Archive for the ‘Agile’ Category

#agileday2011 just do what works / @agile umpire

September 27, 2011

Quick notes on talk by George McMonigle and Matthew Groner which I enjoyed. Ironically had *just* said with Anupam Kundu Of Thoughtworks about how at times presenters have gotten too far from the actual work. These guys were talking, no blemishes hidden, about what had worked for em, what they could do berthed.

Had a great slide:

In order to….
We used to…
But now we…

For example:
In order to measure performance we used to focus on burndowns but now we focus on story points.

Agile effectiveness over orthodoxy.

#agileday2011 David Hussman raw notes / #agile

September 27, 2011

NOTES

Compares Ward Cunningham to Frank Zappa ( “Shut up and Play Your Guitar” )

Logging 10,000 hours. Improvising again and again. Exploring. Being Fearless.

Ward’s approach is if you have things you want to manifest:

Idea – to make it manifest, need:
– process
– community
– tools

Breaking stuff is not the problem; leaving it broken is the problem.

XP: put velocity into XP to give slack to think. Now we are not doing that. We are just trying to go faster. Deming.

Integration (software) is a learning inhibitor. “The people who went to Snowbird and signed manifest were the people who showed up” – Martin Fowler

In the old days he just called “agile” “working together” – people are too divorced from seeing people use or experience their end product.

Next shift is measuring Outputs to outcomes.

Burn-up: discovery vs delivery
– Shifted to burn-up chart because it shows how much have we discovered against how much delivered. When discovery is not anonymous you can learn from it.

Chartering: big picture creator
– where you are going and how you get there

Acceptance tests: value clarifier
Continuous integration: stop waiting

Dogma emergence.
Crusaders have taken the place of evangelists – and Scrum-but tests – originally was what practices were missing; became a label, an insult.

Example of rolling out two practices only – that was a successful approach.

Moral of pig/chicken story is you die if you are committed ?! Shutting people up doesn’t work with grown-ups. Reminds of Orwell’s Animal Farm and Politics and the English Language.

Comparative learning – from this to that.

Fibbonacci series: don’t get hung up on the tools – it’s not about the shift, it’s about people trying to learn to estimate.

Dude’s Law: value = why/how

Story template was about someone doing something of value – people try to force things into the story template they should not.

Get rid of stuff that doesn’t help you learn. Wishes we would call “test-driven design”

If someone says “you should…” answer “why?” Moving from product owner to product ownership.

Talks about a pacemaker project and how stories become about value. No product owner, one throat to choke. Is stunned how addicted to people’s addiction to it. Read Kent Beck’s paper on “all one team.”

Why of product owner is to get a single voice. Prod owners – need to know where we’re going so don’t end up with legacy software for tomorrow.

See his pragmatic programmers video series.

Talked about story mapping. Who= personnas; what and how.

Take what user is trying to accomplish and drive through. Used Best Buy team example.

If you choose to use words people don’t understand, that is your fault, not your listener’s lack of education.

Example from Jeff Patton. Ripped a dollar up into quarters. Which is most valuable.

Example of visual waterfall. It is when you stop meeting and talking to each other, stop collaborating.

From measuring points to pivoting learning. Lean guys were trying to get cycle time to customer down. Agilists were trying to reduce iteration time. In 1999 XP was about fixing programming. Move away from over-designing. Now it is about Customer Development.

Practices to Outcomes – to “people helped”

Ray Kurzweil

Have to move away from moving forward as an Agile team like a shark, heads down. Doesn’t matter what what we did in the past, stuff we made, if context changes and output does not make sense.

Agile spent a lot of time in delivery space, but assumes magic product owner grooming backlog. Sprint reviews can just be feel-good. Now has a discovery cadence.

Boston Scientific doing 6 week discovery piece. Once you can deliver what do you need to learn.

#agileday2011 my raw notes from the Keynote with Linda Rising / #agile

September 27, 2011

Here are my raw, unedited notes from Agile Day New York. Will parse later and capture my reactions and those of others if I receive any.

NOTES

– believes in the power of stories
– send her ideas for stories; call for insights

Presentation is on Patterns – mentioned Gang of Four book

New article series on IEEE software

Question she’s been asked “how can we force people to do Agile?”

Mentions Cisco vice president that if he has an initiative and people don’t do, he fires them. What you get from that is compliance. They will do as long as you are enforcing. “I believe onlybway to really change is to get people to believe it is the right thing to do.”

Asked who is rational. Found audience member – asked if married. Then asked if it was rational decision. Did he do a decision tree? No.

Cognitive scientists are telling us *none* of our decisions are rational.

Then mentioned how a deck on agile with rational argument for Agile does not take. Reason why people decide to do anything in an organization is not based on a rational decision. It is based on something else.

We don’t know, can’t know why we make the decisions we do. After the fact we can outline a reason why; we are good at making a rationalization. But has nothing to do with the real reason.

There are patterns on the website. First pattern set she showed:

Power of belief. If you are going to be someone who is going to change your organization, you must believe. Be an evangelist. Share your passion.

Agile might be a placebo. What do we think: Does it matter whether we have double-blind studies? We have no proof. We only have a lot of good stories, but no scientific proof.

Take small steps; build on successes and learn from failure. Repeat.
Test waters; Time for reflection; small successes; step by step. Then you can reach the tipping point. Has seen increments of a few hours at Amazon.

Timing is everything. For example better times to talk to people than others.

Companies announce: “Do more with less.” Means we have to work more.

How do these companies do this? They just announce it. Example at her husband’s company. And not a single person left; not a single person worked fewer hours. Not that they are resistant to change or stupid. Have no time to breathe or think of a better way.

How to get started?
Just do it. Do Food.

Goodness should win, right? Could it be that everyone thinks that his ideas are the good ones? Has nothing to do with tools. Bullet in a PowerPoint doesn’t convince, doesn’t brainwash.

An experiment shows that serving food opens the mind to ideas. So “do food.”. Double-blind studies show that the group fed food will support even bad ideas. Every time. And the qualitybof the food is important. Not what they say they want; what they really want.

All dictators say “I was doing it for good reasons. I am good person at heart.”

Build grassroots support:
– personal touch
– emotional connection

Main question is “what’s in it for me?” And if you cannot make an emotional connection, adopt another’s p.o.v., and only present rational, you cannot effect change.

Respect resistance; use it to your advantage.
– fear less
– trial run

We get stuck on differences. Male/female. Old/young. Etc. Hard-wired to do that. If we meet resistors we will start saying “those people” – we will start saying “those people.”

What do we do with those people? Fire them?

The most convincing thing you can do is to pay attention and listen. Treat that person as though they are wisest in the world. So play role of active listener and learner.

Seek them out. Respect that other point of view. 75% of the time that respect will listen them into being open to you. Move away from the fencing match model of “Ha! Ha! I win!” It doesn’t work.

http://fearlesschangepatterns.com

What is Hyper Island and Do They Teach Agile? #agile

September 18, 2011

SPOILER ALERT

It may be better for someone to go into the Hyper Island experience without pre-conceived notions.  If you think you might have the opportunity to go to Hyper Island, maybe don’t read this post.

Discovering Hyper Island

The Future of Advertising, Fast CompanyOne day earlier this year, when I was reading articles trying to figure out how to get inside the Gated Creative Community and trying to sort the “Future of Advertising” for myself, I stumbled upon this article in Fast Company by Danielle Sacks (@daniellesacks) about her attendance of a Hyper Island Master Class. These three-day seminars are currently all the rage, evidently, for former adworld muckity-mucks trying to catch up with digital – or anyone in advertising, really, trying to survive the “Digital Age.”

The first thing I wondered is if Hyper Island had a connection to “Agile.”  (more…)