Agile Otter Blog

"Is it safe to say PM has to acquire new skills to make himself fit in the scrum process? "  This question was asked in a scrum forum on Linked In, and many interesting and valuable answers were given. It is pasted here verbatim because I want my answers to this question to come home with me, and to be available to my clients, peers, and colleagues. The fear of "working without management" or "losing my management job" is pretty fierce in larger organizations, and I think it can be a misplaced or imaginary fear. This answer was specifically pointed to people in a Scrum-specific forum, but information here applies generally in any number of organizational change contexts. Even in our migration to Anzeneering , we have seen/felt the powers permission and support. On to my answers: Strictly, yes.  The biggest and most difficult difference is not telling individuals what to do. It's hard for the individuals at first too. It's easier, onc...

Ruud Wijnands and I just completed QCon London. I have a few new contacts, a few new stories, and we were able to present "Take Agile Back" -- a talk in three parts: Take Back Agile: "If this is agile, take it back." Take Back Agile: "Give me my agile back." Take Back Agile: "... to your team."  The point was not to shore up the defenses and protect the whole velocity/timebox/points/meetings nightmare, but to remind people that there were reasons that XP (and scrum) worked, and to return our thoughts to the experiments that resulted in a successful, productive, social process that got stuff done. There are underpinnings to consider. Safety (anzeneering) is one. It has to be safe to experiment in order to do things more intensely. We see people repeat some practices, but deny the right to modify the system via experiments and validated learning. This is a mistake. We need to find o ur own "two questions" and focus on nev...

Everyone points to the four "preferences" part of the manifesto and ignores the more important first paragraph, and the far more important second page ("principles"). Key phrase: "We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it." That's different than "we are cementing our idea of software development process by teaching it and certifying others to teach it." It's different from "we are making people feel better." It's different from "we don't write documentation" or "we force velocity as high as possible" If we lose that key phrase, we lose it all.

I feel safe to say that "being agile" is more than a mere state of mind, because an agile person or team has definite practices and tendencies that are not present in non-agile environments. I don't doubt that there is a change in values, but I argue that those changes will have practical, daily results that can be seen. Too many people hear/see "just a mindset" and think of the four tiny sentences in the front page of the manifesto (which skips over the first paragraph, which is by far the more important IMHO). To wit:  A team is working 80+ hours a week.   The design and architecture were carved in stone last year.   The members all "do their own work."   Each team member has 18 tasks "in process"   They're "debugging their way to release" without automation   The last five retros have ended with "oh, well. We'll try to do better, I guess."   They are all competing against each other for recognition/award...

An i nteresting article from Sara Mednick linked insight and sleep, but in her explanation on page 27 I saw some interesting echoes of the work done in 1920s by Graham Wallas. This is an excerpt from the paper linked above (emphasis mine): The insight gain studied by Wagner et al. initially revealed itself in an implicit manner.  Then, through a slow process (enhanced by sleep), it emerged from the nondeclarative into the declar- ative realms as a fully assembled insight into the task structure.  The authors proposed that insight gain is not a pro- cedural learning process, since the reac- tion time data did not become faster with learning, which is the hallmark of procedural learning.  Instead, all participants who gained insight (regardless of whether they were in the sleep or wake groups) actually showed a slowing in reaction time just prior to insight gain compared with participants who did not gain insight.   “Specifically, the slow- ing of reaction...

An interesting article was published in the New York Times recently reporting that, experimentally at least, teams have a measurable collective intelligence, and that this intelligence is drawn from unexpected wells. We might expect that those teams had really smart leaders and high IQs in general than others. It seems reasonable in today's world where we respect individual skills and individual characteristics and bank so much on the charisma and dominating spirit of strong leaders. That is why it is so interesting that this theory is entirely wrong. Instead, there are three reported attributes that seem to favor some teams: Equality Empathy More females in the population. The second, empathy, was a bit surprising only because male developers pride themselves on separating their feelings from their work -- compartmentalizing the subjective from the subject matter. Maybe that was wrong all along also, and a barrier to passionate or fulfilling work. In short, we don...

First look at this video... We can have a laugh at this poor lady's bad moment (and frankly, I did -- don't judge me). But it is funny because we see this all the time in different forms. How many times have you seen a team crank up the size of its sprint "commitment" because they didn't make the last one? How many times have you seen people struggle with a practice by doing it "wrong" over and over until they simply got sick of trying and quit? When we're focused on something else (getting the release out, dealing with a bad review, feeling bad about a skill we need but don't have) we can easily get into this kind of a mess. Here you know that she knew intuitively that her problem was that the gas cap was on the other side, but she somehow got it into her head that it was the wrong side of the post and not the car. She kept pulling up to one side and then the other, sure that she got on the right side of the post this time. It was...