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Agile and Conchango, what a combination. This is my account on how Agile is being used and further developed here at Conchango.
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Google Custom Search Google's custom search also dubbed CO-OP makes it easy to create a search engine which will only return results within a certain topic. You control which pages are included in the result-set and how they are being included. I will not bore you with details for, Goole manages to explain their service quite well. Simply follow the link posted above. The reason why Google Co-OP is mentioned in this post, is because Tim Haughton created XPoogle and DotNoodle within a few hours. While XPoogle focuses on topics related to Xtreme Programming and DotNoodle focuses on topics around .Net. Watching that development, I could not help myself but to create a custom search engine which focuses on Scrum and staying with the naming theme so well established by Tim I have dubbed it Scrumoogle.           The motivation behind creating Scrumoogle is easily explained. Our community is good at collaboration, it is one of the core values. Scrumoogle is as good as the community chooses to make it. Everyone is invited to contribute their private collection of links which are Scrum related. Scrumoogle is also about trust. Obviously I would like to ensure that this is a search engine with a narrow focus on Scrum, not on Agile, not on XP, not on DSDM...I think you get the picture. I cannot possibly verify every submission made, so I would hope that those who do submit will actually ensure that they are staying on topic. Improving Scrumoogle There are a few ideas starting to develop in the back of my head and I would like to share them early on in my thought process. · Ranked inclusion - You submit an URL, which then gets ranked by the community. Much like Digg. Once a certain threshold is reached, it gets included. · Pingback Inclusion - You have finished you latest post on Scrum. You ping Scrumooge to include your URL. You have an API key that you use and your web-site has been verified up-front to be Scrum related. I would be more than happy to learn about your ideas, I would love to understand how a community driven search engine can make searching for complicated topics about Scrum easier for everyone. I also like to exporer this technology, including Googles Custom Search AJAX API, which seems a very good way of including context sensitive information on someone's web-site. ...and Conchango What has this to do with Conchango? We emply bright people and we have an ever growing community of Agile and Scrum experts. I would hope that those can set an example and ensure, together with me, that we are staying on topic. Naturally I would expect Conchango generated content, which is meant fo public consumption with a topic of Scrum to be included very quickly in this search engine. I know I will do my best to grow Scrumoogle and make it an interesting service for the community.
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The Fall 2007 Gathering.
As some of you might know the Scrumgathering in November is being organised by the Scrumalliance and Conchango agreed to help as best as possible. After some preparation time the Scrumallaiance has now released some more information on the format of the gathering. The autumn gathering will offer not only Open Spaces but also tracks of structured sessions. If you are interested in submitting a track, please read the call for papers carefully and ensure your suggestion makes it to the Scrumalliance on time.
The CSC Program
To quote from the recently posted article (you can only read it when you are logged in):
"The Scrum Alliance is seeking feedback on a proposed new certification program for Scrum coaches who are guiding organizations in adopting, transitioning, implementing or scaling Scrum. The Certified Scrum Coach Program, or CSC for short, is an experience and skills-based program designed to distinguish individuals who have aided organizations in successfully applying Scrum to improve their effectivenes"
You can read the full article by following this link. Along with the article a PDF document has been published and an email address has been made available to send comments to. You may download the PDF from the link below, these are the original instructions, please follow them carefully if you wish to comment.
- "Download the Certified Scrum Coach Program Draft Proposal (PDF document).
- Comments may either be made on the website accompanying this article or emailed independently to csc-feedback@scrumalliance.org.
- All feedback must be received by July 15, 2007.
- Please do not discuss this proposal on the ScrumDevelopment Yahoo! Group. That group exists to guide Scrum Masters in the practice of Scrum, not to discuss Scrum program effectiveness or changes"
As I have been personally involved in the process of shaping this certification program, I am quite confident that it could add value to the ongoing discussion around certification and skill based versus knowledge based approaches.
The Agile Alliance – 2007 Agile Alliance Elections
The Agile Alliance has a split Board of Directors, elected for two years but serving alternate years. That means the community is going to elect new directors this year. Every member of the Agile Alliance and those people within Conchango who choose to make use of our corporate membership are entitled to vote. A list of qualified candidates has been posted to the Agile Alliance's web-site. As you will be finding my name on the list as well, you can have a look at my statement or you can watch the video instead. Other candidates include Diana Larsen, Esther Derby, Laurent Bossavit, Jeff Langr and many more. I would strongly suggest you read the statement and that you vote. Six of these people on the list will have a major stake in how to take the Agile Alliance forward into 2008.
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 I do not like to listen to the same song over and over again, especially not when I know there is a whole album, a variety of tunes I could be listening to. Recent developments in the agile community suggest that people realise more so than ever that is it time of us to start listening to those other ‘tunes’. I am tired of Scrum in a software development context. I am sick of listening to the same arguments over and over again, when history has clearly shown that Scrum is very well suited to deliver projects on time with an increased return on investment in the software area. The Agile Manifesto clearly focuses on the issues surrounding software development, its principles clearly stating that. As a governing body over the principles and ideas expressed in the Agile Manifesto the Agile Alliance has started to take those principles a step further as many of the article submissions on their web-site clearly reflect. It is imperative for us as an agile community, for us as a company which tries to be as agile as possible to advance Scrum past its perception of being only well suited for software development. This has happened in the most wonderful ways, some member of the scrumdevelopment group actually reporting that he had managed his wedding preparations by using Scrum. The theories behind agile principles and Scrum in particular are very strong, the evidence that Scrum could work in any context which is not directly connected to software development is starting to become more publically available. There is no reason for to use to be overly circumspect. While Ken Schwaber’s first two books focused on single team application of Scrum the next book will focus on the challenges involved with scaling Scrum, looking at it from an Enterprise point of view, probably for that very reason so aptly titled “Enterprise Scrum”. Scrum evolves and with every Scrum gathering or interesting discussion we are taking the next steps towards a more versatile, building block based approach in the application and adoption of Scrum on many different levels. Scrum will evolve and hopefully such efforts as the APLN and their Learning and Recognition committee, which is working hard towards creating a common grounds for certification around agile leadership and principles can help provide the people necessary to understand Scrum and its aspirations. Recently I have been nominated for the Level 2 sub-committee of the L&R APLN effort and I am very much looking forward to the poll. Regardless whether I am elected as chair of the committee I will still participate and I urge you to do the same. Community participation is imperative to the continued success of Scrum, whether that is with the entities listed above or your own interest group. I hope that innovative work done by thinkers in the community, innovative work done by companies such as Conchango when running projects will help to add new facets to how Scrum is being perceived not only by individuals but also the business community. We might have to adjust our expectations in terms of what a functional delivery actually is, how Product Ownership is realised and what Return on Investment constitutes in their respective context, but we will know for sure that we have a solid set of principles to build on. When the term Web 2.0 was coined, some say by Tim O’Reilly, the geeks and experts moaned and somewhat belittled it as yet another new word for something already well known to them. But business recognised the dawn of a new age and investments in web based companies were invigorated. I feel that it is time for Scrum EX (as in Extended) or Scrum NG (next generation), whatever you might call it, we seem to be at the very edge of that step into a new dawn of Agility and Scrum seems to be at the forefront. I know I am going, I would hope you all tag along.
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Moving from one country to another is never easy. Being confronted with a different lifestyle and different expectations make it hard at first to adapt to the new environment. Maybe that is why I underestimated how much change in my approach would be needed when I moved from Austria to the United Kingdom. Those two countries are not too far apart and in my eyes the United Kingdom is part of Europe, an environment I am very familiar with. To think so was wrong and constant change is now required to tune and match my delivery and my being to what is expected in English society, making it easier for others to interact with me. Neuro Linguistic Programming, a fairly young branch of psychiatry and psychology, has been building up since the 1970s and describes how humans interact and change over time by better experiencing their world around them. What I described above and much more on the level of personal interaction when I coach and mentor can be described by a term called pacing. Modern Literature suggests (1) to be a successful couch or trainer one needs to learn how to gain rapport with your coachee or trainee. Rapport is the art of being able to tune yourself into the people around you and pacing is a natural step further by carefully mirroring and reflecting some of their key behaviours to make them feel save. Expected and well known behaviour offers guarantee to the observer thus allowing them to more readily accept change.
While coaching, mentoring or even training a lot of the time will be spent increasing a groups or an individuals potential by allowing them to discover different ways of changing their perception of the world around them, thus allowing them to change and realise potential that has not been touched on yet. Pacing is the extension of a natural behaviour we all exhibit, especially with those who are close to us, those we share a deep common bond. It is a technique I have learned to treasure when being invited to facilitate retrospectives. Esther Derby and Diana Larsen’s book titled “Agile Retrospectives” devotes a tiny paragraph to it as well. Something I first over read and after revisiting finally realised. There is a simply instruction there, to count silent to a specified number in order to refrain from urging the team on during exercises and to know when it is safe to move from one stage of an exercise into another. This clever application of pacing allows me as the facilitator to build rapport with the team which is holding their retrospective. Mirroring the teams behaviour, trying to engage in their readiness to move on by pacing myself through counting helps to be a better facilitator and build rapport with the team to ensure they are open to the remaining exercises which need to be facilitated. Pacing, matching and mirroring can be applied to almost any situation to build rapport, whether that is when speaking with a customer or while having a chat with your best mate. Around 93% of our communication is never vocalised only around 7% are. The majority of those 93% is made up by body language and many courses can be found which teach better awareness of this form of communication. Techniques such as NLP go a step further including a more holistic view on physical and psychological interaction pattern. Moving from country to another, getting introduced into a new environment or simply being helped in how to better facilitate retrospectives. The ideas described above can be useful in any of the scenarios described. (1) Coaching with NLP: How to Be a Master Coach, ISBN: 0007151225; Coaching For Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose, ISBN: 1857883039 Recommend Article:
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Recounting the times I have heard the word impossible in the last couple of months is easy for me. I can even tell the occasion and usually when it happens. Expanding ones horizon and not limiting yourself to established and understood modus operandi is often perceived as being impossible.
A scenario I am fairly familiar with. When I am asked to give our basic agile course, which covers an introduction to agile and Scrum, we sooner or later end up talking about agile teams. How they are compromised, what the key attributes are. Agile teams have a few key attributes and for completeness’ sake, let me reiterate them here.
I entreat anyone seriously interested in agile team composition to understand them well.
- Responsible and committed
- Cross-functional with no roles
- Self-organizing
- Empowered to do whatever is needed to meet commitment
- Ideally sized to 7+/-2 members
The one bullet point from the list above which often triggers a muttered ‘impossible’ from the course participants is number two. Working with a team is hard enough, where individual commitment might not be recognised amidst the many contributors, but working in a team that has no roles and needs to organise themselves? Impossible!
There are many sagacious-sounding comments for or against this way of working, let us stop and rewind.
Looking closely at the current structure within organisation and the way we choose to run Human Resource departments we are able to descry that the current approach is detrimental to achieving truly agile team structures for a number of reasons.
Compensation as well as recognition and thus subsequently our career path are not necessarily tied to our skill set, but the roles we have operated in. Skill pools are usually less restricted than roles. A role expects us to fill only skill sets which are beneficial to the role. Skill pools can consist of many skill sets helping you to have many roles.
It is unlikely for someone to be hired into a director position unless he has held previous roles that would lead up to this new one. It is unlikely for someone to be paid more in a ‘role’ considered to be lower in hierarchical order than another.
Role based hiring introduces an inherent pressure to stick to those areas of expertise which are connected to the role. There is little chance for out of the box thinking and improvement on those skills. A simple example would be ‘I am paying you to be a Business Analyst. That is where your main skill is, do not waste my money by trying to help and test’.
Through specialisation we attempt to minimise the time spent completing a certain task. We derive this from sequential model thinking. I can only enter into completing task F after task E has been completed, so I naturally want the best woman or man or the job.
Most agile frameworks aim to improve output and the way we deliver by parallelisation of tasks. Having a task wait for completion is more 'expensive' than starting the task and maybe taking longer for it to complete as if the absolute expert had picked it up. Knowledge transfer and constant communication within the team will help to ensure that the quality level does not drop all too much. This is a frequently brought up argument and can be mostly handled by common sense and human nature.
We are professionals, we will know when something is too complicated and thus quality and completion time might be compromised too badly for us to pick up a task, rather than a subject matter expert. Cross –functional with no roles does not mean anarchy. It is a reminder to allow for out of the box thinking, creativity and knowledge transfer so that the overall structure of a team improves with every day on the job. It also serves as a reminder that we are only limited by our imagination and time. In any given organisation any of the members could do anyone’s job.
While highly unlikely because we are constraint by time and education, our brain does not limit us to only do what we are good at doing. There is always room for improvement and room to transfer our knowledge so that it resides in more places than only our brain.
Modern organisations keen on adopting agile through their structures will need to learn that resourcing and hierarchies have to change. Those companies will need to learn to adjust their compensation schemes and how they motivate their employees. Most likely moving from a very individually based recognitions scheme to a more team based one.
An open mind, cross-functionality, flat hierarchies and new ideas in human resourcing and company structures are all a “ceremonial appurtenance" needed to further develop agile and lean thinking. Nothing should be impossible once it becomes a passion. For more information and another excellent post, please read The Wisdom of Teams - Generalizing Specialists
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Something to Consider... Before I dive into my thoughts, trying to untangle them long enough so that I may write something half decent, I would like everyone to consider the following few lines of text. These sentences have been taken from the lyrics to a song by Faithless. The song is titled To All New Arrivals and the parts I am interested in are shown below: "In our world, Malaria kills a child every 30 seconds. Eleven Million children die every year of malnutrition. In our world, 15 Million children have been orphaned by AIDS. Thirty-thousand children die on preventable causes every day. In our world, two Million children are working in the sex trade this month. One point one Billion people in the world earn less than a dollar a day."
Behaviour, Behaviour, Behaviour...
I have gone through the exercise of verifying some of the numbers and those that I checked were close to the actually reported figures. In the wake of such profound statements what follows now seems little and pointless. Problems I am facing everyday are negligible if viewed in a wider context, but they may very well decide over the successful or unsuccessful adoption of Agile if not addressed properly.
Instead of giving a long list of the most common issues I have come across I would like to reflect on an experience which is fairly fresh. Myself and Matt Roadnight, a colleague of mine at Conchango, have spent the past week mentoring and teaching about Agile with a large international cooperation. If you have ever watched the news, they might have cited as the source. The concept of having a time box, which is strict and immovable around all of the key area when you adopt Scrum as a framework seems to clash wickedly with an established meeting culture. Immersed in their current behaviour it was hard for participants of the many meetings and classroom session which we held over the last week to be on time. Getting in too late for the beginning and not being back on time after breaks seems so common there, that it is almost an expectation of their employees for us to accept such behaviour as a given. Facilitation... There are many lessons I learned from traveling and introducing Agile to a multitude of places, one of them is that you need to facilitate whenever possible and that small changes,very much like the butterfly effect teaches us, can have the biggest impact down the road. Being on time and accepting the fact that being punctual guarantees the smooth operation of the whole framework is not easy.
Being told to be on time usually does not work as extrinsic motivators are less sustainable and less powerful than intrinsic ones. Being punished for not being on time reinforces a negative learning experience, which is something most good facilitators would like to avoid. While the short term result is usually good, the long term suffers. Locking the Door...
Without wanting to play with an individuals feelings, those are strong factors in ones behaviour and when properly triggered they often lead to a change in the way we act.
My desperate attempt to somehow stimulate the participants of our courses to be on time finally lead me to locking the door to the meeting room. The door has a simply twist lock that shuts it from the inside. By doing that, yet opening the door almost at once when someone was outside, it reinforced that they were actually late. It seemed to have much more significance, as there was some interaction on my part required to actually allow them back into the room.
This simple act of requiring me to interact, actually unlock the door, must have made them feel awkward or ashamed, or just a little ashamed to trouble me. The level of tardiness did drop significantly over the course of the day. Which leads me to believe that this is a successful strategy.
Mind you, we did set some rules for the course up-front, so it was well known that we would act in such a manner. More Ideas... After bringing my observation to Matt's attention he agreed with me and made some suggestion on how we might improve this little technique. As we are usually teaching introductory classes on Agile or Scrum it ends up being a full day session in most cases. It might be well worth to agree up-front how the classroom should react when someone breaks 'being-late-rule'. - Do not wait for tardy participants, start on time.
- Halt what you are doing, wait until they are seated.
- Get everyone to focus their attention on the tardy individual until they are seated
- Lock the door
- Restart from the beginning, explaining that this is necessary due to someone being late
- Agree with all members on some form of 'punishment' for tardy participants
This list is far from perfect and I will try to better understand the possible implications of each point made as I move on an apply some of the ideas above. Known Facilitators such as Esther Derby and Diana Larsen describe a multitude of techniques in their books and articles online and I recommend that you have a look at their web-sites.
Apropos web-sites, I was quite delighted to see that one of my articles made it to the frontpage of the Scrum Alliance's web-site. For all of you interested in the facilitation of joy at your work place, it might prove to be an interesting read.
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 I am reading a book. A rather interesting book which is entitled Getting to YES. Contrary to what some might be thinking right now, it is not a guide on how to date, but rather a conglomeration of guided advice on how to be a better negotiator.
While reading the first few chapters on the tube this morning I have come to the realisation that writing my blog entries is also a for of negotiation. From now on my blog posts shall be even more well considered.
Finally I have had a chance to speak to Colin, which is a challenge in itself. With mother nature and ancient societies only giving us 24 hours in a day it seems one needs a time machine to ensure that the big Kahuna has some time left in his day for a jovial get-together. With Colin's insight and a general bearing of what I can offer to help Conchango in being even more successful my outlook on the next few months has brightened considerably. Agile is not a silver bullet and there might be environments out there where agile would not be able to survive, simply because it is bound by controlling factors within the situation is it being applied to. Reducing agile methodologies to software projects is a dangerous path. In my opinion agile methodologies offer a framework to operate with not a process to follow. Frameworks can be adapted to suite the needs at hand and this is wherein their beauty and biggest pitfalls lie. It lies in the very nature of agile methodologies to inspect and adapt. The big challenge which companies like Conchango are facing is to know when it is enough. How far can you bend the rules before framework which is loosely governed by them will break. During my self-employment, my travels all over the world I have had a chance to see a lot of implementations of agile. I was also allowed to teach my point of views and I have come to the conclusion that there are a few I consider essential: - Common Sense
- Time Boxes
- Self Organisation
Anyone that has been to a CSM course will recognise these rules, they form the very basis of Scrum. While I know those rules like the back of my hand enforcing them is not as easy as turning my hand. It requires often a compromise on some of the more specialised rules to be allowed to push these basic ones through. Self-organisation often being the toughest one to enforce. Work environments which are common within large clients do not seem to foster that particular type of interactive and high bandwidth communication type of working. For Conchango to gradually change the rules by which Businesses interact with each other is one of my biggest wishes. Streamlining current processes such as procurement, sales, marketing, human resourcing and all the many others needed to be successful into a more human centered, maybe more agile approach. I can only act as observer, mediator or mentor when my knowledge is needed and I am happy that Conchango, as a whole, seems to be engaging in many of the parts I mentioned before. This will be a long, winded and sometimes steep road for me to travel, as I will have to learn that I might have to adjust my point of view now and then. While the needs of most engagements are dictated by the business I would hope that steady improvements to the way we interact with our customer, the way we deliver projects and our reputation will allow Conchango to be an innovator in a fast growing market. Innovators are always willing to go out on a limb and spend the extra time needed to fine tune their ideas. I believe that everyone I am working with at Conchango is an innovator. It is up to us all to harness that power resting within the many communities, in a way that should be our way of achieving self-organisation with common sense.
Which leads me to the conclusion that we are working within a framework already. A framework called Conchango, where many different, bright individuals work together to produce something. It is up to us now how well we inspect and adapt, how agile we choose to be.
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 I arrived in London on BA699 on Monday the 15th of January 2007. Of course we ended up being late so I had to rush into the Egham office. I hate nothing more than to be late and thankfully I was not. You do not want to be late for your Introduction, now do you?
After having been self-employed for quite a while it is a new experience to be tied in with a single employer on a fixed basis. It is a good feeling though, especially since I got one of those really neat laptop backpack bags. That rucksack has so many different features and storage options that I still have not quite figured out what to put where. I just know my phone fits in the phone bag and I could pull my headphones through a little headphone opening. What is even handier than the bag is the monthly payslip I can now look forward to receiving in the mail.
Unfortunately I lost my battle with IS and whoever else is in charge of distributing hardware, so instead of working with a pretty, pretty, pretty MacBook Pro, I am now typing this sitting in front of a not so pretty Dell. That shall not curb my enthusiasm though, I will learn to cope with the inefficiencies of Windows and smile in pleasure everytime I come home and open my private MacBook Pro (calm down people, I was teasing... no need to start a flame war :). Working for Conchango will be a challenge. I have been hired into a completely new role and I will need to stake my claim as I go along. That is a tremendous opportunity, because it allows me to shape my future every day. The decision to join Conchango over the many other offers I had was the absolute right thing to do. This company is serious about Agile, serious about Scrum. So serious that their various efforts of applying Scrum actually do reach down into the marketing department and up into the sales department. There might be risk associated with building a new role, but I am more than confident that I can build trust in what I can bring to the table. I get things done, it is just not in me not to. I will enjoy working here, I will be passionate about it and I will aim to move things forward. While there are some things I cannot agree with, I will learn to accept them, I will bring them to the attention of the people in charge and I will have fun doing so. I am very much looking forward to working together with Colin and Iyas. This will help to further my education and challenge me to think about new and interesting ways on how to apply agile principles to the many projects running here at Conchango. Not to mention that I want to grow with Conchango, want to help in acquiring new and interesting customers. If you are employed at Conchango and you have questions, about me or Agile in general, please do not hesitate contacting me. If you feel your department or project might benefit from a little agile advice, then please do get in touch as well. I am very much looking forward to working together with all of you. I am also looking forward to sharing my progress and ideas on this blog. "But wait" - you say. "What about the phone?". Right, the phone. I managed to convince Vodafone, that despite me having no credit history in the UK I should be allowed to own a Palm Treo 750v, which is really a neat phone. I am still looking for some decent ringtones, but apart from that I am quite happy with it. -d
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