Agile Complexification Inverter

I've never met a Scrum team that was highly performant (one commonly stated end goal) that did not have a highly engaged and participatory Product Owner.  I've also not met one person that can do all that that role requires for Scrum teams and the business.  Yes, Scrum's model simplification may mislead organizations into believing that the role is one and only one person.  It was designed this way for very valid reasons - to quit thrashing teams and increasing focus, also a form of limiting work in process, the concept of the PO as the one-ringable-neck responsible for the ROI of the team. However this simplification rarely addresses the needs of the total business.  Here's a great article on the expansion of this simplification. The Product Manager vs Product Owner   by John Peltier I've worked with numerous teams in my 10 years of guiding Agile transitions.  And reflecting upon all those teams, there success levels, the customer & te...

I'm angry.  I'm as angry as a hornet's nest that just got hit by a rock thrown by a 10 year old that has no idea what they just did.  Oh, there may be no intent of harm, but someone is getting stung. Here's the current situation.  A 70+ year old person I know woke up a few days ago and fell in the bathroom.  We will call her M.  M was knocked unconscious for a moment.  M's spouse responded and called 911, the medics arrived and took M into the Forsyth County Hospital in Winston-Salem.  The medics were wonderful, very courteous and professional.  M was throwing up and had vertigo on the way to the hospital.  At the hospital she was treated and admitted for tests and observations.  When I talked to M, and she described the event it appeared to me that she had not had a stroke, they had done a CT scan and it was normal.  I'm not a doctor, and have no medical training, yet I've never played a doctor on TV. ...

Oh you gotta to try this ....   Bullet-Journal. An organization system for daily journaling.  Perfect for the agile coach that loves the tactical analog system of sticky notes.  Did you catch that - it is NOT an App! Bullet Journal - the analog system for sticky lovers Watch the video and jump start 2014 with a journaling system to keep your stickies organized. "Bullet - Journal - for the list-maker, the note-takers, the Post-It note pilots, the track-keepers, and the dabbling doodlers.  Bullet journal is for those who feel there are few platforms as powerful as the blank paper page.  It's an analog system for the digital age that will help you organize the present, record the past, and plan for the future." I'm in - start mine yesterday.  I have the authority to make modification to the system (I'm a supper-user on this platform).  I'll let you know how they work out. david@koontz.name

Wish there was an App for That! As every cycle passes back through the beginning it must first go through the ending... so let's first see if I made any progress in last year's long forgotten new year's resolution .  It was to create a learning plan and bet back into the beginner's shoes.  To become a newbie on some new tech and experience the frustration and excitement of learning a new tech skill. All in all I did very well.  I did create a learning plan.  And like all plans it was great to have one and worthless after a little bit of learning proved it to be a poor plan (almost like I created it out of ignorance - oh, yeah - I did!).  Yet, it did provide a direction and increased the motivation as I could measure the progress and see where it was directing me in the wrong direction (or a direction I no longer desired to go). I did learn the basics of RubyMotion (an iOS tool chain - development stack for iPhone apps). RubyMotion.com  Ran a f...

A technique for increasing performance by using a simple (perhaps magical) recipe when giving feedback. Read the study, understand the method of investigation; ask yourself if this is similar to your work environment - just enough such that the technique might be generalized across the two different situations. Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust: Wise Interventions to Provide Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide  by David S. Yeager, et. al. If you just want to cheat, read the "cliff-notes" version (it's what I did) - but I promise myself to go back after writing this post and read the study. Try This One Phrase to Make Feedback 40% More Effective  by Jeff Haden - INC. Jeff is quoting   Daniel Coyle , author of  The Talent Code  which references the study.  Now I'm referring to Jeff -> Daniel -> Yeager et al.  And you are at the front of the line of referral - maybe you should jump the line - read the original work. But y...

Does it exist? Health care in the USA is under great pressure to change these days.  So regardless of which pole of the political sphere you personally are drawn toward, the landscape underneath your view point will be changing.  One could ask why.  It is an interesting line of inquiry.  Will the fact that health care is just too costly, increasing at exponential rates, and leaving an ever enlarging number of americans out of the "care" system suffice for the moment? So this domain of the american system is being pushed off a proverbial cliff into a turbulent troubled sea of change.  I wonder - do we have any system models that would describe what might help in these situations? Here's a case in point, a CEO announce a spur of the moment policy change, a move toward transparency.  Why?  Perhaps he was frustrated with the ill-rational behavior of "the system".  And decide that a move toward transparency was a rational behavior. Florida Hosp...

Best quote: "Significant Impostor Syndrome" 2013 Brickell Key Award nominations video. Published on  Oct 24, 2013 Nominee recognition video for the Brickell Key awards, presented at LeanKanban North America 2013 in Chicago IL, USA. Video by Derek Wade.   Music: Thomas Newman - "American Beauty" Spollier Alert!!! The winners were Yuval Yeret and Troy Magennis. See Also: http://leankanban.com/brickell-key/   the award page.

December's issue of Harvard Business Review creates a compelling case for the concept of persistent teams. And hey, if they do it in the operating room, then there must be good science behind it. But heck, we don't need no stinking science, we just know it works, right? http://hbr.org/2013/12/the-hidden-benefits-of-keeping-teams-intact/ar/1 Harvard Business Review - Dec 2013

Our company just discovered an interesting impediment this past week.  The Dallas ICEpocalypse of 2013 resulted in many companies shutting their offices, ours did this also, both Friday and Monday (Dec. 6th & 9th) - someone even opened an outdoor ice skating rink in Dallas .  Yet many team members worked from home, and to do this many had to use the Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access secure systems.  Guess what impediment a few thousand employees all working from home the same day causes?  The VPN is a licensed infrastructure with a license limit.  Yep! only a fraction of the people working from home could access the limited licenses of the software VPN. So I wonder if there is a system, known to mankind, that is designed to deal with this sort of constraint and surge in usage....  isn't that new fangled cloud computing environment designed to handle this very sort of on demand scalability? So I understand the need of the company IT department...

Practicing Into to Refactoring with LEGOs . Refactoring is when a developer changes the structure of the code without changing the behavior.  To do this with little or no risk a craftsman will have a set of well maintained tests that prove the code still behaves exactly as before. A simple way to visualize refactoring is to think of 12 eggs.  Most people will imagine a carton of eggs.  But it is possible to think of 2 cartons of 6 eggs; or even 6 packages of two hardboiled eggs.  Refactoring get's its name from the factorization of numbers.  Twelve has multiple factors (6 x 2), (3 x 4), (2 x 6), (1 x 12).  No matter which factorization the resulting collection is twelve eggs.  In TDD we have test to make sure we don't break the eggs. Note:  Many IDE's claim to do refactoring, and many times they work just as expected; however not all IDE refactorings are reliable.  I suggest you test your IDE's refactoring before you trust it. To int...

The Spartan team at VHA has been doing t'ai-chi before their daily stand-up now for several months. Just a few minutes every day.  Lead by someone different every day. Spartan's daily stand-up starts with t'ai-chi I was floored the first time I attended.  It's introduction may have been the tipping point between team formation and performing . See Also: It's Not Just Standing Up  Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings - Jason Yip Neil Killick's advice on Stand-ups: Stand Up and Shut Up the 24 forms of Tai Chi (youTube video)

I hear lots of colleagues using the term 'technical debt' and the scenario that plays in my brain's cineplex is from The Princess Bride when Inigo Montoya remarks to Vizzini; "You keep using that word.  I don't think it means what you think it means." Inconceivable! So what does "Technical Debt" mean?  And what do my colleague's typically mean if it is not truly technical debt. The first is easy; the definition of Technical Debt: He who coins the term gets to define the term ( that's Ward Cunningham ). Ward Cunningham on Technical Debt Metaphor  OK, so to be truly technical debt one must negotiate the debt with the business.  The business should achieve some objective sooner and incur an obligation to repay the technical team the time and effort required to put the system back into a proper state of clean well factored code. But, wait... what could my colleagues mean when they misuse the term technical debt?  I think the...

What do you do when the Product Solutions Director comes to you and suggest that she would like a product delivered within a 5% error on the delivery date? One suggestion is to run through a thought experiment with her.  For example:  Let's assume this is a project that will take about 6 months.  Let's base the schedule on a 180 day time line.  So you desire us to hit that 180 day target from six months away to within 5%.  OK that's 0.05 * 180 = 9 days.  Now is that a plus or minus 5% or a 5% range?  Or in absolute terms for this example do I have to be within 171 - 189 days (+/-5%) or within 176 - 185 days (5%).  So to continue this example, consider a team doing 2 week sprints.  This would equate to 12 - 13 sprints with one sprint error. by Mountain Goat Software But perhaps more important is what this one prime aspect of project success says about the other aspects of the project.  So lets try to balance the project success as...

Sprint length - a fun debate. What is the best practice - a funny question. There is no best practice for sprint length.  But what factors should go into the decision? The team's ability to become predictable within the sprint duration. The Product Owner's ability to plan and to commit to the unknown of not changing the plan for the sprint's duration. The frequency of needed feedback on the direction the team is making toward the release goal. The ability of the team to create their sustainable pace. Many team's I've worked with have trouble defining their sustainable pace .  I've argued that this pace that allows the team to deliver both working software that is potentially shippable each sprint and to have high quality deliverables along with team learning is quite a bit below the teams typical sprint velocity. When teams are under extreme pressure to deliver they typically forget one of the 7 habits of effective people - to sharpen the saw .  S...

What do the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays do to your teams tempo and cadence? For most US teams this holiday period from mid November to after the first of January is hectic and disruptive in various ways.  This calls for a Holiday Stratagem.  A trick to allow the team to have some semblance of continuity and flow during these times. The Sontaran Stratagem - Doctor Who To discuss this stratagem let's first define some terms: Tempo - the rate of workdays to calendar days Cadence - the beat of the sprint events to fall upon the same calendar day of the week Sprint duration -  in work days (in this example I'll use 10 work days) Sprint length - the length of calendar days between two sprints (14 days for the example 2 week sprint) What do you value more?  The ability to deliver more work in the short term -or- the ability to predict long term the capability of the team to deliver that work?  Or perhaps something else, like teaching a new te...