Agile Otter Blog

I've had a side-project that started because I've been working with dual-role (and one triple-role) Scrum Masters lately. I appreciate how hard it is for them to be good at several things simultaneously. Once I started collecting techniques for them, I figured I should publish it somehow. I was thinking of a blog, but Joshua Kerievsky (our leader at IndustrialLogic ) had mentioned possibly using something like LeanPub. I really need to learn to release a product early and use feedback to guide it to be something that really addresses a market need. I've invested some odd hours here and there on this, and have gotten some friends to look it over. Sadly, most of them who are dual-role SMs haven't had time. Still, here is a chance for me to learn in a lean startup kind of way, releasing early and often, and let the market help me develop the product further. I'm interested in hearing what you think of the cover, and the idea in general. I've not...

Today we held the first ever Puzzle Challenge at my client's site. The goal of the challenge was for each team to pick a work style that aided them in getting the greatest number of puzzles completed in a very short time (10 minutes per sprint). The set of puzzles to solved was a mix of crosswords, mazes, word-search, sudoku, word jumbles, and number blocks. The teams were told that there was no partial credit at the end of the ten minute sprint. The teams were given a menu of practices to choose from: Team members could one mode of adaptation, leadership, teamwork, noise level, and task switching. A style of 11111 would mean a 1 in each of these categories, a style strongly resembling an "ideal" organization in the buttoned-down 80s. A style of 33333 is basically a productive chaos, which might have been more widely recommended in the free-spirited 60s. Teams made an initial selection, then were allowed some adaptation. In initial selection of work s...

The law of Raspberry Jam is "the more you spread it around, the thinner it gets." A useful principle when dealing with work-in-progress, attention span, goal-setting, etc. I found this gem recited in an email a while back and saved it, without really remembering who wrote it. If you know, please feel free to help attribute it. It quotes Goldratt's /Critical Chain/: There’s a lovely example of the evils of multitasking in Goldratt’s Critical Chain. Suppose you have three things to deliver: A, B and C. Suppose they all take, I don’t know, 2 days each to complete. If you did them one after the other, A will be finished by day 3, B by day 5, and C by day 7. AABBCC. Now suppose you want to satisfy the people who commissioned B and C that you’re paying attention to them, and you decide to multitask. So you decide to split things up, and work on them in one day blocks, ABCABC. The result is that now A is delivered on day 5, two days later than before, and B is delivered on d...