Recently the Agile Academy decided to get out of running community meetups and hand them back to the community. At the same time, Adrian Smith and I had been talking about the lack of meetup groups in Brisbane. As a result, we took over the established group that existed and created the Brisbane Agile and Lean User Group.
We held our first meeting last week at the Villager Hotel who kindly sponsored the venue and some nibbles. We had about 30 attendees turn up to listen to a discussion about OpenMRS as well as having some group discussions on distributed Agile and selling Agile.
For our first meetup (under our new identity), we are going to run some lightning talks in an open space format. With a number of members having just attended Agile Australia and a long time since our last meetup, we are looking for members to share their stories.
For those that attended Agile Australia, there was a calll to action to support the OpenMRS project (http://openmrs.org/). With groups already kicked off in Melbourne and Sydney it would be great to canvas interest for a similar group in Brisbane.
If you are interested in giving a Lightning Talk please contact us and propose a topic. Alternatively, feel free to speak with us on the night as we setup the agenda.
We are also looking for suggestions on where and where to best host our meetup as well as looking for upcoming topics that the group is interested in hearing or speaking about.
After an overview of the new group and some discussion on potential upcoming topics, Michael Harrison led a discussion with Cathie Hagen on OpenMRS:
We then broke into two groups to talk about Distributed Agile:
One of my colleagues sent this around the other day in a note when she couldn’t make daily standup to describe the frustration she was having in one of the teams she was coaching. Made me reflect on some of the challenges I face as a coach on a daily basis as well…
The day before the Agile Australia 2012 conference in Melbourne was workshop day, and I presented a couple of sessions as well as sitting in on others. There was a good mix of local talent delivering workshops this year. One of my hopes for next year is to make them inclusive of the conference proper somehow, so more people can benefit from and experience them.
First Steps With Agile
On behalf of the Agile Academy, Rene Chappel and I presented First Steps in Agile to a large enthusiastic class (in fact, the class was four times larger than we were expecting and much larger than the numbers I have had in similar classes for the last few years).
New to Agile and wondering where to start or want to know what all the fuss is about? This workshop will start you on your journey and help you become familiar with the core values and principles of Agile. You will gain an understanding of what is meant by the term ‘Agile’ and learn about some of the key practices and processes of an Agile approach (while having some fun along the way!)
I had one session free and sat in on this session delivered by Jason Yip. The workshop exercises presented scenarios and encouraged participants to practice speaking aloud their process to solving the scenario.
novices understand the formulas but not what is happening
superficial (understand the formula), semantic understanding (understand what is going on), qualitative understanding (know instinctively what is true)
“Think like a Commander” – US Army exercise to expose and correct weaknesses
learning is not a comfortable experience, it is an experience of confusion
sits between classroom study (learning basic concepts) and a full scale simulation (you use your strengths to achieve an aim)
Agile adoption in Australia and across the world is now becoming more mainstream and, as a community, we are struggling to address the issue of how to take experienced Agile practitioners to the next level, while still supporting those who are beginning their journey. With the “agile” word getting so overloaded, the challenge is to continually innovate without assigning labels or losing focus on our prime objective – to deliver!
Join Craig Smith with Nigel Dalton, Simon Bristow and David Joyce (on the couch) as they explore different viewpoints on all things Agile – then, now and future!
Some of the comments on Twitter included:
@jchyip: #adapt discussion is similar to our Agile cult discussion at this morning’s Lean Coffee. #agileaus
@carolineggordon: Issueing a challenge to the women in the audience at the panel, I want to see one of us up there next year #agileaus – #deliver
@stephlouisesays: Always look forward to hearing @smithcdau at #agileaus -didn’t disappoint! Valuable messages and images that make you think (and giggle!)
@lukasm: Great start to #agileaus Inspiring talk by Dr Fiona Wood followed by a thought provoking panel on where agile is, has been, and going.
The Agile Coach is a critical role in helping leaders, teams or individuals understand, adopt and improve Agile methods and practice. Additionally, an Agile Coach helps people rethink and change the way they go about their work. For a individual to be effective in a coaching role, they must poses a wide range of skills and experience. In this workshop we will explore Agile coaching skills in the context of a competency framework and provide participants with lessons from real-world coaching experience. The workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to learn about coaching, identify areas of Agile development and to broaden skills through hands-on group and individual exercises and games.
You will:
» Understand role of an Agile coach and the typical development pathways
» Identify personal areas of strength/weakness in relation to a broad range of Agile and related skills
» Learn situational specific coaching techniques for common Agile dysfunctions
» Understand the use of maturity models in helping teams learn and adapt to Agile
» Understand organisational and role specific Agile challenges
» Learn how to adapt Agile practices to suit team specific challenges
I first started using Yammer back in 2009 after hearing about it winning TechCrunch50, and was user number 1 on our company domain (now we have thousands of users). Its been interesting to see the organic growth from the first time I used it (I had nobody to talk to), to a community of early adopters (who treated it like a corporate Twitter) to its usage now as an important communication channel and groupware solution.
My colleague and friend Teale Shapcott arranged the guys at Yammer to come into our organisation last week to give a bunch of people an informal train the trainer session on “Yammer – Getting Started with Groups”. Steve Hopkins and Ross Hill conducted the session, and here are my notes:
Metcalfe’s Law essentially confirms that things get more useful the more people you have in the group
the problem with email is that if you send an email to 12 people, you get 12 responses!
a Yammer group is an way to replace email in a team (basically an easy way to setup a distribution list)
Yammer are currently launching new things to the site every week
Yammer recently acquired oneDrum. Essentially what this will do is put a Yammer folder on your desktop for Office integration, as well as being able to follow files and get updates when things change.
The point of the training was to help get people using Yammer for collaboration. A good exercise to start is get people to log into Yammer (set up a private group for training) and get people to say hi. Next get people to enter what they are currently working on and then get everybody to respond on others posts to get people familiar with the value of the tool.
Pages are a new feature:
pages are a good way to collaborate and brainstorm on ideas
pages can have 10 editors maximum at the same time. It will auto save. When you publish it will notify all the followers that there is a new draft. You can revert back to old versions
pages are useful for meetings, use an iPad and throw the notes or actions up on a page, you can link actions to people or files as well
coming soon is the ability to mark a page as official
documents don’t need to be run by any person specifically, they are now crowd sourced
groups are like rooms in a house
One thing that is new that I did not know about is that you can now use the share feature to share a message across groups (you used to have to duplicate the message).
In the session, one of the other participants shared their approach to getting their team to use Yammer:
they created a new private collaboration group
it took a conscious effort to use yammer by getting the leader to share things on Yammer, this took a few months
they have seen a massive reduction in email but communicating a lot more
they also created a larger department group as well
gains comfort for people using a team group rather than the All Company feed or a public group
takes time to get the comfort up and you have to make enemies
people for the most part are learning something new
you need leadership and you need to take a hard line about just using Yammer
use followed conversations mode, set their preferences to only follow groups that I follow as it removes the noise – everything you see should be relevant, you also need to clean up the feed and email notifications settings for them
update the information tab and use it for information and quick links
needed to be hardcore and had to keep asking “are you logged into Yammer” in order to cement the habit
direct people to engage with your content, rather than just posting something
use announcements to get everybody in the group
get people to follow a hash tag for things like events
Generation Y folks are good advocates to get on side
As a second exercise, we then created a page and collaborated on out own checklist of an approach and tips to setting up a group. Many of the participants (who I assume were not familiar with wikis or collaborative tools like Google Docs were in awe of seeing people collaborating at the same time).
When introducing groups, you are bound to get resistance, so the Yammer has a bunch of great case studies that cover lots of different team types.
Another use, relating this back to Agile, is one team were using it for showcases by doing a live webcast and getting people to comment on Yammer (also the posting the video to Yammer so people could talk about it later as well). In the vain of standup, another organisation would, on a Monday, start a post on what are you working on this week. There are lots of potential usages for the features of Yammer for distributed teams. Another suggestion was to organise in everyones calendar a YamJam to discuss something on Yammer a a certain time.
Finally, there are a lot of Australian companies using Yammer, and the following videos are worth a look.
So there have been a lot of posts out there about Moneyball and how it directly relates to Agile and the Lean Startup. However, I finally got around to watching the move tonight (thanks to my colleague Renee Troughton for lending me the Blu Ray) and had to note down my own thoughts. There are so many good quotes and scenes from the movie, but here are just a couple of standouts (warning, some folks may consider these to be spoilers if you have not seen the movie!)
Right at the start of the movie Billy Beane is talking to the team owner about needing more money (sounds like the start of any typical traditional project to me!)
Billy: I can’t compete against a hundred and twenty million payroll with thirty eight million dollars. Schott: We’re not gonna compete with these teams that have big budgets. We’re gonna work with the constraints that we have and you’re gonna get out and do the best job that you can recruiting new players. We’re not gonna pay seventeen million dollars a year to players.
And a little later in the scene, Billy sets his goal.
Billy: That’s my bar. My bar is here. My bar is to take this team to the championship.
At the scout’s meeting, their discussion is all about appearances rather than understanding and building a team.
Scout: Ugly girl friend means no confidence.
In that same meeting, I really enjoyed the scene where Billy is in the position of a coach/facilitator and keeps asking them if they understand the problem!
Grady: We’re trying to solve a problem here. Billy: Not like this you’re not. You’re not even looking at the problem. Grady: We’re very aware of the problem. Billy: Okay, good. What’s the problem? Grady: Okay, Billy. We all understand what the problem is. We have to replace… Billy: Good. What’s the problem? Grady: The problem is we have to replace three key players. Billy: No. What’s the problem? Poloni: Same as it’s ever been. We’ve gotta replace these guys with what we have existing. Billy: No! What’s the problem, Barry? Barry: We need three eight home runs, a hundred twenty R.B.I’s and forty seven… Billy: Aaahhh! The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there’s fifty feet of crap, and then there’s us. It’s an unfair game. And now we’re being gutted, organ donors for the rich. Boston has taken our kidney’s, Yankees takin’ our heart and you guys are sittin’ around talkin’ the same old good body nonsense, like we’re selling deeds, like we’re looking for Fabio. We got to think differently!
A little later in that scene, Billy is really trying to make the committee think differently, but they are just thinking in the same old ways.
Billy: If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there Grady: Boy, that sounds like fortune cookie wisdom to me, Billy. Billy: No, that’s just logic.
I really liked the scene where Billy is talking with Art about his contract. The final line of the conversation reminded me of many wasted meetings.
Billy: Good meeting. Everytime we talk, I’m reinvigorated by my love of the game.
And then there are always the nay-sayers and (in the case of Grady) those who will always try to bring your approach down.
Announcer: Do you see this as a decimation of the whole team? Grady: I think that he bought a ticket on the Titanic. Announcer: Oh, boy! He’s tried to come up with a new approach, my hat’s off to him. It won’t work.
The discussion between Billy and Peter about cutting players was a good reminder of being honest and transparent.
Billy: They’re professional ball players. Just be straight with them. No fluff, just facts. ‘Pete, I gotta let you go. Jack’s office will handle the details.’ Peter: That’s it? Billy: Would you rather get a bullet to the head, or fire to the chest or bleed to death? Peter: Are those my only two options?
There was an interesting little scene regarding soda, that is a good reminder that sometimes you can be penny smart but pound foolish (the little things are sometimes what keeps individuals and teams motivated).
Justice: And how come soda is a dollar in the club house? Cause I’ve never seen it like that. Peter: Billy likes to keep the money on the field. Justice: Soda money? Really? Where on the field is the dollar I’m paying for soda?
The scene where Billy shakes up the team by firing some of his all-stars was the turning point that shows that sometimes your superstars are hiding the real talent (and sometimes you need to do something extreme to make a change). Art is the classic Project Manager in this scene.
Art: Yeah, I don’t wanna go through team rounds, Billy. The line up card is mine. And that’s all, okay? Billy: The line up card is definitely yours, I’m just saying you can’t start Pena first. Art: Well, I am starting him at first. Billy: I don’t think so, he plays for Detroit now.
There are some good inspirational pieces in the film (like when Billy asks Justice to step up and be a leader for the younger guys). This quote is my favourite though.
Billy: Everybody, listen up! You may not look like a winning team, but you are one. So, play like one tonight.
The big speech when Billy is at the Red Sox resonates with anybody who has tried to implement Agile in a team before.
For forty one million, you built a playoff team. You lost Damon, Giambi, Isringhausen, Pena and you won more games without them than you did with them. You won the exact same number of games that the Yankee’s won, but the Yankee’s spent 1.4 million per win and you paid 260 thousand. I know you’ve taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. It’s the threat and not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it’s threatening the game. But really what it’s threatening is their livelihoods, it’s threatening their jobs, it’s threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it’s the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people are holding the reins, have their hands on the switch. They will bet you’re crazy. I mean, anybody who’s not building a team right and rebuilding it using your model, they’re dinosaurs. They’ll be sittin’ on their ass on the sofa in October, watching the Boston Red Sox win the world series.
Near the end, when Peter shows Billy the video about the guy hitting the home run, they starting mentioning metaphors (I was so thinking about the metaphor in XP at that point!)
Also, the Lenka song “The Show” made me think about why as Agile coaches we get up in the morning and do this (plus good to see Australian music in the movie!)
I am just a little lost in the moment
I’m so scared but I don’t show it
I can’t figure it out
It’s bringing me down I know
I’ve got to let it go
And just enjoy the show
For those who haven’t seen the movie, it is well worth the time spent. I hadn’t realised Aaron Sorkin had worked on the screenplay, so for that alone it had to be good!
A couple a months ago, Adrian Smith and I were asked to put together an article for the third edition of AgileTODAY to complement a workshop we plan to run at Agile Australia 2012. Adrian and I had a whiteboard session, and we put together these 8 tips which will hopefully help aspiring Agile coaches.
Introduction
The Agile coach is a critical role in helping leaders, teams and individuals understand, adopt and improve Agile methods and practice. For new and aspiring coaches, starting a coaching engagement can be daunting. It is easy to become distracted from the original mandate and get embroiled in the issues and politics of the team. The following tips were put together to help Agile coaches stay focused and achieve successful outcomes.
Before beginning an engagement with a team try to define success in terms of measurable outcomes and a realistic timescale. Share the outcomes with the team and sponsor to ensure there is a shared understanding of what you are trying to achieve. This will help clarify your role within the team and can help reduce any fears the team may have about the coming changes. Setting a clear end date will also ensure that both you and the team are clear that the team have to own and understand their way of working.
Showing the team how it is done the first time then supporting them as they take ownership of the new way of working is a great way to bootstrap new practices and build trust in new practices. Role model behaviours you want to see in the team. If there are techniques or technologies you cannot model yourself, you may need to mentor an enthusiastic team member or bring in an expert.
There is always a temptation to get involved and help with the team’s delivery work – especially when you see them struggling. While this may offer some short term help and can be useful as a learning exercise, it is unlikely to help in the long term. Becoming part of the team will also make it difficult to have tough conversations with team members, call-out unproductive behaviours and stay focused on your coaching objectives. Try to stand back, your role is to support the team and let them take credit for their success.
The team has probably faced a majority of the issues long before you got involved. If they are to own the solution after you have gone, it is important to have them involved in the decision making process. Remember you are trying to help the team learn to work without your help. This sometimes means you have to let them make a decision that goes against your best judgement. Teams need to learn by their mistakes (and sometimes their idea works out which means you can learn something too).
People can adapt to change more easily when it happens slowly and they see how it aligns to an overall plan. Additionally, change becomes natural when you are able to create a safe learning environment for the team that encourages experimentation. Try to change the practices that are causing problems first replacing them with simple alternatives. If you take away all the old practices that a team depended upon they can lose their way and not see the dysfunctions for themselves.
Asking questions is a fundamental skill for an Agile coach and can be used to drill down to the root cause of problems a team is facing. Don’t be afraid to ask “why” a couple of times to get to the facts behind a problem or to introduce the elephant in the room. As a coach you are in the privileged position of being able to raise sensitive issues and to legitimise discussion of difficult issues.
Helping the team identify what is important (especially from a customer’s perspective), making it visible and updating it regularly will focus a team. Example metrics include: throughput, cycle time, delivered value and many others. The corollary to this suggestion is that you need to be careful what you measure because you can incentivise behaviour that has the potential to be counter-productive.
Although the Agile journey is important, Agile perfection is not the end goal. What does matter is delivering what your stakeholders want in a sustainable way. For this reason it is important to use Agile maturity assessments and other metrics with care. Helping a team become agile should focus on instilling Agile values and principles, while selecting and adapting Agile practices to help the team deliver.
Summary
Becoming an Agile coach requires a deep understanding of Agile, the confidence to drive change and a willingness for self-reflection. The role of an Agile coach is a rewarding one that allow you to use a wide range of skills across technical, social, business and communication disciplines.
I am a huge fan of the Lean Startup movement, so it was a thrill to hear directly from Eric Ries. His talk mirrored others of his that can be found all over the web and the content followed much of what is available in the book, but it was inspiring and awesome nonetheless.
This is a copy of a similar presentation from another conference.
Here are some of my notes from the talk.
you can now rent the means of production and compete with big players
join the global conversation at #leanstartup
this is the boring part of entrepreneurship
Ghostbusters is the original movie on entrepreneurship
startup = experiment
we live in a time where we can build anything we can imagine – need to ask not can it be built but should it be built…
entrepreneurship is management
most products Eric has built have failed!
Frederick Winslow Taylor stated things that are obvious now yet had to be invented then – work needs to be done as efficiently as possible and breaking work into tasks
all of the tools of general management are based on planning and forecasting – but making an accurate forecast relies on a long operating history – need a new entrepreneurial toolkit because the world is filled with uncertainty
the pivot – successful entrepreneurs did not have a better idea, they take the leanings and change the direction without changing the vision
runway should not be amount of money remaining but amount of pivots remaining
achieving failure is successfully executing a bad plan – this is like getting good fuel mileage when driving a car off a cliff
Agile only works well if you know who the customer is
failure is the great equaliser of quality
“we learned something important” is an excuse, need to learn early
ask what experiment am I trying to run, and what learning can I take from that
build > measure > learn loop – minimise time through the loop
measurement will slow you down but optimise the part to optimise the whole
drive down the batch size to one day – continuous deployment – many features take longer to prioritise than to build
The Toyota Way says foundation is long term thinking, the startup way says foundation is accountability
brink of success is indistinguishable from goofing off – need innovation accounting
business plans are rarely achieved – achieving failure – leap of faith assumptions need to called out
build a minimum viable product, iterate experiments and look for upward trends, pivot when returns are diminishing
better to have bad news that’s true than good news that’s made up
pivot meeting should be a milestone in its own right, need good information to make a good decision – micro scale experiments that help make future decisions
lean startup is still early adopter stage
Dr Werner Vogels – The Lean Cloud
Dr. Werner Vogels is the CTO of Amazon.com and opened the startup event. Here are some notes from his session.
are all the lessons US lessons? No, early on some cultures said this would not work, particularly admitting failure, the grass is not greener in Silicon Valley, understand the underlying principles, figure out how to translate strengths and build on the Lean startup principles
there is a new book by Jeffrey Liker who wrote The Toyota Way (The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership) – Toyota has translated the approach to as many plants in the USA
need to communicate and connect with your employees – we are still solving simple problems
good thing about having a small amount of customers is that when you screw up you can apologise… personally
stop doing stuff that does not deliver value, not laying people off
spend time doing the right stuff, not the wrong stuff
think systems, not software – Southwest think employees, customers and then shareholders
optimise the whole system (software is just a layer) – Amazon is structured around it services (2 pizza teams of 8-10 people)
a separate testing team is silly – just handoff / afterthought, need to build quality into your product
need to understand value before you deliver value – understand what your customers value, not what they want and build the right thing before building the thing right
setting up a new product is a set of learning loops
watch for what is making people uncomfortable
understand your customers not by bringing an idea but by taking the team to understand the problem
there is always demand in a service company – fix issues as fast as possible, but that is not the game
consumability – how much effort does the customer need to go through to get value?
customers decide value… and therefore decide waste
measure productivity on value delivered, not features
work in progress is waste – customers are not interested in your long list of things to do
good Agile teams have a low number of defects
map end-to-end flow to find the biggest opportunity in your end-to-end process
40-90% of the cost is maintenance not delivery, the cost of quality is way higher than the cost of building quality in, don’t put defects on a list (track them, fix them immediately), root cause every escaped defect, determine why every one happened
problem with readable specifications is that the text is not refactorable – any text page will have hundreds of ambiguities
every organisation that calls itself professional should be doing TDD
expertise takes 10 years / 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, need a teacher to challenge, feedback and dedication (The Road to Excellence)
marketing leader – for a successful product you should be able to name this person
technical leader – keep two top engineers free to roam around and give guidance
Empire State Building – on time and under budget, had to manage the flow of materials not tasks, had two alternating mills to keep up schedule and remove failure point
people who have dome something before should know how to deliver within the constraints
when managing an organisation you need to manage the capacity, you need to have a stable flow
kanban – reduce work in progress to expose problems (don’t crash your boat on the first day, keep your limits high then lower your limits and remove your problems one at a time
kanban board – every column is handover to the next column, the next column (downstream process) gets to define done
5 why’s – the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause…, The Team Handbook has good process improvement practices, as do the Six Sigma tools
product-centric development – 54% of Fortune 500 companies are heading in this direction
Here is a picture of an exercise we did to map the cycle time of a particular company (it highlighted some of the issues they are having around approvals).
Finally, a huge thank you to Nick Muldoon from Atlassian who helped me out with a space on this course. Also to one of my colleagues who reminded me that we should ask forgiveness not permission when I was dealing with some competing priorities!
Recently the Agile Academy decided to get out of running community meetups and hand them back to the community. At the same time, Adrian Smith and I had been talking about the lack of meetup groups in Brisbane. As a result, we took over the established group that existed and created the Brisbane Agile and Lean User Group.
Craig Smith
