Agile Complexification Inverter

Compare Titanic to Costa Concordia :: 100 yrs apart - what have we learned? Titanic has 19th century tech but barely able to use it to the fullest ( wireless radio - morse code - very small message payload - poor distress procedures & discipline in industry).  Used 18th c. tech - flares to signal distress - but ignored by closest vessel.  Left the ship watches binoculares in port (I've done that).  Capt'n made errors in judgement - full steam ahead through known ice flow with no binos on watch... stupid move. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-extraordinary-story-of-the-titanic http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/costa_concordia The Costa Concorda's captain made several big blunders in judgement.  He may wish he had gone down with his ship, as Capt'n Smith of the Titanic did. While both captains made blunders of judgement, the state of the art of sea distaster has changed in 100 years.  The two disasters are not very compara...

So I hear someone say: My company is not thinking of hiring Scrum Masters for the current Scrum adoption initiative that is underway. We appear to have plenty of Project Managers (yet that community believes they need more "heads"). Yes, "heads" is the unit of measure for our "resources."  So the apparent logic that I have explained to me - because I'm just too illogical to arrive at the obvious is ... we will just let the PMs do the SM roll. Right, no problem there. It shouldn't take too much time to do the Scrum Master's job... just a few meetings and that silly 15 minute stand-up each day. Yep - that's the plan. So now lets look at one metric and ask ourselves why this trend is happening.  Let's compare salaries of Scrum Masters to Project Managers.  You can get the   latest info via  Indeed.com .   data from Indeed Salary survey   David Bland (Scrumology) did this some time back and reported that a SM in 2009 average...

How frequently do you revise the training that you give people?  I try to change something each time I present.  Purposefully mutate the presentation, then reflect on the outcome.  These are not scientific experiments, more intuition based  learning - which I believe is very worth while.  So one technique that helps me to change the presentation is to not use computer generated slides (Power Point). With slide decks - one may change an individual slide an assess if it was better or worse; however when one creates unique artifact each time it will naturally mutate.  Some times for the better, sometimes for simplicity, and at times for the worst.  Yet with a flip chart artifact, if it is unclear, you can just pull out a marker and fix it in real-time.  And you may learn what will improve the artifact the next time you use it. Some people don't like the high amount of time required to create posters for a cours...

Are the capabilities of a CEO leader similar to the leadership needs of a ScrumMaster or Agile team leader?  I think they are very similar.  And if so then the risk factors that are associated with CEO succession planning would also effect the Scrum team's succession planning (assuming anyone is concerned about the leadership changes to a Scrum team). So let's look for the fractal nature of self similar systems within the Agile company. Here are the top risk factors for CEO succession planning. "Of the top 11 factors HR executives cited as the most common causes for CEO succession failure, eight pertained to deficiencies in interpersonal skills -- failure to build relationships and a team environment, a mismatch for the corporate culture, inability to win company support, being egotistical, not flexible, poor management skills, poor communication and lack of political savvy."  ( p. 51, Chief Learning Officer, Apr. 2012 www.CLOmedia.com ) Source: Chal...

Agile Palooza - at Sabre HQ - March 8th. The Agile Coaches table at Sabre's Agile Palooza had a guest, Lance Dacy, Founder of DFW Scrum . The person responsible for the "Agile Palooza plan coming together" Charlsi, with the leadership, Chuck & Lisa. Overall feedback was very positive. Some of the feedback on the sessions - I think we call that a success!

Sabre Holdings held it's internal agile conference, March 8th.   Agile Palooza sponsored by VersionOne.  It was a real success. See Also:  Big Visible Charts for feedback of talks at AgilePalooza

There is an interesting discussion of the Standish Groups 2012 report on Mike Cohn's blog .  Go read the article ( Agile Succeeds Three Times More Ofter Than Waterfall ) and the comments. Here's the summary graphic.

How does one define an Agile process.  I've heard that mathematics should be able to describe most anything; so here is my attempt at describing an Agile process. An integral equation.  The integral from sprint 1 to sprint N  of teamwork multiplied by the sum of test-driven development to the power of continuous integration plus pair programming plus the summation of refactoring. See Also:       S.O.L.I.D. design principle posters .       Which Agile Process Should You Choose?  a comparative study of processes       A List of Agility Tests During Scrum boot camps at SolutionsIQ back in the day we ran an exercise to map the engineering practices to the Agile manifesto's 12 principles .  The first several groups to participate in the exercise arrived at a set of practices that felt to all as if they had covered most of the 12 principles, but not all sufficiently.  That's what in...

One way to scale Scrum is to get one team functioning (mature team) and then populate new teams by dividing the original members up amongst the newly created teams. Does this work?  I think the answer is both yes and no.  Does science have any analogies to study that would help us to predict what factors lead to the yes answer and away from the no answer? The Founder Effect - an effect that evolutionary biology predicts from the classic theory of evolution.  The most adaptable will survive.  We agilist believe in this theory.  Here's a study of the founder effect in Caribbean lizards .  The study reflects that the founders of a population have a significant  effect upon the new population.  However the environment also has a significant effect. To draw the conclusion the studies author,  Schoener said: “The answer we found is that founder effects can leave a persistent signal as generations replace one another over time,...

Oh the irony of a Pig and Chicken paradigm. If you know of the Scrum parable of the pig and chicken.  Then you may find this story humorous.   I'm working with a group trying to teach them just enough Scrum to form a project team.  Trying to facilitate just enough team formation to allow them to self organize.  We planed a 3 day workshop, to be immediately followed by sprint one.  It went well.  Although some troubling patterns were apparent, we summoned up the courage to keep moving forward. Fast forward to Sprint Two's planning session.  Only three of the seven team members were at the planning session, one had to leave for an hour during the session.  The product owner did not appear, the scrum master had a higher priority meeting.  Summing more courage to venture into the unknown the 3 team members and the two coaches (we pair coach teams) ventured into the unknown. We discussed the obvi...

I had a wonderful Christmas.  My nephews got me addicted to the Dragonvale game.  A land where one breeds dragons of various types - did you know, dragons are very hybidizable (I'm sure that's not a standard dictionary word). Dragonvale - iOS simulation game. To build up to a high enough level to purchase a breeding cave one must build treat farms, dragon habits and grow crops.  For this there is an internal game monetary market.  The prices of these goods are set by the game designers (I'm assuming it is not a true " free market ").  The game does not have a sane and balanced market pricing system. The objective of any game designer is to get you to play and have fun.  That is objective number one - design in the fun-factor (see MIT Technology Review 's Exploiting the Fun Factor ).  A secondary objective is to build a game where people will spend money - real cash in exchange for virtual goods.  This is one technique f...

What does it take to have a first rate customer experience when there are more customers than sales representatives?  Yes, this means there is going to be some form of wait, a queue.  Here is my comparison of experience at the Apple Store to that of the restaurant, CheeseCake Factory which we went to right afterwards. At the Apple store we were put on a wait list to see a representative (the greeter used a text description and my wife's name to put her on the list explaining that the next available person would find us, as we browsed).  I asked what the description was, and this is how my wife was described: "tall, with long hair, in a jean jacket with multi-colored scarf".  I suggested that they had the technology to just snap a picture and attached it.  She said there might be privacy concerns with that. We browsed and found the item we needed (a Mini Display Port - HDMI adapter).  About the time we had found it an Apple ...

Do you innovate new ways to visualize your problem domain? The health care field is constantly using technology to visualize their problem domain.  They teach with color coded pictures, pink muscles, red arteries, blue veins, yellow nerves, etc. Yet the actual patient doesn't arrive on the surgens table with this color coding - YET.  They can do quite miraculous tricks with imaging (x-Ray, CT Scans, MRI, etc) and some imaging techniques are in real time.  Here is a video of the latest technique I've seen.  To visualize the problem. I love the history and context Ms Nguyen gives us in this video.  The reason for surgery theaters to be where their were in old buildings.  Now with electric lights they can be in the basements, many times they are because of the heavy equipment they contain. Apply this to the domain of software development.  Yes, we also use color coding to visualiz...

Many organizations adopting Scrum ask these questions. Do we need a full time Scrum master for each team? Why do we need a full time Scrum master, can't they do other roles also? Now allow me to give you the answers:  Yes, you need a full time Scrum Master. Why - watch the video. Let me explain: Yes, you need a full time Scrum master, because they will be constantly watching for the actions of the team.  Making sure that the team member are working in flow as often as possible.  This is a full time job. Why can the scrum master not do other roles on the team? Because of the human ability of selective attention.  First let me show you a video - a little test of your superior ability to follow instructions.  Perhaps you've seen this video - if so, just play along, maybe you will be surprised at how well you do on the test. The Monkey Business Illusion Now do you understand why we need a Scrum master watch ht...

Why do some product win in the market place and some lose?  Is being first to market the key distinction between winning and losing? The Agile software development movement has this one aspect (time-to-market) as key differentiator.  Many surveys note this aspect as a reason to adopt Agile methods.  Business people resonate with this value proposition.  The Lean Startup movement has this within its core.  It appears just common sense.  But is it good practice - is it a true cause and effect relationship?  If one is first in the market place with a new product, will it capture market share and become the de-facto standard product in the market segment? Take the case of the cookie - the Oreo Cookie (introduced in 1912) - have you heard the back story?  It was the perhaps a knock-off of the Hydrox cookie (introduced in 1908), the first in the market segment, yet always labeled "imitator" and never a strong competit...