Ardita Karaj' Agility Narrative about bamboo and the agile organization

Ardi learned Agile & fell in love with products working with small teams in a startup and a 3D product company. After this, she became an Agile coach, exploring agile in government, through consulting assignments and in large financial services.  She has impacted many in the Toronto area as a community leader, supporting and running meetups. 

For Ardi, Agile is like bamboo - a living organism, flexible and strong. It's sustainable and green. It grows and evolves.  In her agility narrative, the protagonist is the organization that needs to fully adopt  agile. She sees herself as an advisor helping this happen, understanding how hard structural change is, especially when it involves adapting governance. 

The theme of the narrative is continuous delivery with sustainability and a strong focus on customer.  She reminds us to know frameworks but apply as it makes sense. To learn from challengers.  And to take the opportunity with agile as survival, and/or growth could be at stake. 

For leaders and coaches, she calls for more courage to do what it is right and consider the human side to increase employee engagement.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcoming Ardita to The Agility Narratives Podcast
• 1:40 The definition of Agile - Uber, Pilates, and Bamboo
• 3:32 First job while at university with a startup - a very agile organic way of working
• 4:28 3D Product company in Canada - fell in love with product - this is where agile made sense to me
• 7:47 The desire to make our customers shine - collaboration just worked
• 9:30 Back to Waterfall - then back to Agile - being transformed!
• 11:12 Knowing what good looked like - launched myself as an Agile Coach & community builder
• 13:41 Agile practices in context of government, consulting, large financial services and construction.
• 15:19 Framing product v project as a context for Agile
• 17:11 Let's start on your agility narrative - I see myself as an advisor - across the delivery lifecycle
• 21:55 Who's the protagonist? The whole organization (Bamboo)
• 22:55 What the underlying constraints to moving to the delivery model? Discussion of resistance to structure and governance change
• 26:28 We need more courage from leader to state what not's spoken
• 29:11 Ardi's philosophy on frameworks
• 31:42 Ardi's theme for The Agility Narrative - Continuous Delivery in a sustainable way - never forgot you exist for the customer
• 32:34 No villains in Ardi's narrative - there is a creator, a challenger, and a coach...
• 33:55 What's at stake for clients? Survival, adapting to new ways, and growth to become the disruptor
• 37:42 What's your call to action? Be courageous - Focus attention, our intention and our metrics on the change we want to see on a larger scale
• 39:09 Thank you