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Agile Mindset

Seize The Improvement Opportunity!

Sometimes it is right there before us and all we need to do is to reach out and take it. Improvement opportunities are there – all we need to do is learn how to identify them and invest the minimal time to turn the opportunity into something real.

A good indication of an improvement opportunity hanging around is when something really good or really bad happens.

For example, I am working with a client where seven development teams are struggling for some time to better work together. One of the problems we were having was that features didn’t complete – didn’t move to Done. This week we had a deadline and the teams worked very hard and managed to get the important things done. They worked hard but you saw the spark in their eyes – They were very happy and proud about it.

Agile Mindset

When Scrum Events Are Burdening

At the beginning of a Scrum implementation y, you usually finds two main types of team behaviors. Those who embrace the scrum events (Planning, daily, etc.) and try to better understand them to represent one type. There are many issues and many required adjustments and the team is working on them with the coach.

Other teams view Scrum events as a total waste of time. They do them reluctantly and don’t see any value in it. What do you do? We’ve had several such cases and we wanted to better understand what’s going on there. After a deeper look into the dynamics of these teams, we reached some conclusions that let us sleep better at night.

Agile Marketing

Choosing your Agile Marketing Tool

Tools for Agile Marketing seem to be a hot topic in the various Agile Marketing communities. The Marketing Agility Podcast is talking to some tool vendors and people started to discuss it on the Agile Marketing Facebook Group as well.

For co-located marketing teams the best approach would probably be to start without an electronic tool and just use a physical board/wall with sticky notes at least until they get the hang of it and learn what they really need. Many marketing teams are distributed and therefore don’t have this luxury. While moving to a co-located setup is definitely a recommended option it isn’t always realistic… So those teams do need to have some electronic tool to support their move to agile marketing.

Agile Leadership

Experiencing Self-Selection of feature teams

Lately I had the opportunity and pleasure to facilitate a process of designing cross-functional feature teams in a self-selection process. Self-selection is a facilitated way to let people choose which team to work in. It is surprising how rare this practice is sometimes even considered eccentric while practically it is a simple and fast and produces such great results – well-formed teams with more involved and engaged people.

Why teams self-selection?

It’s a fast engaging process that creates the best conditions for a team to reach high performance.

It’s based on the assumption that with the appropriate context, people will choose to work in a team that they feel will make them be most productive, taking into account the personal relationships with the other team members, the complementary skills they bring and their aspirations for personal and professional development.

Kanban

Ba – A sense of togetherness – Amplified by Music

When teaching SAFe (The Scaled Agile Framework) we talk about “Ba” – the sense of togetherness and connectedness that amplifies the performance of teams and larger groups (e.g. Agile Release Trains).

This week when visiting Leankit (To teach an Implementing SAFe 4.0 SPC4 class to their Customer Success coaching team) I had the opportunity to see their Sweep ceremonies (Sweep ~= Program Increment) – a Demo and Business Context event for the whole company.

The sense of “Ba” – people having fun together, enjoying their week together, and working towards the company’s mission, was in the air.

Insights

PI Planning Magic!

Earlier this month I was helping a software organization in an Israeli defense organization (that’s why there are no pictures) run their first PI Planning event. The day after I told my colleagues at Agilesparks that this is one event I will try to remember whenever I get into difficult times doing coaching, something that happens from time to time, coaching being what it is. I will try to remember that day because of the magic that happened somewhere around noon. And I want to tell you all about it.

Change Management

The Need To Continuously and Relentlessly Persevere

You may be smart. You may be intelligent. You may be creative. Yet to really achieve something meaningful, to make a real change, you need to do what the title suggests.

I like words and these three did something to me. There are other good words to describe this but these three are special. For me.

Feature teams

Comparing Estimation Techniques

Which Estimation Units Should Your Teams Use For Work Items?

Why estimate in the first place?

At the feature level, you want estimates so you can figure ROI (Return On Investment), so the business and product owners can prioritize one feature against another
At the roadmap & backlog level, most organizations want to be able to forecast, be it at the feature level or release level, so you need to be able to understand what is your organization’s capacity, and translate it into plans with dates and deliverables, milestones etc.
At the finer-grained, work-item level (typically User Story), you want to help teams understand their capacity so they can take on the right amount. In particular in teams that use a frequent planning cadence, such as that prescribed by Scrum
Still at the team level, team members setting expectations on the amount of work they plan to complete can surprise themselves, learn, and improve.
At the team level, you want to understand whether a work item is small enough, might want teams to discuss estimates as part of creating a common understanding about work and align their views

Agile Mindset

Getting into a teaching mindset

Being mindful of the teaching mindset

I wear many hats at AgileSparks – what you might call a T-Shaped sparkie… Every week I can find myself wearing the consultant hat, the marketer hat, the thought leader hat, the trainer hat, the conference speaker hat, the head of business in the United States hat and probably a few more that I’m forgetting. Switching hats requires a context switch which we know is tough but also requires a mindset switch.

Specifically, what I found over the years is that going into a teaching mindset is something I need to pay some extra attention to. This goes beyond making sure I’m comfortable with the materials I’m going to deliver, reviewing the facilitator’s guide, etc.

Agile Tools

5 pitfalls when using Atlassian Jira

Jira Atlassian is a great ALM tool for managing your Agile environment. It provides a friendly work space for Agile teams and has some informative out-of-the-box reports that allow teams to easily apply root cause analysis.

At the program level, there are several easy ways to achieve aggregated data reports and epic progress boards. The relatively new Jira portfolio also has some interesting features that enable larger organizations to manage their program, including shared planning, shared releases, progress, and mitigation plans.

Visiting many organizations that use Jira as their main tool for their Agile environment, I decided to summarize 5 common pitfalls it is best to avoid.

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