Jason Schreuder
Agile Coach
Jason is a lean-agile coach and trainer from Apex, North Carolina. He has a true passion for coaching and facilitation around business process enablement, organizational design and dynamic teaming to help organizations sense and respond to future challenges. Jason has a diverse background of leadership, coaching, facilitation, and team-building skills gained from years in the military and the engineering/technology industry. He works with leaders at all levels and teams of all types to innovate and collaborate better, deliver more effectively, and continuously improve. Jason engages with practical approach to coaching that challenges traditional views of management, the way work works, and what it means to be a leader in the ever-changing and complex global economy. You can follow Jason’s musings and learn more about him at iterationsofjason.com.
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Area of Expertise
Now You’re Asking for it! A Culture of Continuous Feedback
Agile has feedback loops on the products we build, and on the process we use to do it, but people feedback is really hard! Studies have shown that people have a negative physiological reaction to just the thought of having to give or receive feedback. But are we conditioned to be terrible at feedback from our experiences in traditional work environments, with all of their power dynamics and political undercurrents? In this talk, we will explore the science behind giving and receiving feedback, and how you can create a culture where everyone actually asks for feedback, continually, and celebrates it as a cultural norm. Even the best agilists struggle working with teams on safety, trust, and feedback. This is a crucial leadership skill, and leaders at all levels should be well versed in this topic.
Bullsh*t Work, and What to do When You Discover It
One of the biggest challenges for leaders in organizations adopting agile ways of working is all the problems that agile uncovers. With tight feedback loops on product, process, and people, along with a burgeoning culture of speaking truth to power and telling it like it is, teams start to uncover all sorts of issues. All of this organizational dysfunction that has been swept under the rug for many years is finally seeing the light of day! Your teams are starting call out departments, process, and functions that seem to serve the primary purpose of slowing down delivery. The bureaucratic trappings of a complex organization, also known as bullsh*t work, is designed to control and “process risk away.” This is now one of the biggest challenges for your organization to overcome, and how you as a leader can add real value to your new agile teams.
From Short-Term Value to Customer Centrism: A Revolution in Management
The goal of the firm, as put forth by many business schools that still ascribe to the Michael Porter way of thinking defined in the 1980s, is to maximize short-term stakeholder value. This is “the biggest idea in business” and has defined not only the way organizations are built, its leaders are incentivized, and the way work works in many companies today. It is also the worst idea, denounced by many responsive, forward thinking CEOs and management thought leaders. Stephen Denning, in his inspiring 2013 article in Forbes describes a Revolution in Management in which many adaptive, responsive, and agile firms fundamentally think differently about their approach to customers, the concept of value, and how they design and support organizations. We now see a focus on: delighting customers profitably, enabling self-organized teams and networks, collaboration and interactive communication, and iterative and incremental work. In this talk I will explore the mindset shift, systems thinking, organizational development, and coaching approaches need to nurture and support the growth of new leaders who can leverage these emerging realities.
Minimum Viable Governance: How an Agile PMO Can Add Value to your Organization
In an an Agile transformation, quite often the Project/Program Management Office (PMO) is seen as antithetical to Agile methods. Agile practitioners see the PMO as a bloated, bureaucratic central hub of command and control. Moreover, teams and managers often throw up their hands and say “we are Agile now, so we don’t plan” and essentially only live two weeks at a time. Now add scaling frameworks and few coaches, and the rest will just work itself out, right? Aaaaand . . things fall apart. Organizations are not simply a container of autonomous teams. They require coordination and governance with a minimum viable structure (MVS). There are some tried and true ways to partner and collaborate with the PMO. By leveraging the political prowess of project managers and bringing product leadership and technology together, we can shift from managing projects to product discovery and delivery.