Agile Complexification Inverter

Have you ever been in a situation where you thought the technique needed to move forward was one thing, yet the person leading (your leader) assumed something else was what was needed?  Did you feel misaligned, unheard, marginalized?  Would you believe that 54% of all leaders only use ONE style of leadership - regardless of the situation?  Does that one style of leading work well for the many levels of development we see on a team? Perhaps your team should investigate one of the most widely used leadership models in the world ("used to train over 5 million managers in the world’s most respected organizations").  And it's not just for the leaders.  The training is most effective when everyone receives the training and uses the model.  The use of a ubiquitous language on your team is a collaboration accelerator.  When everyone is using the same mental model, speaking the same vernacular hours of frustration and discussion may be curtailed, and alignm...

We are desperately searching for a term for people that connotes the best of human kind.  The creative, sensing, combinatorial synergistic, empathic solutioning persons that have yet to been labeled with a role name that works. Some of the old terms: Staff , Workforce , Human Resource , My Team , Army , Company Shakespeare created 1700 words in his time.  He mutated verbs to nouns, and vice-a-versa, transformed verbs into adjectives, and formed words from whole cloth never before heard.  This skill is rare, but there is a poet that can create the term we need in the twenty-first century. What should this term define? 21st Century Human Resource ; the generalizing specialist. Yes, but what more?  What less? Suggest your poetry in the comments, let us see if we cannot do 1/1700 as well as The Bard. By-the-way; who create the phrase "coin a word"? How Ofter do you use the 10 Most Cringe-Worthy Workplace Phrases? So, if you want your colleagu...

Let's Invert the typically wrong headed view of Software Development project management as a construction project.  We can map it the other way just to see if it works... to have some fun, to explore the meaning of phrases we toss around quite frequently. Site Landing Page Normally Project Management terms come from a construction domain.  We are going to apply the lexicon of modern software to the construction of a home.  We will follow the construction project and meet some of the people doing the work. This is a very small (8 homes from $600,000 skyward) program in my 30-40 year old neighborhood. About 6 months ago I saw the programs landing page go up.  It gives casual observers and some of the stakeholders a general idea of the intent of the program.  And most importantly who to contact for additional information if you happen to be interested in their products. The Refuge program has 8 product projects and has them running independently. ...

I'm from the Carolina's where legend has it that our family commonly just hunkered down in the home on the coast and waterways than to head for inland shelter. Now that's from the old school days of barely improved (read paved) roads. They counted a storms severity by how high on the back porch steps (about 15 - top to ground) the water reached.  I don't recommend this action in todays world of long range forecast and transportation options. I do recommend a drink or two in a hotel bar, far far away. This is the week that Harvey came ashore in Texas.  I live on a hill in the little old town of Grapevine outside Dallas and Fort Worth.  And thank you all for letting me know that a storm is coming... I didn't get out and walk Malibu before the rain hit, so I grabbed a hat and we went anyway.  Much nicer walk with the drizzle, I'd say. I'll raise a glass to you - if you were not smart enough to do the responsible thing, at the last responsible moment. ...

In the 1900s the automobile industry was the most important and innovation industry in the USA.  But one could question if this was good for our society in the long run.  And one could question if they actually innovated.   See Russ Ackoff's 1994 speech "You see, the automobile is destroying urban life around the world..." 11 minutes mark. In the early 1900s there were few automobiles, very little infrastructure created to support the industry.  For example the road system was still designed for horse drawn wagons and the wagon wheel (remember a steal rim and wooden compression spoke wheel).  The future  US Highways , or the 1950s Interstate Highway System at the cost of $425 billion were decades and many innovations away. There was no gas service station, there were however horse stables, farriers, and blacksmiths in each town along the roads.  There was no real "road map", there was no road naming system, like was created in 1926 - the United Sta...

Do we mean the words we use - or do we just use them because everyone else does...  you know like the popular buzz word in corporate bingo?  Let's take the word Transformation , as in: "Hi team, I will be you Agile Coach - let's all do the Agile Transformation thing together.  Out the other end of this transformation we will be a changed company." Some definitions of Transformation: a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance. a metamorphosis during the life cycle of an animal. (in physics) the induced or spontaneous change of one element into another by a nuclear process. In an organizational context, a process of profound and radical change that orients an organization in a new direction and takes it to an entirely different level of effectiveness. BusinessDictionary.com Some in the agile world are pulling against this trend... see Dan Mezick's The PUSH of Agile Causes "Trance Formations ". So stop that. And do these things,...

A rant on Metric's I wish I had written...  so I'm going to just include it by reference and call it my own. One thousand Words on Metrics Here's a quote to get you even more interested in clicking that link... Conclusion In short, I find most grasping for metrics to be a reliable metric for lack of understanding of human behavior, not only that of those who would be measured but that of those who would do the measuring. If a higher-up wants a metric about a team, say, as an input to their judgment about whether the team’s work is satisfactory, oughtn’t there be some other way to tell? And if I choose nearly any metric on someone else’s behalf, doesn’t that reveal my assumption that I know something about how they do their good work better than they do? Or worse, that I prefer they nail the metric than do something as loose and floppy as “good work”?  Well - will you look at that!  Yareev's even willing to apply his own metric to his work.  What a ...

Our organization is starting to talk about measuring Cycle Time and Lead Time on our software engineering stories.  It's just an observation, but few people seem to understand these measurement concepts, but everyone is talking about them.  This is a bad omen...  wish I could help illustrate these terms.  Because I doubt the measurements will be very accurate if the community doesn't understand when to start the clock, and just as important - when to stop it. [For the nature of confusion around this terms compare and contrast these:   Agile Alliance Glossary ; Six Sigma ; KanbanTool.com ; Lean Glossary .] The team I'm working with had a toy basket ball goal over their Scrum board...  like many cheep toys the rim broke.  Someone bought a superior mini goal, it's a nice heavy quarter inch plastic board with a spring loaded rim - not a cheep toy.  The team used "Command Strips" to mount it but they didn't hold for long. The team convinced me th...

A few months ago Michele of Sliger Consulting, Inc. asked about my first Agile Light Bulb moment, I've had a few of them but one that easily came to mind was this one with the Washington State Appellate Clerk court case management systems people back in 2005. In just two months our newly delivering Scrum team had put into production the "undoable" feature - BAM! - value delivered, trust confirmed, transformation successful. "My light bulb moment was during the product demo in the Sprint Review Meeting, when the state of Washington Appellate Clerk of Court told me he and the courts had been waiting 20 years for the feature that our team had just delivered. In just two months our newly delivering Scrum team had put into production the "undoable" feature - BAM! - value delivered, trust confirmed, transformation successful. He later sent me the requirement spec for the 20-year-old feature and it read just like our epic story and its children we discovered...

What do you get from six years of blogging about Agile/Scrum and your continued learning experiences? Stats from Agile Complexification Inverter blog site Well the stats are just one insignificant measure of what one gets from writing about their experience. The more meaningful measures have been seeing some of these articles and resources put into practice by other colleagues, discussion that have happened (off line & sometimes in comments or twitter, etc.) with readers that require me to refine my thinking and messaging of my thinking.  Interestingly some times seeing a resource that you have created being "borrowed" and used in another persons or companies artifact without attribution is both rewarding and a bit infuriating.  I like that the concept has resonated well with someone else and they have gone to the trouble of borrowing the concept, and repeating or improving or repurposing the concept. Let me borrow someone else's concept:  "The Ba...