Agile Learning Labs

Happy Birthday Internet!

By: Chris Sims

In case you haven't heard, the Internet turns 40 today.

Cheers,

Chris

Agile Open NorCal: Requirements Discovery & Story Mapping Workshop

By Hillary Johnson

Chris and Jeremy Lightsmith proposed similar sessions, and so chose to combine them into one. About 15 people showed up for an exercise-based session on generating requirements using the Story Mapping technique, which Chris first learned about from Jeff Patton. As I’ve done in the past, I served as the putative “client,” in my guise as editor-in-chief of a newspaper—come on, you remember newspapers, those things the Brits used to wrap fish back in the olden days? (BTW, the New York Times is now a mere 11 inches wide. I think this is the next step toward ceasing print publication, as it’s now conveniently laid out to be printed on your home printer.)

For the first phase, Jeremy interviewed me to tease out big picture goals I had for a system to manage my work flow, from story assignment to layout. “Trackability” was one, with the measurability factor being to lower the moment of “Oh s—t!” moments per edition of the paper. Then participants broke into two groups and brainstormed for ten minutes to come up with a handful of goals for a fictional new system for renting videos online, based on Netflix.

In round two, Chris interviewed me to determine the personas involved. Then the groups reconvened and created personas for the users of the Netflix system.

In the final round, Chris conducted an abbreviated interview tracing my work flow and breaking it down into rough-hewn user stories: “Assign a story to a writer,” “Assign a story to an issue,” “Submit story to art department for layout.” After that, the groups worked on their Netflix user stories, and quickly got the hang  of it: “Add to queue,” “Sort by category,” etc.

For being so brief, the workshop operated on two levels:

On one level, the process showed that user stories, however granular they may come, are best woven out of whole cloth, that context is king, and if you get the big picture from the horse's mouth (ugh, mixed metaphor--where's a copy editor when you need one?), your user stories will almost write themselves.

On another level entirely, the exercises introduced them to the concept of the Story Map as a big-picture information radiator that helps developers working on highly granular user stories keep their sense of connection to the big picture, and especially to the end user. You could almost call it an empathy radiator.

Experiential Intro to Agile: First session of the day at Agile Open Northern California

By Hillary Johnson

We're just finishing up with Chris' first session at Agile Open Northern California, an experiential introduction to Agile. Chris led a group of 16 through two simulation exercises, then teased out the basics of Agile during the debriefs. Below is graphic facilitator Elizabeth McClellan's capture of the first exercise, where participants drew and folded paper party invitations--first using a wasteful batch and cue process, next using a more agile, incremental approach:

And here are the group's "aha" moments following the exercise...

How not to hold a webinar

By Hillary Johnson

The short answer to the title question is, of course, don't hold one at all.

The long answer is:

A) Don't let the first 18 minutes of your 60 minute time slot go by futzing with technical difficulties, letting your audience listen to your team's "uh, why don't we try x?" and "Bob, can you see the whole slide now?" If you have 100-200 people on the line, you've just wasted close to one human work week of their collective time. Get on the line an hour early and do a dry run!

B) Don't announce that you're going to make a brief pitch for your company's services, then proceed to deliver an infomercial consisting of little else. Especially don't answer audience questions with sales pitches. "Well Bob, the XYZ certification may be the industry standard, but doesn't that mean that everybody has it? If you really want to stand out in the crowd, we recommend also getting the one we sell."

C) Especially don't combine A) and B). Why on earth would I sign up and pay tens of hundreds of dollars to take a training course from someone who can't mount a basic webinar consisting of slide sharing and voiceover? Why, oh why?

Just had to vent. If Agile Learning Labs ever holds a stupendously bad webinar, I hereby promise to eat my shoe.

What we learned from (teaching) our first Certified ScrumMaster class

By Hillary Johnson

Chris recently co-taught Agile Learning Labs' Certified ScrumMaster training course under the visionary tutelage of Jeff McKenna. Jeff, as you no doubt know, was a member of the first Scrum team, and he knows a thing or two on the subject. He and Chris worked well together. One student quipped, "It's like Chris is the Mom and Jeff is the dad." If your mom is a former lounge lizard with a beard.... No, it makes sense. Chris is the nurturer who wants to provide you with a safe place to learn to crawl, then walk, then run; Jeff, on the other hand, is the wise and wisecracking veteran of the front lines, with a satchel full of war stories--and riveting delivery. Having both in the classroom made for a fun, dynamic learning environment.

The students also generated their fair share of insights. We've taken to asking them to record their "Aha!" and "Eureka!" moments on Post-It notes, where they can be shared by all. This class of 27 people generated hundreds. Here are some highlights:

"Prototype your process, not just your product!"

"Dividing work into sprints actually relieves anxiety!"

"Agile may not be faster, but you'll know why things go wrong (or right)  sooner."

"Scrum is about creating a repeatable process."

"The daily stand-up is a communication meeting,  not a status meeting."

And my personal favorite:

"Time constraints force action."

We're looking forward to scheduling the next CSM class with Jeff, which will likely be held in early December. If you'd like to know when that happens, you can sign up for our mailing list. Like this one, it will be a collaboration with the SF Bay Area chapter of the Project Management Institute. If Chris and Jeff are mom and pop, then PMI's Community Relations guru Bill Dominguez is definitely the cool uncle.