Chris McDermott
Independent Lean Agile Coach, Founder of Lea Agile Scotland and Lean Agile Glasgow
Chris is an independent Lean Agile Coach, founder of Lean Agile Scotland and Lean Agile Glasgow and knows enough about most things under the Lean Agile banner to be both effective and dangerous all in one session.
He caught the Agile bug in 2003 when, as a developer, he borrowed his brother-in-law’s copy of XP Explained (which he foolishly returned). In around 2010 he found Lean, ToC and stumbled across Systems Thinking. This led to founding the Lean Agile Scotland conference in a desire to bring together lots of smart people to learn from and to introduce others in Scotland to these ideas. In the past few years his interest in Complexity Theory has grown. His head is now a tangled mess of all of the things he’s learned in the last 15 years which he suspects it will take the next 15 years to make sense of. He intends to offload some of that sensemaking burden on you.
Maturity Mapping: Focus Your Improvement Energy on What Matters To You
When we look to improve our teams or our organisations we often reach for a maturity model. We’ll start with an assessment that grades us and then offers a recipe to follow to greatness. It might tell us we don’t visualise well enough or our stories aren’t perfectly formed and what we should do to get better but does that really help us? Does it promote continuous learning and does it help us solve the real problems we are facing.
One of the issues with the maturity models we often use is they are context free. They don’t understand the environment, the challenges and the specific needs we have in our context.
In this workshop Chris will explore an alternative, Maturity Mapping, using Wardley Maps and Cynefin, that allows you to develop situational awareness and build a shared understanding of the unique challenges you face and where you should focus your improvement efforts.
When we look to improve our teams or our organisations we often reach for a maturity model. We’ll start with an assessment that grades us and then offers a recipe to follow to greatness. It might tell us we don’t visualise well enough or our stories aren’t perfectly formed and what we should do to get better but does that really help us? Does it promote continuous learning and does it help us solve the real problems we are facing.
One of the issues with the maturity models we often use is they are context free. They don’t understand the environment, the challenges and the specific needs we have in our context.
In this workshop Chris will explore an alternative, Maturity Mapping, using Wardley Maps and Cynefin, that allows you to develop situational awareness and build a shared understanding of the unique challenges you face and where you should focus your improvement efforts.