Agile Complexification Inverter

There's a lot of talk these days in the tech sector about "digital _________" or a "______ Platform" - have you noticed it also?  I find this astonishing, as the world turned digital back in the 1980s along with disco.  And as for platform - well adding the word to shoes was a bad idea back then also. So what causes this echo from the past? I don't know - shall we investigate this over the next few months - the dog days of summer 2017? Summer is a season.  Season are cyclical - they come around again and again.  So this brings us to ponder... When do the days get longer and why?  Most people answer Summer.  And what's the longest day of the year (Northern Hemisphere)?  Right June 20th, the summer solstice .  And so the next few days the daylight is getting less and less - all summer long the days get shorter and shorter.  Almost completely backwards from what we thought we knew. Do you remember way back in 2001... when Steve Jobs ...

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,...

I'm taking Mezick's introduction course to OpenSpace Agility - thought I'd write a bit about what I'm learning. Unboxing the workshop - Your move Schrodinger. Day One: Beginning concepts - leaders have a duty to set direction and name constraints; yet stay away from telling how to achieve the goals.  Executives commits to holding first OpenSpace and Acting upon the proceedings.  And holding a second OpenSpace after a time box (100 days). A constraining forces in OSA will be the Agile Manifesto, actions and experiments should be judged by this definition and if seen to support it, be considered good. Another foundational concept of OSA - Self Management - defined as the behavior of a group to know and practice their decision making process (whatever that may be).  A good test is to ask 5 people how their group makes decisions - then count the number of answers - one general description of their decision making apparatus points strongly toward a self-managin...

Pondering some messages... both the implied, the implicit, the unintended, and the overt. What are the messages when a manager calls a meeting and schedules it for an hour... then repeatedly states that they have nothing really to talk about, and after the group does the appropriate amount of beating the horse, the manager states "I will give you back 20 minutes."? One overt message is the meeting is over you are dismissed and you have 20 minutes returned to you to get real work accomplished. Another implied message is that your time is not your own and now the manager is returning their time, time they require of you to attend their meeting, is now returned to you so do with it as they have done - spend it well.  [ Because anyone delusional enough to think that time belongs to someone, is just off enough to believe that one can spend time. ] The unintended message - the part that rubs me raw; like when manager's refer to people as resources (typically implying...

Concept of Product Development Flow "I believe that the dominant paradigm for managing product development is fundamentally wrong.  Not just a little wrong, but wrong to its very core.  It is as wrong as we were in manufacturing, before the Japanese unlocked the secret of lean manufacturing.  I believe that a  new paradigm is emerging, one that challenges the current orthodoxy of product development."  -- Donald Reinertsen Reinertsen goes beyond the advance ideas of lean manufacturing, what he calls Flow-Based Product Development. Scrum was sparked by a paper called The New New Product Development Game by  Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka (1986).  Are you seeing a synergy of ideas? Lean principle of Flow In the manufacturing world Toyota exemplifies the achievements one may obtain in 50 years of practicing a new mindset of principles.  Manufacturing deals with repetitive tasks predictable processes to produce component parts, hom...

What might it mean when the terms used in your Agile transition start to be applied to almost any fleetingly similar activity?  For example, the manager starts "inviting" the group to mandatory stand-up meetings, scheduled ad-hoc for the same day, with no agenda; at this "gathering" there will be a particular dynamic of communication, wonder what that style can best be described as...  Will it be anything like you wish at a team morning stand-up in the Scrum process that introduced the term? Is this a positive or negative indication of the perfusion of terminology? What is the positive aspect of people adopting the new terminology of an introduced framework? What is the negative aspect of this terminology being used to describe old and new behaviors as if they are similar. How should one address this with there supervisor? A conundrum I find myself wrestling with lately.  Do you have advice for me? A command performance for the Queen See Also: ...

I've made a transition from gray tones to living color - much like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (the first color motion picture). Dog Groomer's have a natural capability to accept a being for what they are and how they present, as well as what their humans may desire.  This is a wonderful ability - we should learn from them.  I had a great conversation with my local groomers at the Blissful Bark Dog Wash , about peoples expectations and inherent biases based upon look, job title, etc.  This capability of acceptance and a deeper level of judgement came to me as they asked about my hair color choices.  They told of the judgements that a dog groomer receives - one even equated the title's status to that of a stripper (good company if you can have friends in low places). From this and other conversation I've had as a result of a choice to live with more color, I've made some interesting observation about you people. You humans are preoccupied by noticing inconse...

What makes a team?  Is there a continuum upon which sits the term team?  Some have referred to difficulty comparing apples to oranges - I find it quite easy. Apple <-> Orange <-> Pomegranate <- Team ---- Group -> List of English terms of venery, by animal Why do we not list HUMAN in the animal column when listing group names? For example,  horses are know in groups as:  team in harness haras or harrase herd stable string stud Humans are know in groups as:  mob, group, team, squad, army, click, .... We have a whole system of dealing with collective nouns . How do we distinguish between the behaviors of a team and the behaviors of a group?  Have you noticed that manager's refer to people that report to them as a team?  Regardless of the behaviors that the group may exhibit - rarely a team like behavior...   I've always said just because we all wear the same color jersey doesn't mean we ar...

A video that cannot be unseen.  If you want to truly understand the difference between a unit test and integration tests. Watch what happens when you write plenty of unit test - but skip the integration test . I found this GIF on the web today ... junior dev: It works! tech lead: . . . . . . . . . [facepalm] #coderlife #fail pic.twitter.com/goYsZP5Ol0 — #CoderLife (@thecoderlife) August 16, 2017 See Also: The 21st century definition of TEST  I would like to define that within the modern software world that the word test have a more specific meaning. I propose: Test - (verb) a  highly repeatable  measure to check the quality, performance or reliability of (something), esp. before (something) is created and then put into use or practice. Traditional Test Engineering is DEAD "In this shift to agile, late cycle or manual testing efforts are often dropped or, worse, the program management and development teams embra...

Have you seen the new automobile vending machines.  It appears we could put anything in a vending machine.   So what would you put into the vending machine?

What do these phrase have in common - what is their inherent consistent meaning? Zero Defects Take the time to do it Right Repeatability and Reliability Process Maturity Model Measure twice, cut once Six Sigma Rework is Waste, Lean processes remove Waste They are ironically consistent in their purpose to reduce variability.  Don Reinertsen will attempt to convince us that in the domain of product development (unlike other domains) variability may not be the enemy of good.  He will argue that it is the economic payoff-function of this outcome that is of upmost concern in design. Voltaire 's aphorism :   Perfect is the enemy of good. I'm in a group at work that is reading books on Agile software development topics to what purpose... well to learn I hope.  After Lyssa's book on Coaching Agile Teams  we turned the knob up to 11 with Don Reinertsen's Principles of Product Development Flow .  Since it's such a tough read, a dense book with so m...

Truth is a wonderful concept - but can we really know it? I'm very excited about the 2017 release of a Wonder Woman movie.  Can't wait - it looks great, I always love the first in a series.  I like the character development, the WHY of the foundational aspects of the character.  From the preview it looks like we will see  Princess Diana of Themyscira  grow up and the reasons she finds her self in America.  Fascinating... I learned a bit about the truth of the back story of the back story of ... well the history of the creator of the Wonder Woman myth in of all places... a training course on DiSC by Dr. Abelson .  [ Queue the spooky dream sequence music. ] The inventor of the Wonder Woman myth is William Moulton Marston . Wonder Woman made her debut in All Star Comics #8 (December 1941), scripted by Marston.  If you have one in the garage I'll buy it from you.  Apparently, Marston designed Wonder Woman as an allegory for the true lead...