The Quick Brown Fox

Weird confession time? I used to be a little dubious about the long-term role of coaches and even of Scrum Masters or equivalent in an Agile organization. Once you’ve taught people the rules, what else is there to do? People are smart, and Agile methods as a rule aren’t complicated. I wondered—how could it possibly take more than a year or so to get this thing going? Then I spent several years observing an Agile transition from its initial push phase through to a kind of equilibrium, and I have gained a different understanding of the roles and the process in such a transition. I’m going to call these roles Primary Agile, because their work centers on fostering agility— and nothing else . Agile transitions can be thought of as something like a chemical reaction. The system starts in one state, and by adding some ingredients and – most importantly – energy, the system changes into a different state. For most organizations, that end state is going to be very different from whe...

Last year it seemed like I couldn't turn around without hearing someone talking about shu ha ri and its applicability to Scrum (it was usually Scrum, probably because other Agile techniques are less ceremonial). There's a good summary here . Although I don't practice martial arts, I do meditate and practice yoga, which I feel gives me a way toward understanding how the idea is supposed to work. When you first start practicing, after all, it takes all of your attention just to get into the poses or to glimpse a moment of still attentiveness. Why you're supposed to do a specific pose or follow a particular sequence won't fit in there until you've been doing it for a while, until the physical part has become automatic. That said, something about that metaphorical connection, about the idea of "just do the Scrum ceremonies as prescribed, and why will come later" didn't sit well with me. After a fair amount of rumination I've finally identified wh...

It's the end of another work week, and while the weather has been grim and blustery for days, things are very shiny indeed in my life right now -- two developments in particular. First, I'm going to be doing content management and editing for the Women in Agile organization. I'm extremely excited about this. I have long been hoping to find a venue where I can put my writing experience to work in support of the agile community, so this looks perfect. I've started reaching out to people who might be willing to add some content to the site while I think about what I might contribute myself -- tons of fun! I've also started taking a coaching class with the inimitable Damon Poole . It's a significant investment of time and money, but I'm trying to move in the direction of what causes me genuine excitement, and this is it. I took a short class with Damon prior to this and have encountered him at various Agile New England events, and I can recommend his traini...

I signed up for one of those WordPress "how to blog" classes in hopes that I will learn something and get a little bit more disciplined about this! The first assignment is to write a "who I am and why am I here" post. As good a place to start as any. (This blog isn't on WP but one of my other ones is, and this blog needs more attention, so.) Who am I, though? I'm a mid-life wanna-be career changer. I'm fascinated by everything I've come into contact with since my introduction to agile practices three years ago. I don't know if they can save the world, but they can certainly make us less miserable while we go about our work, which is a step in the right direction. I'm a very reserved person and don't share myself easily, which can come across as being detached or diffident, but is really just a reflection of the fact that I'm very introverted and have a degree of social anxiety; trust is a slow process for me. I have a family and a...

I just started re-reading How to Change the World , and was reminded that part of the cycle is "check." I planned my brown bag series, I did the sessions -- three times now -- so what's happened? Nothing. Attendance is non-zero, but there doesn't seem to be any particular level of interest, either. Although managers have indicated that they are interested in attending every time, they have not actually done so for any of the three sessions so. No follow-ups have been generated.  The next session on the schedule is a challenging topic: Improv games. This won't work if just a few people show up. Since one of my colleagues is leaving, there's an excellent chance of only one person showing up. I've tried to head this off by asking for volunteers up-front to work on it, and gotten no response. So I'm feeling a bit discouraged about this effort, and also am pondering what I could do to be more effective. I suspect that the answer is "do more marke...

This is the third session in my brown bag series. It's not an "agile" topic really, but it was one of the things people requested a session on.  I hoped that people would bring their questions and be willing to discuss them. There were four topics proposed, and some conversation although it was mostly people in the room. Here is the outline:  Day before, set up a Trello board as an option for people to raise topics and added a link to the invitation. Recruited a co-pilot who would watch the WebEx chat and bring up anything that came in through that.  Five minutes before the session, dial in to WebEx, start camera, ensure that screen sharing is set up and the projector is working.  Noon - official start time. 

This is a follow-up to my previous post about getting the offshore and local teams to work together. Armed with the results of my brainstorming session with the team, I met with a representative of the offshore group. I was prepared to bargain, to set limits, to look for a way to help them move forward without jeopardizing my team's sprint backlog.  What I heard, in the course of ten minutes, was that the offshore group only has 2-3 stories every sprint that might benefit from our attention, and that while they do occasionally get stuck, mostly they want up-front guidance and code reviews -- things that can easily be scheduled and shouldn't, if all goes well, take more than a few hours of team from one or two people in a given sprint.  That's what the big deal was? I thought as I jotted notes.  More often than not, I have found that problems are not complicated to resolve if people just take ten minutes to discuss the situation.  

This week something unusual happened: two different people who are not on my team approached to ask for help with impediments. Removing impediments is, of course, one of the chief responsibilities of a Scrum Master. We're supposed to be way-smoothers, facilitating the team's work. One issue was very straight-forward, and was actually given to me because it seemed to involve a piece of documentation (my other job); my boss wasn't sure what the complaint was about or what needed to be done to resolve it. I talked to the Scrum Master who had raised the impediment, together we talked to one of the members of the team affected, and confirmed that the issue had already been automated away and could be closed. Easy-peasy. The other item is ongoing, and I want to document it here, because it's the kind of thorny recurring problem that can't be easily resolved. It has to do with collaboration between one of the local teams and the offshore group. HQ is farming out more a...

The second in my "brown bag" series at work wasn't really a brown bag at all. Given the expansive possibilities in the topic and limited time in which to work with them, I decided to do this one as a self-guided installation. I had a lot of fun researching and designing the materials for this one! I divided the room into three stations: Drive Find Your Why Management 3.0  Each station had a large sticky note on which I wrote out some highlights of that particular approach to motivation, an interactive portion, and at least one printed takeaway. For Drive I made up a bunch of true/false questions; for Find Your Why there was a thing to match the company to their public mission statement, and for Management 3.0 I printed out a bunch of Moving Motivators card sets.  As it happens, hardly anybody came, because we're updating Jira this weekend and there was a meeting scheduled about that which conflicted with mine. I admit that this was frustrating; motivation...

I thought it might be useful to record more details about the session I did on this subject. Not least because I might want to do it again someday.

After 2 1/2 years of doing the job on a part-time basis, yesterday I had my first interview for a Scrum Master position. I did not get the job -- I didn't particularly expect to, my first time out -- but it was an interesting experience. At least now I know what kind of questions people tend to ask prospective Scrum Masters, and they gave me some feedback on my interview style, which I suppose might be useful. There were a lot of, "Tell us about a time when you solved a problem" style questions, which I more or less expected. There were some very specific questions posed about their company and their team situation, some which I was able to address better than others. There were a lot  of questions about how I ended up in Scrum from tech writing, which on the one hand is obviously a common reaction to my resume, and on the other hand started to annoy me by the end of the afternoon -- not least because it looked like the nine people I spoke to had not coordinated at all....

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. ...

Following on the heels of my spring cleaning, I thought it might be interesting to collect everything I've learned in the past few years in one place -- sort of how far have I come, and what do I still want to add? What's on my "theory" list that I could try out soon? We'll start with the easily quantified, certifications: Certified Scrum Master Certified Scrum Product Owner Certified Professional - Agile Coaching Games and techniques I have used, in no particular order:  Lean coffee Good/bad/improve retrospective ("standard") 4L retrospective Sailboat retrospective Sprint as movie title retrospective Moving Motivators Blind drawing Core Protocols - Check-in, Decider, Perfection Game Appreciation Circle End with/start with improv game Circles and soup Journey line Kanban Active listening I have good theoretical understanding or have participated, but haven't facilitated in a work environment:  Yarn Ball game Constella...

In the wake of the 2019 Agile Games/Mob Programming conferences, I spent some of today locating and going through old notes -- taking inventory, after a fashion, and getting rid of things that are no longer needed. It was a little surprising, just how many things I can say that I know about at this point, or at least know enough about to know where to look for more information. Now to figure out how to get the teams to ask for things.

Sometimes everything comes together. I am currently reading Personal Kanban . I had a work-from-home day today, and I had a million small tasks that needed to get done before the kids got home from school and destroyed my quiet space -- documents to write, appointments to make, meetings to attend, and a few household chores (since the one downside of working from home is that I don't get much exercise, throwing a load of laundry in every once in a while at least means I got up and went downstairs). It felt like a lot. Even if I remembered all of it, how was I going to get all of that done?! I followed the recommendation in the book and wrote everything out on sticky notes. Some things, like the meetings, had to be done at a particular time. Calling to make appointments was better not attempted during lunch hour. I wanted to get my documents out for review as early in the day as possible so people had time to look at them. A few minutes on Duolingo would make for a nice afternoo...

A while back my perusal of Management 3.0 posts led me to an exercise called Moving Motivators . I did it by myself and thought it was interesting, and I've been wanting to try more exploratory kinds of activities with my team in our retrospectives. I thought this might be a good one, but I was determined to start small. We had an hour set aside for the entire retro, and I thought ten minutes was a good slice for something like this while still letting us talk about the sprint. This an existing team that has had several members join recently, one of whom has previous experience with this same group but has been on a different team for a long while now, and two who do not. So I thought this might be both fun and useful as an introduction of sorts. I printed out a bunch of card sets and asked everyone to spend a few minutes sorting them. (Mine had changed even since the last time I did the exercise.) Curious though I was about everyone on the team, I had them pair up and spend a ...

Today I got a classic Scrum Master sort of situation: one of the teams wanted me to create forward sprints in Jira so they could plan ahead. That's not how Scrum works, I replied. But all of the other teams are doing it.  Well that's weird.  I don't work with those other teams, so I can't comment on why they might be doing this. I could, however, take the opportunity to explain why we don't  (as a rule) do this: because the foreseeable future isn't very far at all. We have two-week sprints here, and I don't think I have ever, in two and a half years, seen the backlog for an ongoing sprint go unchanged. If we can't even look ahead two weeks to figure out what it is we need to do, why on earth would we try to look out farther than that? What a colossal waste of time. For the record, I anticipate being overruled on this by product management, but at least I did make the argument.