If you’re unfamiliar with the phenomenon, we’re in the middle of conference season right now in the US. Quite a few software and testing centric conferences are scheduled every year in late spring and early summer and then fall. Two times a year, I’m on the road for 4-6 weeks attending and sharing at wide variety of conferences.
It’s something that I enjoy doing although the travel can be quite tiring. One of the great things about it is that it provides me with new ideas. And if you know me, many of those ideas end up in my writing.
Here are a few…
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.
In late 2014 I ran an open space at the Raleigh Scrum Coaches Retreat with this title. You can read more about that session here.
I then got the opportunity to run the session again at the Phoenix Scrum Gathering in May 2015. The session was well attended with the room full at around 100+ people. So the dynamics were a bit different from the retreat.
Instead of focusing on those bad expressions, I want to instead share some of the new themes I heard in this session.
So I published the book in late January 2015, so just a few months ago. I wanted to share some of the happening around the book.
Sales
Have been incredibly brisk, both in the US and abroad. The first month or so was quite slow. But we’re now starting to see momentum gaining sharply.
There also another trend, folks are buying larger “chunks” of the books in PDF format to help in their organizational agile transformation efforts. We’ve had 4-5 large purchases of copies for just this purpose. We hope to see that trend continue as well.
On the surface, this statement appears as if I’ve lost my mind. For one thing, a traditional view to Product Owners is as a Product Manager or customer/business stakeholder-facing role. And the traditional Project Manager is more so a planning and execution focused role. The two are quite far apart and seem to have little synergy.
The other factor is traditional versus agile contexts.
There are no “traditional” Product Owners. Usually a Product Manager is in essentially the role but it’s very outwardly and upwardly facing. Once the requirements are “signed off”, they’re not that interested in collaborating with the team until the end of the project.
I frequently get asked about the dynamics of building agile organizations from an organization structure point of view.
The most important point is that you don’t create a high-performance agile organization by the defined structure. Managers don’t do it; neither do VP’s or Directors.
Surely we set the stage. But the teams are the ones that create the organization. We don’t have to optimize the structure for every technical hurdle or risk. Or create a structure that perfectly balances skill-sets and experience across all functional roles.
Whew! I’m glad, because I never figured out how to do that perfectly anyway.
I was watching ESPN today. It’s spring in North Carolina, early April to be specific, and the Masters golf tournament is scheduled for later this week. So there’s a build up of golf buzz related to it.
I’m not much of a golfer, but even I pay attention to the Masters. It seems to be one of those golf tournaments that have seeped into the fabric of American life. And the Augusta, GA course is incredibly beautiful as well.
But enough of that.
There was an interview today with Bubba Watson. Bubba is a 2-time champion and he won the tournament last year – 2014. Early predictions from the pundits give him a more than reasonable chance to repeat.
As I listened to the interview, I became more and more intrigued with Bubba Watson – the person. And I started to see a correlation between some of his answers and the agile principles and mindset I’ve come to know and love.
I’ve recently been reading about and discovering some agile coaching firms who have different views towards client coaching. To be honest, I’m struggling to understand and accept some of their perspectives. So as is often my practice, I thought I’d write something about it to clarify my thoughts and position on the matter.
But first, let me share a story from a close friend of mine in Southern California:
A Coaching Story
I’m one of the best, most experienced personal trainers on the planet. If you view my website, you’ll see testimonials about my:
- Helping transform the health of large groups by running health camps;
- Assisting incredibly famous actors and actresses increase their physical performance to get ready for challenging physical roles;
- Serving as a lead fitness consultant on The Greatest Loser show;
- There’s even a rumor that the President will be inviting me to serve on the Council for Physical Fitness.
I challenged a service organization leader the other day about their agile journey. The firm provides outsourced software development teams – mostly for agile-centric clients. I was asking him about his internal application of agile practices and he asked me the question:
But Bob, when are we “done” with Agile?
From his perspective, his clients were asking for agile aware and literate teams and he was providing them. But he really hadn’t wrapped his head around agility. And he struggled with the notion of adopting agile practices internally.
I wrote an article a few months ago about sprint reviewing the “hard stuff”. It was inspired by an engineer who asked me (challenged me) about demonstrating more back-end, embedded, non-UI, infrastructural work at the end of Scrum sprints.
His general take was that it was:
- Hard to figure out how to demo the “stuff” they were delivering, and
- The components didn’t lend themselves to demonstration (in simplistic terms, they didn’t have a UI)
I pushed back a bit in the article, trying to encourage him to demo “something” and not “go silent” for too long.
