The 90 Day Mark

Well, today marks my 3 month anniversary of my new job at kCura. It’s been great so far, and I thought I’d share my experiences getting integrated into my new role.

When I joined, kCura already had Scrum in place. We do three month releases (recently up from two) but we do two week sprints – so six of those per release. We currently have nine teams – eight using Scrum and one using Kanban. Our teams are co-located and cross-functional; we use physical task boards. We use index cards for user stories and color-coded sticky notes for tasks. We plan releases using points and sprints using capacity in hours (eventually we will use points). We have release and sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews and retrospectives. When I joined as an Agile Coach and ScrumMaster, the Scrum framework was already in place and being used robustly.

That has made integrating into this company really easy. I joined during the second sprint of the last release, so I shadowed the other Agile Coach (and my manager) Jeff Steinberg, who put all of this in place. I learned how he was interacting with the teams, what he provided for them, how he coached them, and how he saw the role. Then, at the end of the release, I was able to take over as ScrumMaster for three of the teams.

Once I was with the teams, I took over just as he had, following the same procedures and flow. With a new person on their teams, they didn’t need me to come in and make big changes. I just observed, followed the process, and helped. I was able to coach one team that was struggling to complete their stories, to be able to complete their work within the sprint (they just needed some guidance on being more realistic about their commitment). I spent the next whole release in this mode – still learning, getting to know people, learning more about how the release process works, the software, etc.

Now we are gearing up for the next release, and I feel very good about the next three months. I am ready to do more coaching – encouraging teams to think about the agile principles behind the practices, cultivating even more of a culture of continuous improvement, and encouraging them to become ever higher performing – releasing the highest value software with very high quality – each and every sprint. My goal is to post again about this at the end of each release. Cheers!

Golden Circle of Agile Transformation

Today at Agile 2011 I attended a session with Jean Tabaka, an Agile Fellow at Rally, entitled ‘The Golden Circles of Agile Transformation’. I really enjoyed this session. In it, Jean challenged us to think beyond the individual practices we are doing with our teams – standups and sprint reviews in Scrum, pair programming and continuous integration with XP, etc. She led us through determining what our ‘book of guidelines’ is: what are the guiding principles that we use to tell whether the practices we are using are effective and when we need to add, modify, or remove any of them. The Golden Circle refers to concentric circles with ‘What’ (the practices), ‘How’ (how we know whether they are working and when to change them) and the ‘Why’ of using Agile.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately as well. I feel that it is so critical to really develop high performing teams and high performing organizations, to go beyond doing Agile practices by rote and to use them because they support principles and values that matter to us.

At first, I thought perhaps she was referring just to the 12 Agile Principles behind the Agile Manifesto. Instead, in addition to those she suggested considering guidelines from Lean as well:

1. Eliminate waste
2. Amplify learning
3. Decide as late as possible
4. Deliver as fast as possible
5. Empower the team
6. Build integrity in
7. See the whole

Also, from Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, Complexity Theory, Cynefin. This gave me a few new avenues to research and absorb. The point is, we want to continuously improve and adapt, and the guidelines offer areas for us to consider in making choices about what improvements will either help solve the problem at hand, or make us even more high performing and satisfied in our work.

During the last bit, Jean challenged us to answer the question of ‘Why’ we do Agile. As she said, the ‘Why’ should a BHAG – a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or a Social Purpose, that kind of thing. Interestingly, it was very very difficult for most people to come up with a good answer to that question, and she gave us several minutes to reflect on it. I admit that I struggled with this question as well. I was reminded of a talk that Globant CTO Guibert Englebienne gave while I was at Orbitz, where he said that in his experience, technologists need to feel that what they are doing serves some purpose higher than making money (which is mostly for someone else anyway). I can relate to that. Interestingly, Rally’s higher purpose is to transform the software industry into a zero carbon footprint industry, starting with themselves. Go Rally.

3-2-1 Blastoff

What a packed day. Today was the first full day of the Agile 2011 conference. I attended sessions on how to use Non-violent communication which was very interesting. This session provided some basic tools to think about the basic needs that all humans have, and how to take a coaching problem and use the analysis of what we need as humans to understand it from different angles. It also taught us how to separate observation from (often negative) evaluation, and how to apply that back to people’s feelings. If you can understand that, you can often unlock potential means of more effective coaching. Lastly, we did some exercises to consider what our own needs are as coaches – that tends to get lost in the day-to-day work of servant leadership to our teams but it is important to know and ground ourselves in order to be effective coaches for them.

In the afternoon, I attended Christopher Avery’s session called “Coaching Success: Getting People to Take Responsibility & Demonstrate Ownership” where he taught research on the Responsibility Process and how to practice it. That was pretty interesting from a psychological standpoint, but I feel like I need to read more about it to be able to really absorb it. Luckily, Christopher has more about this on his website at www.christopheravery.com.

Those two sessions took up the bulk of the day. At 5pm, they held a ‘Reunion’ session for the creation of the Agile Manifesto, which was basically a Q&A session to 15 of the 17 original authors. The session was humorous and pretty interesting as the authors basically recalled the meeting they had here in Salt Lake City 10 years ago where they drafted the manifesto.

Finally, the night ended with a reception – dinner, drinks and socializing. It’s been fun so far, I’m really looking forward to tomorrow and the rest of the week.

Acceptance Tests – The Writing’s on the Wall

I came across this photo on Tom Perry’s Agile Testing Blog.

The thing I like about it is the additional column for “Tests Spec’d” before progress on the tasks begins.

I think it would be cool to have a checkbox to mark that the acceptance tests had been written as an indicator that development can begin.

Agile 2011 Here I Come

I am ridiculously excited about the Agile 2011 conference in Salt Lake City next week. The last time I was able to attend was in Toronto in 2008. At that time, I was a newly converted amateur Agilista, having just earned my SCM the previous year, and doing some experimentation with my then-team, before the company I was working for had even given much thought to using an Agile framework like Scrum.

Now, things are a bit different. I’m working professionally as an ScrumMaster and Agile Coach, and feeling really excited to be able to use the next week to learn, contribute, and network among peers as a professional Agilista. Woohoo!!!

My plan is to post updates, notes and photos here on my blog, so stay tuned.