The Quick Brown Fox

I did my brown bag session today. In the end 10 people showed up for an exercise on how to create a continual improvement plan. I thought that was pretty good for a pilot. A 45 minute timebox made for a bit of a breakneck pace, and the most common piece of feedback afterward was that more time would have been nice, but people seemed engaged throughout, and overall the comments were positive. The next challenge of course is on how to follow this up with another good topic. Motivation was one that got a lot of interest, although a bit more challenging to design a class around.

Continuing the work I started with my skills inventory a few weeks ago, last weekend I ordered a copy of Training from the Back of the Room.  Today I sent out invites for the first of what I hope will be a series of brown bag sessions on agile topics here at my company. The most popular topic was continual improvement, so that's going to be the focus of the first one. There's a real challenge in crystallizing this topic down to 45 minutes and making it interactive, but I'm enjoying the hell out of planning it, and looking forward to seeing what can be made better the next time we do it.

I'm excited to have gotten any response at all to my survey on learning more about agile topics. If this goes well, it would be a huge step in the direction I feel like I ought to be moving my career. Everyday hurdles remain, however. Middle management came in to talk to the team today, at my request, to try to clarify the roadmap for the immediate future. The upshot is: more things are going to change. Two of our current team members are expected to move to a new team that's supposed to start up next month; one of the others didn't quite jump up yelling, "Can I go, too?!" on hearing this, but it was a close thing. Another is currently being loaned out to yet another team, and we don't know if or when they'll be coming back. Same old, same old, but so frustrating.

For today's retrospective I took a slightly different tack. We've been reverting to the "standard" good/bad/improve format lately, and it doesn't seem to have been very effective. Today I kept the perspective firmly on concrete future actions, asking the team to come up with things they could do tomorrow  to make things better. I also tried out the 1/2/4/all (we only had four today) format that got so much exercise at the Agile Games last year. Most of the concerns fell into a couple of affinity areas, and the top one had to do with the clarity and availability of requirements. I have therefore scheduled a quick meeting with the product owner team (yeah, there's more than one, which is... a problem) for tomorrow afternoon, and am also going to try a little experiment during sprint planning. It's going to be a little excruciating during the meeting, but I'm hoping that it will drive home the point that we have been shortchanging our grooming process.