Book BOSSA nova

If you’re serious about enterprise agility, you owe it to yourself to explore the groundbreaking work by Jutta Eckstein and John Buck expressed in BOSSA nova. Take the assessment right now – and read their book to learn more.

~ Comparative Agility

Take the survey at Comparative Agility or drop us a note to learn more about how far you got or how you can benefit even more from implementing company-wide agility. In this video, we’ll give an overview of what you can do with the assessment.

Have a look in the book! Download here a sample chapter.
Find out more by meeting us at conferences.
Connect & discuss BOSSA nova in our Linked In Group.

Our article Yes, Cross-functional Teams, but Real Ones! was selected for the Best Agile Articles of 2019! Thanks for voting! You can receive the complete ebook covering all Best Agile Articles of 2019 as a for free download!

Moreover, our book has been featured in the top 10 Corporate Finance And Budgeting Books List by the Public Company Community.

Translation to French is currently in progress.

Zur deutschen BOSSA nova Seite

Get our book in traditional Chinese

Consigue nuestro libro en español (en leanpub o amazon)

  Get our book in Korean

BOSSA nova Probes – short & sweet, May 15, 2020, presented by the Agile Australia

What is BOSSA nova?

Logo Bossa nova

BOSSA nova is…

… an approach for company-wide agility. It enables your company to be agile, nimble, and flexible by combining

  • Beyond Budgeting (beyond command and control toward empowered and adaptive management),
  • Open Space (leveraging the power of innovation from all employees),
  • Sociocracy (flexible organizational structure that allows decentralized decision-making), and
  • Agile (continuous learning via experiments and feedback).
Sample Chapter
BOSSA nova is for everyone in the company. You can start using it right away.
Have a look in the book! Download a sample chapter...
Sample Chapter

So what?

BOSSA nova makes company-wide agility possible.

Agile just by itself is revolutionary in the software world. Here’s what McKinsey said about Agile in October 2017:

“Agile performance units excel most often at strategy and people-related practices, and they outperform all other units in stability and dynamism.”

Now what?

How can I Implement BOSSA nova?

Implement by probing, by doing experiments to understand the complexity of your organization’s Strategy, Structure, and Processes.

strategy
structure
processes

Strategy

Is trust cheaper?

How can we both self-organize and stay aligned?

Structure

Should we change our legal structure?

Can our board of directors include a CEO, a representative elected by staff, and a customer without interfering with the board’s work?

Processes

How include customer feedback in board meetings?

Can we organize transformative learning?

Find out more by meeting us

Here is where we’re presenting next:

Jutta’s upcoming events.
Training options from John by Governance Alive.

Sessions & trainings on related topics

Events calendar for deep dives in Beyond Budgeting.
Events calendar for Open Space by the Open Space World.
Events calendar on agile (un)conferences & trainings announced by the Agile Alliance.

Learn more

Take the Survey

Understand both – how you compare and how you can improve on your journey to company-wide agility. Take the survey at Comparative Agility or drop us a note to learn more about benchmarking your efforts and using a data-driven continuous improvement approach.

Take the Survey

… from our presentation recordings

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Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, …, International Sociocracy Online Conference

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Sociocracy: Thinking Smarter Together, TEDxUMD Talk

… from our podcasts

… from our articles

… from insights of our colleagues

… from Probes of our Peers

Background: Currently the biggest part of the Scrum Teams within the Agile Release Train feel neglected and floating in the organization. Due to discussion between them and stakeholders (management+customers), they are losing sight of where their specific part of the product fits into the longer term vision, the company vision and the sense of purpose.

Hypothesis: If the first level of stakeholders would start actually being involved and engaged in the Scrum Events, together with the teams, there would be more opportunity of two-way discussion on the vision and ultimately providing a better sense of purpose, leading to happier teams.

Experiment: Identify 2 events where more active participation of stakeholders is expected. Beforehand, measure the level of happiness based on a set of questions that also includes the  feeling of connection with the vision. After the events, measure again and inspect what is the difference. Adapt the future events accordingly.

Background: Mostly team members are just allowed to focus on deliveries and not on learning and improvement. They are mostly given so much delivery related work that they are not able to take up some new things and learn.

Hypothesis: If we allow the team to have dedicated time for self-learning in each sprint, then the team’s learning and new ideas proposal increase resulting in improvement of product and their satisfaction level.

Experiment: Self-learning opportunity helps in improving ideation and improvement of product. Giving dedicated time for learning and improvement helps in new initiatives from them and improves their happiness index.

Background: Agile is being followed in most teams and organizations now. They are also doing retrospectives. But most of the time, the right set of impediments and improvements are not the output of these retrospective meetings as they have a fear that if they speak up it would impact them in appraisals.

Hypothesis: If we do not have managers in the retrospectives, then the team will open up with their impediments and improvements as they will feel safe.

Experiment: So, this probe talks about how removing managers from retrospectives impacts the team and how they bring the impediments/improvements and also question each other openly making each other accountable.

Background: Client was not trusting the new vendor team, not giving them authority for change movement to the next environment; this was causing delay in work as it was being done by a member from client’s side.

Hypothesis: Our hypothesis was that if this activity is done by team members, change will move to the next environment quickly, there will be no dependency and delay in delivery.

Experiment: We wanted to experiment it for two sprints (with pre and post measurements) and see if this is making delivery faster and the team is winning client’s trust.

Background: In organizations, teams are demotivated/demoralized and low work satisfaction due to multi-channel communication within the scrum team created due to logging/managing, fixing in-sprint defects.

Hypothesis: As per our hypothesis, if we stop logging in-sprint defects and focus on collective delivery the team will be more effective and will express less frustration which can be effectively measured by timeliness of delivery and improved quality.

Experiment: In one team of the organization, avoid logging in-sprint defects and create a more collaborative environment. Encourage the team to use techniques like Pair Programming and Test first approach before delivering any product backlog item. Keeping all other parameters constant measure parameters for the team before and after the experiment and compare the results.

Background: Teams are not aligned on how they are contributing in enhancing business value. In the long run this might lead to lack of motivation and disengagement in teams.

Hypothesis: If sprint goals will be aligned with business value, it will not only bring motivation in the team but customer delight as well.

Experiment: Reserve some time in sprints, where the team can spend time in brainstorming and coming up with ideas to add business value which further can be converted into features.

About the authors

Agile BOSSA nova JE

Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, trainer, author and speaker. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make agile transitions. She is experienced in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large, distributed mission-critical projects and has written about her experiences. She holds a M.A. Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education.

She is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served on the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian and European conferences, where she has also presented her work.

Agile BOSSA nova JB

John Buck is President of GovernanceAlive LLC, an international training and consulting organization headquartered Washington, DC, USA. The firm also offers mediation and meeting facilitation services. John has taught many training workshops on sociocracy and led many implementation projects for a variety of organizations, more recently expanding to include BOSSA nova. He serves on the boards of various other organizations. His research and development is ongoing. For example, he is working with Fujitsu’s advanced software lab to develop Weaver, software that helps meetings go better – in-person, online, and asynchronous.

John Buck has extensive management experience with government and corporations, including managing large information technology projects. His clients span the globe and include plastics manufacturers, schools, colleges and universities, long-term care facilities, co-housing groups, NGOs, food producers, and software companies. He holds an MA in Quantitative Sociology from The George Washington University.

We’d love to hear from you. Contact us at:

Agile BOSSA nova contact

Jutta
  www

John
  www