
COVID-19 and Agility - Tom Fox
04/28/20 • 34 min
The world is in a state of significant flux. If there was ever a time when individuals, corporations and society as a whole needed agility, it's now. In this episode Tom Fox, Manager of the Agile Transformation Office at Amway, speaks on the impacts of COVID-19. His words are his own and do not represent the position of Amway as a company, but as you'll hear, they speak admirably of the culture at Amway.
- How does "Work from home" affect the Agile Transformation?
- How do you coach teams when you're completely distributed?
- What are we learning from this?
If you have specific questions, contact Tom Fox.
The world is in a state of significant flux. If there was ever a time when individuals, corporations and society as a whole needed agility, it's now. In this episode Tom Fox, Manager of the Agile Transformation Office at Amway, speaks on the impacts of COVID-19. His words are his own and do not represent the position of Amway as a company, but as you'll hear, they speak admirably of the culture at Amway.
- How does "Work from home" affect the Agile Transformation?
- How do you coach teams when you're completely distributed?
- What are we learning from this?
If you have specific questions, contact Tom Fox.
Previous Episode

Agility is a requirement to survive and thrive - Tina Abdoo
Tina Abdoo, VP at Amway shares how agile is a way to thrive in an ever-changing marketplace.
Why it matters to a leader
- Your team is happier!
- Your team is more stable, predictable and autonomous, so you can have higher confidence in the things you commit to.
Challenges you can expect during transformation
- You will experience ups, downs, forward momentum, back sliding and forward progress again. Persevere.
- The myth that we don't need KPI's and metrics anymore - we do, they're just different.
- Fear of measurement (aka metrics) leading to judgment
Common mistakes leaders make
- Leaders and managers trying to fix things for the team - getting in to the details and providing the answers of "do it this way" instead of contributing their idea as an option - not the only way.
- We forget that this is a cultural movement. Closely tied to a growth mindset, we must cange the way people think about and see their work.
Next Episode

Why Agile Fails - Lee Wiesehuegel
Coach Lee tells us "why agile fails" at scale and what needs to be addressed to reduce the chances of it happening to you and your organization. Most of us know that Agile is easy and effective on a single team, but those of us in the business of Agile Transformation are not working with single teams - we're working with large corporations, multiple departments, external service providers and dozens upon dozens of teams.
So how do you avoid failure with agile at scale?
3 key elements of agile at scale
- Teams
- Backlogs
- Working Tested "Stuff" (software, product, etc.)
3 areas that need to change
- Structure (of the teams and their relationships to one another)
- Governance (who makes decisions, how they are made, when they are made)
- Metrics (what we measure and how we respond to what those measures are telling us)
Questions? Email me or Lee at
[email protected]
[email protected]
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