I remember my first reading of the DAD – Disciplined Agile Framework by Scott Ambler that one of the areas he emphasized was governance.
When I first read it I had two immediate reactions:
- What did he mean by “governance”?
- And why care about it within agility; wasn’t that something agile intended to minimize or eliminate with transparency?
So to say that I was less than impressed by DAD initially was an understatement. But over time, I’ve kept up with Scott’s writings and explanations of his intentions with DAD. And to be honest, I like what I’m hearing of late.
Until they realize that:
They have to sometimes say NO to some stakeholders;
They have to make decisions; short term vs. long term; tactical vs. strategic; now vs. later;
They have to peer into the future and anticipate customer needs;
They have to aggregate opinions from multiple, sometimes very powerful and unique, voices;
They have to trust their teams;
Every year I try to spend time on my own training. I usually start thinking about two things the year before:
- What are some knowledge gaps that I have that I’d like to fill, and
- What are upcoming trends that will cause me to become obsolete if I don’t get ahead of them?
Then I review the available courses and I’ll try to come up with 2-3 things that I’ll focus on for improvement.
This year, I’ve planned on the following:
- Training from the Back of the Room, by Sharon Bowman
- The Nexus framework for scaling Scrum, by Ken Schwaber and Scrum.org, in July
- And Leadership Agility 360 workshop, by Bill joiner, in November
I just watched a video by Mishkin Berteig where he clarified that the concept of a Sprint #0 is NOT part of Scrum.
A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine tweeted about the concept of Hardening Sprints. If you’re aware, the Scaled Agile Framework has “dabbled” with hardening sprints and other “extensions” to Scrum. Ron Jeffrey’s strongly, clearly, and repeatedly responded that hardening sprints are NOT part of Scrum. It became physically painful as Ron pounded his point over and over again in tweets.
I’m an insider (a CEC) to the Scrum Alliance CST & CEC discussion group. Some of the most heated discussions I’ve ever seen there revolved around the definition of Core Scrum in the Agile Atlas. This was before the Scrum Alliance centered on the Scrum Guide as the clear definition of Scrum.
Giving feedback is one of the things I like most about agile methods. There’s this thing about it though. It’s not that easy to give effective feedback. Lately, I’ve been hearing agile team members start their feedback with the following statements:
- I don’t want to rain on your parade, but...
- I don’t mean to be negative, but...
- I don’t mean to criticize, but...
- I don’t mean for you to take this the wrong way, but...
And then there’s the Ricky Bobby quote from the movie Talladega Nights regarding – “With all due respect…”
Alan Cyment: Another Look at Shu-Ha-Ri
Alan Cyment gave a wonderful Pecha Kucha talk at the recent Scrum Gathering in Phoenix.
In it, he challenged the use of the Shu-Ha-Ri model or metaphor on a couple of levels –
- Is a martial arts metaphor really the best way to describe the growth dynamics of agile instances?
- Are there really only three phases of agile adoption?
- Often in Shu-Ha-Ri we can revert as well or regress in our learning.
- The notion is that the Coach is a Sensei…and others aren’t?
Alan’s metaphor was much simpler, yet I believe richer.
There's an interesting website called Zimbio that runs a variety of fun surveys. I just filled in a Dr. Seuss character survey to see which character I most resemble. The returns are in and...tada...I am closest to:
the Fish
You're the eternal voice of conscience among your group of friends, a wise worrywart with a soft spot for rules. You can be a bit grumpy at times, but you know you're often the only thing standing between order and all-out chaos. The world would really be a safer, happier place if people just listened to you.
Now if only I knew the Fish well enough to resemble that remark :-)
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
The Agile Austin conference was held on March 21 in Austin Texas. It's been held since 2012, so this was the third annual conference.
I'd submitted a couple of talks and was lucky enough to be selected to present. Most of the presenters were from the local area and Texas, but a few "out of town" folks participated. Since this was my first Agile Austin conference, I didn't really know what to expect.
Well, it was a blast. 500 raging agilistas showed up. They apparently sold out the event with about 100 on the waiting list. Imagine that? I was talking to one of the organizers and he said people in his company were asking him to "get them in" and he had to turn them down.
I was working with a colleague the other day and we were talking about speakers for a possible local agile conference.
I brought up a few people that I respected in the national agile community and, almost to a person, they discounted them as being “the same old…same old” presenters. From their perspective, they were looking for more:
- Fresh meat or new blood
- Novel or breakthrough ideas
- Something “different”
- Out of the Box thinkers
- More modern and energetic
And I think I understood the point. We can certainly get repetitious in our industry. Following the same old pundits with the same old messages. But at the same time, something bothered me and for quite awhile…and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
