The Quick Brown Fox

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.

I've had a very nice vacation, saw a lot of family. Still thinking about what I want 2019 to look like, where I want to put my energy. I do know that I want it to be a much more analog year. I feel like things have gotten a little out of whack that way for me.

Missed quite a few weeks here -- been putting my energy into a different project for a while as frustration becomes a challenge here. These things tend to go in cycles.