Writing

Translating Jurgen Appelo

The book is about change management in organizations, the same subject I had been working on since Gameloft. The Spanish edition, Cómo cambiar el mundo: Gestión del cambio 3.0, was published in 2012.

Project dashboards in agile environments

A year earlier, in 2011, I had published Agile Project Dashboards with the Scrum Alliance, in English, and its Spanish version, Tableros de Proyecto en entornos Ágiles. It is a short text on project dashboards for agile teams. I wrote it while taking the method from Gameloft to a multinational.

Kanban outside IT

In 2012 I presented Beyond IT: Implementing Kanban in Staff Recruitment & Selection processes at Lean Kanban Southern Europe, in Madrid. The talk and the paper document the work with a five-person Human Resources team at Thomson Reuters, which recovered control of its recruitment process with a deliberately simple board.

Published pieces

Scrum in 2009, agents in 2025

In 2009 I arrived at Gameloft with a team of twelve people that was not working. I proposed Scrum when almost no company in Argentina used it, and the first reaction was not technical, it was human. Some felt the method took control away from them, some believed it was a fad that would pass, and some simply did not want to change a way of working they knew. I did not convince anyone with a presentation. I started with the ones who were curious, let the results speak, and went after the ones who resisted most one at a time. Over time the team became the best in the company and the method spread to more than eighty people. At Thomson Reuters I saw the same cycle again, with more people and in more countries.

Today I work in programs of hundreds of people adopting AI agents across the full software lifecycle, and I recognize every one of those reactions. The names change, the emotions do not. The developer who in 2009 said “this will not work with our processes and the way we do things” today says “an agent cannot understand the complexity of our systems or produce maintainable code”. The leader who feared losing detailed planning today fears losing control over what gets written. The first to try are still few, those who join later still need to see evidence, and those who resist most still need a one-to-one conversation, not a mandate.

What is different is the scale, and that is not a detail. Scrum changed how a team organized its work; the code was still written by the same people, in the same way. Agents change who writes the code, how it is reviewed, how it is tested, how it is documented and how it is released. They touch requirements, planning, implementation, testing and release at the same time, and they also touch roles that until now looked at development from the outside. The disruption is not of one process but of all of them at once, and the apprehension is proportional.

That is why I believe the hardest part of this adoption is not the technology. Models improve every few months; an organization’s capacity to go through a change does not. What I learned fifteen years ago is that change settles in team by team and person by person, and that it holds when people see they work better, not when they are told to.

I am developing this subject in a longer note. In the meantime, this is the short version.