Agile Complexification Inverter

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...

Introduction:  What We Have Learned Originally written in 1993, this edition written in 2003 has additional insights from 10 years of working with teams.  The authors see more pragmatism on the subject, less thoughtless rushes to a fad movement.  Top leaders are seeing that teams also apply to themselves, at the top of the business.  They see the core aspect as discipline, not the management fad du jour.  The discipline for team performance has 6 basics: team size, complementary skills, common purpose, performance goals, commonly working agreements, and mutual accountability.  The desire to be a team is not sufficient - one must have performance centric outcomes as the objective.  Leadership is more important at the beginning - but not the primary determinant of success.  Most organizations have untapped potential in team performance.  The organizations performance ethic makes the difference between one-off success and widespread org...

Here's the 2016 Pumpkin decorating contest loser.  It's been a real LEAN year for the Scrum team. Have you heard of a MVP - Minimal Viable Pumpkin? Minimal Viable Pumpkin (MVP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_startup

Many of you have all heard of the Tuckman model of team dynamics (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing).  It was created in 1966 and has become the most popular model for describing team behavior.  Is it time to level up in your mental model of team dynamics?  Are you ready for a richer more functional model? Introducing the Team Performance Model by Drexler and Sibbet Orientation - Why am I here? "Orientation is about understanding the purpose of a team and assessing what it will mean to be a member.  you need to understand the reason the team exist, what will be expected of you and how you will benefit from membership.  In a new team, these are individual concerns, because the group is only potentially a team.  that is why these concerns are illustrated as occurring in your imagination at an intuitive level.  As a team leader it is important to provide time and space for people to answer these internal questions themselves." Keys to when...

Let's look at an info-graphic of a beginning team's metrics and use this as a case study in Scrum Team Metrics. Description of charts: Burndown chart - a daily count of the number of task units (aspirin is this teams selected units for task estimation) not done.  This includes the task yet to be started, and task in process. Tasks in Process - a daily count of the number of tasks in process. Tasks Done - a daily count of the number of tasks that are done. Stories Done - a daily count of the number of Stories that are done. Velocity - the empirical measure of Stories that are considered done by the team and accepted as done by the Product Owner during the Sprint Review. The Back Story on this team: This team had been attempting to do some form of ad-hoc Scrum / Kanban with little guidance and understanding of the process.  The Kanban aspect came from the company's tooling (RTC) template - not from any real practices the team was implementing.   After som...

An Exercise in Estimation:  How many times can you fold a piece of paper in half & half again... I do this exercise when beginning scrum teams start story estimation or task estimation.  While this exercise has a unique twist that is very different than task estimation or story estimation - very few people foresee this aspect of the exercise, so it adds to the ah-ha moment. Start by giving everyone a sheet of typical paper (8.5 x 11 in the USA - although the size just doesn't matter).  Then tell them the exercise but ask that no one do any thing yet.  First we will estimate.  The task is to estimate how many times you could fold the paper in half and then again in half and repeat... without doing it what's your estimate of the number of folds? Ask people to call out their estimate, write then on a board in no particular order or fashion. Typical groups come up with estimate in the range of 5 - 20 folds. If you want to do math... calcula...

Mayhem Just last month I receive a congratulatory letter from REI MasterCard - 10 years of a mutually beneficial business relationship ....  until .... chaos ensued (thank you Mr. Mayhem).  So I accepted the opportunity to communicate with my business lender on an incident that made me very dissatisfied with their policies. Subject: Re: Congratulations on your REI World MasterCard anniversary!  Thank you Robert,      Just to let you know - I’m sure this will interest you - I will shortly be canceling my 10 year relationship with REI MasterCard, because of the quality of service you have just required me to deal with. I’ve got a great payment history and have been using our card to pay bills on line and automagically for years. Recently through my oversight, I forgot to pay my bill on time. So in response to this great customer who always pays his bills and once in 10 years paid late, your organization saw fit to block all payments, causing fu...

I learned this technique from the facilitators of Language Hunting  and Where Are Your Keys , they term the technique How Fascinating   and practice it quite a few times each game. The purpose of the technique is to invert the physiology of failure into a learning moment to reflect upon what just went wrong and instead of cringing and curling up into a safe ball, we open up the body and the mind to learning and the experience of reflecting and allowing the universe to teach us something. Try it a few times... See Also: The Failure bow -DeepFUN by Matt Smith Go Ahead, Take a Failure Bow by  Beth Kanter  at HBR TED Talk:   The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure "Great dreams aren't just visions," says Astro Teller, "They're visions coupled to strategies for making them real." The head of X (formerly Google X), Teller takes us inside the "moonshot factory," as it's called, where his team seeks to solve the world...

What do you think & feel about personality and behavioral assessments?  Are they useful to you?  Can you share them with others to help improve your relationships?  Do you have the courage to put your personality on display for your collaborators to inspect? Well I thought I'd try to open the kimono to see if it helps me... I've studied Psychometric assessments and some I find useful, some I feel are just a step to the left from astrology charting.  Yet might not be harmful for self reflection.  I've also found that it takes an expert to explain the tools and reports such that a layperson can understand and make positive use of the assessment and it's report.  And while I've been "certified" is some of these tools/technique I do not practice them enough to be competent - and my pitch is akin to a snake-oil salesman. One issue with these assessments was made clear to me when I heard the Invisibilia NPR show on The Personality Myth.  "We lik...

David Koontz guiding a canoe I was at the Dallas Tech Fest last week (2017 actually) and was asked several times what an Agile Transition Guide was (it was a title on my name tag)... it's surprising to me how many people assume they know what an Agile Coach is, yet there is no good definition or professional organization (with a possible exception coming: Agile Coaching Institute ). So naturally, the conversation went something like this: Inquisitive person:   "Hi David, what's an Agile Transition Guide?  Is that like a coach?" David:  "Hi, glad you asked.  What does a coach do in your experience?" Inquisitive person: "They help people and teams improve their software practices." David:  "Yes, I do that also." Inquisitive person: "Oh, well then why don't you call yourself a coach?" David:  "Great question:  Let's see...  well one of the foundational principles of coaching ( ICF ) is that the coa...