5 + 1 Questions to...Justyna Pindel

Justyna Pindel says "she's not busy, just curious." She is together with Paul Klipp the driving force behind the Agile Book Club where they review each a different Agile book and interview great authors.

Justyna is also the founder of ACE Conf. ACE! is the largest regional conference of its kind in Central Europe on Agile Software Development and Product Design & Management.

And she's also an international trainer and helping women get access to certified Agile training. If that's not being busy?

1.What is Agile or the Agile Mindset for you?

It is an ability to step out of your ego. Being the change that we want to see in an organization. Living by the values that we are trying to inject in others. But the essential element for me is to believe in people.

2. What’s your favorite tool or method you use during your coaching?

A wall. It’s cheap. Most companies have more than one. Visualization of the knowledge work is the first step in order to manage it and make sure we do the right things at the right time. It is also one of the vital elements of company culture when it comes to transparency. But the most important for me is the aspect of how easy is to collect all the flow metrics by just using a physical Kanban board with your teams. It’s really not rocket science to collect data that we all trust because we were there when we gathered it.

On a side note, I am a huge fan of learning by experience using Accelerated Learning approach and Training From The Back of The Room.

3. What book or website would you recommend?

• Rethinking Agile by Klaus Leopold
• When will it be done by Daniel Vacanti
• Fixing Your Scrum by Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller

4. What is essential for you during an Agile transformation?

1. Why do we do it: what we would like to accomplish as an organization.
2. Who is doing it: is it another team transformation? Or everyone is on board and we actually do the true Transformation.
3. How do we do it: what are the first experiments that we are going to run.

However, when I give it a bit more thought, I think the crucial element for success is to make sure that a transformation is across the organization and that it’s not leading to sub-optimization.

5. What is 1 Aspect of coaching Agile teams that you like the most?

Seeing teams make intelligent decisions instead of being in a firefighters’ mood.

+1. What was the trigger to start the Agile Book Club?

Paul Klipp. He is the trigger of most of the things that we do that I would never ever even think of. I can’t express how lucky I am for having such a great business partner and mentor. 

5 + 1 Questions to... is an initiative by Wouter Gheysen, founder of Beyond Business Agility, a Business Agility training and coaching company providing Scrum Training, Scaled Agile Framework training and training on business agility related topics like Team dynamics, Visualisation, Process Efficiency and many more.

More info: www.beyondbusinessagility.com