The Quick Brown Fox

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...