Work Different

Howdy – i am being chaotic a bit and publishing unedited notes. See how it goes. 🙂

In “Becoming Agile in an Imperfect World” as first session. So many sessions I want to attend – so difficult to decide. So many folks love to talk with for hours. Ran into Alistair Cockburn and Ghennipher Weeks on the way in; great breakfast conversation with strangers.

10am: Looking at chart in this session talking about initial spike of happiness, then resistance and chaos. We “just need to know have tools to get out of it.”. Must do homework upfront and work on organizational impediments like no collaboration, like too many concurrent projects and multi- tasking.

(Thinking of Dept. Defense as the ultimate in h2ofall but they here!)

11:30 Pick shorter projects, pick lower priority projects so comfortable if don’t succeed. (But doubting on “agile lifecycle” a little. They are not advising purity. )

Customers may derail agile adoption. (Should they be exposed to sausage-making?)

ikiwisi – I’ll know it when I see it

Standardizing processes a demand? Just standardize values and principles.

For roll-outs: Iterate into small VALUE based increments. Collaborative, evolutionary, integrated, adaptive, encompassing. Embrace change to deliver customer value, plan and deliver often, human centric, excellent work, collaboration with business people.

Have retrospectives every month.

Modeled on the Tipping Point.

1 collaborative – enhancing communication and collaboration.

When people get the value they get they rituals.

11:54 implementing in fortune 20 company – Ahmed Sidkey mentions a focus NOT on practices but just on collaboration. Main issue is “we think we know” in development. And business people think ” well they did not ask me.”. People don’t talk to each other.

12 pm How does this relate to our companies. My thought – is there a roll for some design upfront? Purists may object…

On this chart see “Cockburn” level 2 and 3 people? Means ha and ri? For third iteration.

Mindset surveys – I think some people are not that interested in process. They just want to do the work. Some process improvement stuff may seem nerdy to these people. Sometimes awareness comes across as nerdy: hyper self focused and not other-aware. Low social skill.

To combat?

Inspire people. – make it real and tangible.

1 make a specific goal
adoption schedule specific
don’t try to achieve all benefits immediately
Reduce WIP – so people dont waste time re- orienting
2 make it personal – benefits financial
Don’t be pie in sky
3 shape path make it easier
( for people who think we are being nerdy – how to handle?)

Prioritize the workstream.

Losing job security if you give up command and control.

At the end collected feedback. Inspect and Adapt!

Tags: Agile

This entry was posted on August 8, 2011 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Agile, Alistair Cockburn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.