cOemerge , the profile of “Agile Leanovation”

COemerge, is an emerging company, driven by an “continuously emerging new ideas”  state of mind.  COemerge  will take from here and now toward new horizons some topics that I value : Support the enterprises transformation toward an operational set-up based on collaboration among individuals, and organizations focused on “enterprise”s mission” from a client ecosystem perspective and leverage of  each team valued skills .   cOemerge(s offer of services is under construction. This will stay its state as long as it will exists. Maybe its motto will be “Services (always) Under Improvement”.

Services Overview – under improvement

Help customers to deploy Lean Startup from mindset to operations is a focus activity.  The first Lean Startup implementation of cOemerge is its own service offer. I believe Lean Startup, beyond building “the right product instead of building it right”  is a powerful tool to build and validate a change plan. I’ve set up an approach “Lean Startup for Change“, because change mens innovation and innovation mean driving in a cloud uf uncertainty car changer. Enterprises are build around an activity led by a key goal, I like to call it ‘ the reason to exist” of that enterprise.

All activities from organizations to teams and individuals , should operate to support the key goal, as one of Lean fundamentals assess.   Coemerge propose to build a Product Ownership Approach . Stemmed  in SCRUM  definition of  Product Owner, the Product Ownership aims to make  teams aware of the key goal as being their own as a team and give coherence of their mission in respect with the key goal.  Offer a portfolio of labeled methods   to change, transform, be performant is not good enough., even if there are the most wonderful methods ever in that portfolio ( like Scrum, Lean, Kanban yjat have extraudinary good practices to apply).  Applying the principle of you can only change yourself” , COemerge, offers a panel of Facilitation for Transformation techniques taht aim to identify the intrinsic reasons of organizations to change. The objective of  the Facilitate the transformation” offer is to make that the “best practices worldwide” that cOemerge will help its customer implement ( Product Ownership, Lean, Lean StartUP, Agile, Kanban, Scrum…) become self-sustained by the organizations, teams of those organizations, individuals in those teams. If this make sense for you , tell it. If you think hiring cOemerge to help make sens, please contact

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10 ways you’ll probably f**k up your startup

A good example of how to reveal your “Unfair Advantage” – reveal your WHY you’re doing the business you’re doing

The Happy Startup School – A better way to build a startup

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Here I highlight some common early-stage mistakes I come across working closely with startup teams (and how you can avoid them). This post was first published on Medium.

1. No clear vision or purpose

This should be the starting point for any startup founder, but it’s often overlooked. Too often people dive straight into their shiny solution ideas without thinking about why they’re doing what they’re doing or considering the change they want to see in the world.

“Chase the vision not the money. The money will end up following you.” Tony Hsieh

Without a clear purpose, a startup can meander along without much momentum. And when things get tough (which they inevitably will), you won’t have much to pull you or your team through. Having a clear purpose adds some real meaning to your work, and a cause that people can rally around. It can also give your brand…

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Test Driven Business for Your Leanstartup Products Workshop : The Canvas

The Test Driven Business Workshop to create products that your customer will really love uses Lean Canvas defined by Ash Mayura as one of the artefacts. It’s a successful workshop , you may have some more details on the “Workshop & Tutorials” page , and I think it’s a great way to focus on building an MVP that matters beyond one’s assumptions and beliefs about customers innovations. The best way to prove it was to create a Lean Canvas of the workshop.

The credits of the initial idea of describing the workshop this way, goes to Wiktor Zolnowski .

The only drawback of this version is that “Key Metrics” section disappeared to leave space to a strange “key Activities” section. This may be a significant symptom reflecting that defining metrics is a difficult task, and you should face it. Because when you define metrics to verify your assumptions instead of taking key actions to force assumptions as realities , your mind will unfold surprising options for success.

Enjoy the first version ! Next will come with revenue stream and costs.

Related posts & resources

Test Driven Business for your Lean Startup Products

Test Driven Business featuring Lean Startup Products Tutorial

 

 

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A journey through our cognitive biases

This is  the video of the talk I’ve hosted at ALE2013.
We tend to “over-design” our decisions to avoid errors, still we are always wrong.
This is a talk that aims to discover ourselves a little bit more and become more tolerant with us and with the people next to us, by unveiling some of our cognitive biases we use to takes decisions.

The support of the talk is on SlideShare.

I’m happy to host this talk in French at Agile Tour 2013 Rennes on  and Agile Tour 2013 Lille 

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Test Driven Business Featuring Your Lean Startup Products

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 The innovators dilemma, as Clayton Christiansen call it in his remarkable book is to follow her vision through an unknown reality :  the one of its potential customers. Lean Startup suggest visionary people a shift in their attitude : our brilliant ideas are assumptions and assumptions need to be tested before they turn in proven evidence for success. Faster we test and detect dead ends for our ideas, less we waste ( time, investment, money, intelligence and passion). The key of testing early, avoid waste and adapt in Lean Startup is building a Minimum Viable Product in a Learning Loop ( a Design-Build-Measure-Adapt cycle). The Pretotyping Manifesto says that ideas have no values until they don’t turn into usable products. The Minimum Viable Product is the usable product that will help innovators find the true value of their innovation : he one their customers recognize. Having said that, innovators don’t fully solve their dilemma ; knowing how much “Minimum” is and what “Viable” really means is far from being simple. The Test Driven Business an original approach allowing to focus fast on key features that have a great impact ( the Minimum and the Viable), by starting the definition of your MVP with the design of data and measures you will want to collect when the product will be released before designing the features of your product.  cOemerge offers a one day workshop to help you quickly and cheaply turn your ideas into real products addressing the reality of your users.
You may want to check the next sessions on the Workshop and Tutorials page.

Licence Creative CommonsTest Driven Business de Oana Juncu is a  licence Creative Commons Attribution – Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 3.0 non transposé

You Should Come If …

  • You’re an entrepreneur, owner  of your startup seaking  for a reliable business model to describe your product while reducing  and investment constraints and dependency,
  • You’re a product manager willing to align your product strategy to the operational effectiffeness  while reducing R& D costs,
  • You’re a Strategic Marketing stakeholder and you are looking for fast tracks to validate market impact and top customer segments,
  • You’re a Lean Startup passionate and you are looking for an initiative to make get out of the building “safe and fast’ 😉

What Will You Learn

Dessin par Laurent Meurisse à Toulouse le 22 javier

  • Lean Startup fundamentals : the “Learning Loop” ( Lean Startup), the Minimum Viable Product, the importance of AAA Data and the path toward  Test Driven Business
  • How to design a measures driven product  (TEST DRIVEN) starting from product vision via  “brief coaching techniques” ( Solution Focused)  and the Business Canvas as defined by the  Lean Canvas
  • What kind of   impact of “test driven product design” on customer segment definition and product key features can be expected,
  • How can all observed or expected behaviors be measured via the “measurable phenomena clarification chain”.
  • How to use teh observation chain and design the data collection that meet the AAA ( Accessible, Auditable, Actionable)  starting from the set of   measures you’ll want to make.

Short versions of this workshop are described in french,   here

Price

The price of one day of workshop is 450 euros excluding VAT.  The maximum number of participants  is 24. participants maximum est de 24 personnes . If there are more than 12 participants, all the participants will have 10% off the price.  5% extra discount will be applied if the number of participants is beyond 18, so come with your friends and partners 🙂

Next Dates

 For next dates in English, contact us.

Registration and further information

You can register below:

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Storytelling Workshop : Lead change through storytelling

SunsetStoryteller12You may add interactivity to a presentation or create a hands-on experience of concepts hard to grasp through play-like activities help explain new notions effectively. And… is it enough to make these notions long-lasting and create a day-to-day usage? After have had a lot of fun playing a metapor game, what will I remember (except that I had fun)?  What we remember best are stories, and we lead our decisions by stories we know. Let’s take the example of Agile. There are a lot of urban legends about Agile : you may know “The legend of the useless manager”,  “The story of teams that do whatever they want”, “The legend of the project that never ends because  everything changes all the time”. Instead of letting unwelcome legends sneak, we can learn to tell the stories that we care for. Own the story. The workshop series show make people commit to your initiative or product using storytelling techniques, where your audience are the heroes of your story, not the  you want not the marionette.  Make  the story last.

Brain is narrative wired

Einstein  said that if you cannot explain something in a simple way, ut means that you didn’t understood it yourself. I like to rephrase it tis way : “If you cannot explain it to children, it means that you don’t understand it really”. Neurosciences have found that 70%  of what we learned domes from stories we were told. Our brain reacts better to stories than to a raw lecture of facts of concepts.  Did you ever experienced the void in your brain at the end of a training, conference or meeting where the only reliable answer to the question “What was it about?”  you could provide is “It was about 60 slides”? “Storytelling” (or “Business Narrative”) is a powerful way to engage change in organizations and teams and gain trust and ownership.  The most influential change agents are storytellers.

How does it work

The workshop proposes a framework to present topics, describe concepts, explain products or processes via building stories. This framework is based on  that come from writing techniques and help participants build their own story about the chosen topic.  At the end of the day, participants will have the necessary storytelling tools that will allow them to be clear and convincing to ignite commitment. Some of narrative techniques that will be used are :

  • Why it is important to be specific and why generic is flawless,
  • The importance to create protagonists and profile them
  • How to use the story frame (Problem/Goal/Path/Resolution)
  • How the set the stage and the importance of the context.
  • Put the problem in the context : The Status Quo
  • How to describe the goal owned by the characters
  • Describe the tension between the status quo and the goal
  • How to create the momentum that breaks the status quo ( the incident that makes the status quo no longer bearable)
  • How to use our need to predict “What’s next in a story”.
  • How to detect what is relevant and what can be perceived as “noise” in a story
  • How to use the “ticking clock” that paces the characters road to the outcome

… and many others…

Participants will form groups. Groups will present their own stories and the audience will evaluate teh difference of the message undertanding potential between the “Storytelling” format and the lecturer one.

You should come if…

  • … you are a change agent in your organization,
  • …if you need to share your vision about your product, your market strategy or the mission of your organisation,
  • …if you want to reinforce your teaching techniques with innovant practices,
  • …if you want to know more abour storytelling.

How much time is needed?

The workshop can be hold on a half-day or one day basis.  The one day workshop will allow participants to refine the stories and practice the techniques in a series of 4 to 5 iterations on a “feed-back & improve” basis.

What will you take away at the end of the sessions

You will own the story about the topic that you are in charge of  and you can tell it at work right the day after the workshop. You have had the chance to have tested the message of your story with the other participants at the workshop.

How much it costs

The workshop price is built on a model inspired by the “crowdfounding” principle.  The minimum number f participants is 6  at a price 375 €  per participant for a full day workshop or 225 € for a half day workshop. Prices exclude VAT.  If the number of participants exeeds 12 all registered participans will have 10% off the initial price.  For any extra 6 participants there will be 5% additional discount. The maximum number of participants is 25.

Dates

Next scheduled date in English, please contact us via the contact form below.

If this workshop looks interesting to you register here. And bring your colleagues 🙂

 

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The Play -Room an Active Change Agent

ABB-Flyer01The Sweet Rupture , the book of collected Agile Stories

Last November the collective book of 18 agile stories written by as many authors, an initiative of Laurent Sarrazin was published on lulu.com .  The English version of the book will be released soon, so English language speakers, stay tuned 🙂


The Play-room : the location of change, an actor of change

I was very happy and had a lot of fun to write the story of the “play-room” a place where people gather to create and actually will become the change to Agile, through interactive and creative activities such as Innovation Games and many more.  I propose here a brief extract of the “Play-Room Story”.

playroomeffectThe Environment of Change

“October2011. This wouldn’t have happen if it weren’t le the initiative to build a pragmatic guide of Agile practices for project teams. For geeks, fans of Doug Adams, that might have been « The Project Hitch-hiker’s Pragmatic Guide To Agile». The idea behind this initiative was to use the guide as « facilitation artifact  » for Agile adoption, allowing teams to start-up Agile projects.  A guide a kind of  « Oracle » to answer the troubling questions as  « How To Agile? » and « How will I be able to use this Agile staff in my day to day work? » or at least display “DON’T PANIC” in flashy letters if the previous questions were not answered. Obviously, it was a call to change and a legitimate will to find new practices and paths that help change acts and attitudes without loosing the references built by former processes and experience.

An adventure is made of a sequence of events that will eventually lead a number of characters searching to reach a common goal , to reach that goal, without knowing in advance the road to it.  Change is a always a jump into the darkness of Unknown. We may  strongly want control it, we won’t.  Therefore Change is an Adventure. As all adventures it has  characters and …  a scene.  When people change, their environment change, and that might be neither obvious nor very visible.

This  uncommon story has an uncommon main  character : the “central scene” where the “play of change takes place”.  What play ? The “Agile Transformation Adventure” one, initiated in October 2011, of course!  The  purpose of the “scene of  the Agile Transformation” was, and stays  even today,  to be an active  element of change and the lasting, present witness of that change. People that pass by just cannot ignore it. It blasts into your eyes. It will be called “the play room”.  To understand how things have happen , let’s go back to the beginning of the story.”

If this brief extract made you curious, if you think  you’re also a hero of a story alike and want to know more, follow the #AgileBlueBook hashtag and @rupturedouce to know when the integral version and other wonderful stories, written by fearless enthusiast Agilists will be available.

Until Then ,

Happy New Year 2013!

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