lot of questions around leadership. It is inspiring that so many managers are now become interested in leadership and even more inspiring that a few are understanding the difference between the two.

… so I thought I would start a series so I can capture my thoughts in one place. I hope you find something that inspires and helps.

As a leader I believe that your role is to achieve a better outcome from your team, compared to if you weren’t there. Now don’t laugh, I have met more managers than I could count that made no difference at all (or worse… they had a negative impact) on the output of their teams. Some managers are reporters, others are enforcers, the a few are leaders.

One philosophy I try to embed is Continue reading Leadership Tips (series) Wake up!

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

The Human Side of Business – Minimize Management, Maximize Leadership.

Managing should be an invisible, yet a productive force.

So, how do you improve the efficiency of the human-side of Organizations needed for the future success of a business?

Everything to do with work can be changed for the better, if only Management today is comfortable with simply pointing out where the business needs to go and how it intends getting there. Then letting go, and being flexible enough to adapt and evolve as that future unfolds with all of its uncertainties.

We definitely, need another measure of people performance other than by their economic contribution, which is often not within the control of the individual. We need to measure their commitment and leadership to the well-being of the Organization.

To achieve this we need to make work something worth committing to.

Adequacy and monotony is not something that just happens; it is built into your system. It’s the result of thoughtless social engineering, which adds nothing to improve the human-side of the business, or the abilities of the individual, Continue reading The Human Side of Business – Minimize Management, Maximize Leadership.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

How To Deliver Constant Change Without Burning Out Your Teams

As new beliefs clash with the old, ‘fast change’ has come to mean must change, and with it has come disposable skills, the loss of feeling valued and stable, and a lack of leadership and mentors. This has resulted in not only a knowledge deficiency within our Organizations but also, a shift in the centre of energy of these Organizations.

This disruption has become so much part of our lives (there is just too much to take in… so much to know, understand, think about and consider) that we are in danger of our minds suffering from sensory as well as information overload and burnout. Stress, bewilderment, helplessness, tension, anxiety disorder is on the increase, and it is showing up as unreasonable behavior and even mindlessness within our Organizations’. Its showing up through lower than expected results.

People no longer know how to behave, how they work is how they have always worked. Many don’t know how to change. Speed has turned into haste as organizations fight for a credible future.

Now is the time to be a leader.

Continue reading How To Deliver Constant Change Without Burning Out Your Teams

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

How Spotify Do It – Part 2 of 2

Everytime I watch this series… yep, I watch them regularly… hey why not learn from the very best(!) I learn something new.

As your level of agile maturity grows you will face issues. Architecture, design, fit into assurance frameworks in large organisations, skill set sharing etc. Spotify seem to have faced them all… and found sweet solutions.

Watch and enjoy!

Continue reading How Spotify Do It – Part 2 of 2

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

How Spotify Do It (Is this Agile at its best?) Part 1 of 2

Those of you who know me, know that I am a raving fan of Spotify and their Agile culture.

Spotify is an amazing free, legal online music streaming service check out their product here (https://www.spotify.com/au/)

You see spotify have engaged the Agile philosophy properly. Agile is about trying, measuring, then retrospectively looking at what worked well, didn’t work so well, and well… what totally ballsed up.

Lets be honest here… every project has its issues. Any project worth is weight has to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved before, so it will come across some stumbling block. People will make mistakes. That’s normal and that’s ok with me. Its how we learn, its how we innovate. If we never try anything new, we wont create anything new.

The video below, with a huge thanks to Spotify who made it available, explains their engineering philosophy so well that I thought I’d use it here.
Continue reading How Spotify Do It (Is this Agile at its best?) Part 1 of 2

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Welcome To Agile Espresso For Highly Collaborative Meetings

Have you ever sat in a meeting and thought “OMG… when will this end?… I’ve gotta get out and get xyz done.” You didn’t feel engaged, you didn’t feel valued.

A silly question I know, of course you have!

Sadly meetings like this are common place. It’s how most meetings around the world are run… and they kill productivity and collaboration.

I’ll let you in on a secret… If I have to sit through another rambling meeting… one that I cant add any value too, I’ll lose the will to live.

Recently I was having a coffee with a friend and this topic came up. He started telling me about the Lean Coffee framework and how it had transformed his company. Ummm… no… it’s not a skinny coffee as the name might lead you to believe. It’s actually a framework for running lean meetings.

Driven by the fear of another life-sucking-meeting Continue reading Welcome To Agile Espresso For Highly Collaborative Meetings

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

How To Run A Company (or Team) With (Almost) No Rules

Here’s a thought… If Ricardo can run a successful multi-billion dollar group of companies using his version of Agile, then we should all be striving to instill this mindset into our teams and departments.

What’s exciting is that its not just us dev types who are rethinking better ways of working.

What do Ricardo’s principles and Agile have in common? Well, if I was to pick a commonality I would have to say this…

Continue reading How To Run A Company (or Team) With (Almost) No Rules

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Steve Ranked #10 in Top 25 Agile Evangelists On LinkedIn

Today I received an email from linked in telling me that I am ranked #10 on their worldwide list of Agile Evangelists. I have to say I am pretty pleased with this info!

Me being me I had to check this so off to google I went and yep sure enough, there I am. Woohoo!

Continue reading Steve Ranked #10 in Top 25 Agile Evangelists On LinkedIn

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

How To Put The ‘Fun’ Into Work Environments

So you have, or you are implemented Agile in some form, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe… These are both exciting and scary times. You’ve convinced your boss that this is a better way to create software, to create and deliver business value earlier, quicker and to build an amazing team. You have told your boss you can take him or her to management utopia! Well now it’s time to deliver…

So, why is it then that some many companies that I see have made this massive paradigm shift in thinking, expect their team members to do the same… even though they are still in a work environment that was, to be quite frank, devised in the late 1800’s.

Agile + Fun = Management Utopia
(Massive results, happy staff and happy bosses!)

Continue reading How To Put The ‘Fun’ Into Work Environments

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.