Agile Learning Labs

Breakfast of Agile Champions (this Monday!)

Being Agile is hard. Simple, and hard. Simple because, in theory, all we need to do to achieve a yogic level of Agility is to live by the Agile Principles as set forth in the Agile Manifesto. Hard, because the real world impinges on or impedes this effort every %$(^%&! day.

In light of this, Agile Learning Labs' own Steve Bockman has put together a workshop on the first Agile Principle, which reads, simply:

"Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software."

The workshop is called Continuous Delivery of Software: Maximizing Customer Satisfaction by Delivering Early and Often. The first session will be Monday, January 25, from 7 to 9 am at the Hobee's Restaurant in Redwood Shores (you can see it from the freeway). For the tuition of $50, we're throwing in a full, hearty American Breakfast is included--yep, we're talking bacon, french toast, and chorizo omelets here, not burnt coffee and a shrink-wrapped croissant. You'll also receive a certificate of completion you can use to claim 2 PDUs from the PMI.

PDUs and bacon. What more could you ask for? Register here.

CSM: The reviews are in...

By Hillary Johnson

We're blushing. Drew Powers, the new editor of the SF Bay Area Chapter of the Project Management Institute's newsletter, attended our Certified ScrumMaster workshop in September and has written a thoroughly glowing account of the class, concluding that Agile is indeed highly relevant for Project Managers:

...while migrating from a traditional PM environment may require applying Scrum‘s mantra of "Do, Inspect, Adapt, Redo" to the overall organizational culture, I believe Scrum‘s potential for faster time to market of a high quality products that better meets clients‘ needs will prove itself in a relatively short period of time.

Powers also praised our experiential approach to training, and the "give and take" between our instructors, Chris Sims and Jeff McKenna, but perhaps the most flattering part of the review was Powers' summary definition of scrum. When a student leaves your class able to articulate what he learned this well, you know you did a good job with the teaching:

Scrum is a specific methodology within the Agile umbrella of methodologies that also includes Extreme Programming which are characterized by iterative requirements elaboration and product development. Scrum is based on several principles: Iterative elaboration of requirements, self-managing project teams in which the ScrumMaster acts more of as a facilitator than a leader, and a minimum of documentation. The Scrum mantra is Do, Inspect, Adapt, Redo – that is, give it your best shot the first time, learn from what you do, then do it again. It involves three major roles: The Product Owner, sometimes thought of as the Client, the ScrumMaster, and the Development Team, which may include architects and tech writers as well as coders. The Product Owner supplies and prioritizes requirements from a list of requirements called the Backlog. The Development Team determines which of the highest priority requirements they can bring to a customer-ready state (including QA and user documentation) within a development cycle, normally about two weeks to thirty days in length and known as a Sprint. The ScrumMaster facilitates the entire process, but it is key to note that the development team makes all key project decisions and manages itself. The role of the ScrumMaster is to remove roadblocks and enable the development team to focus on the project.

Thanks, Drew!

If this makes you wish you'd been there, join us for our next Certified ScrumMaster training on the weekend of December 5-6, again with Chris & Jeff.

"Embrace change to add more value!" and other "aha!"s

by Hillary Johnson

Every time we run an Agile Project Management class we tweak it slightly, based on what we've learned in the last one. Inspect and adapt, as they say... err, I mean, as we say.

One thing we noticed happening over an intensive two days period is that people tended to generate many more insights than they can retain. "Aha" moments that seem memorable at the time have faded after the two day barrage of new information. How to capture the spontaneous learning as it occurs and preserve it, without disrupting the flow?

Our solution: Create an "aha!" wall where students can capture their immediate insights by putting up sticky notes at any time during the two days. These ahas formed a significant part of our retrospectives at the end of each module, and make a fantastic mnemonic take-away.

As we strive to structure our workshops to resemble agile projects as much as possible, we framed these ahas as representing the "learning value" the students were generating during each educational "sprint." Needless to say, this maps quite nicely to "business value" and demonstrates the beauty of incremental delivery in a tangible way.

This week we had thirteen very bright students show up for a two day workshop offered through the Bay Area chapter of the PMI, most of them PMPs, some with a high level of agile awareness, others new to the field.  Here are some highlights from their wall of over fifty "aha!"s. Reading over them, I think these could easily be chapter headings for a book on Agile Project Management:

Retrospective = lessons applied = improved output and flow.

Fail safely; fail softly!

Work becomes fun!

Things that are visable get more attention--and get done!

Embrace change to add more value.

If you won't need it, don't do it!

Responding to change means changing the plan.

Document to the extent that value is added to maximize ROI.

Focus on done, not doing.

Slow down to increase output.

Early delivery, early revenue = "compound interest"

A lot of the students in this class expressed an interest in returning for our upcoming Certified Scrum Master Training on August 12 & 13, which Chris will be co-teaching with the inimitable Jeff McKenna, which we have yet to formally announce. If you want to join them for some more ahas, save the date and either join our mailing list or check back early next week, when we should have details and a registration page.

Dogs learn agility with tennis balls; so do we

by Hillary Johnson

The very first exercise of our two day Agile Project Management class on Monday taught me a few things about optimization. It's a ball passing game, where the group is tasked with devising a system for passing balls around such that every ball is touched by each person, and has "air time" in between--ie, it's tossed, not passed.

On their first try, this group passed a whole mess o' balls without error. In their second iteration, they did even better--better than any prior group, and we'd run this game a lot. Could they improve on what I percieved as perfection?

They could. Chris tasked them with achieving "revolutionary process improvement," which proved the spur--and as the product owner, he "invested" an extra two minutes in iteration planning. They doubled their productivity in the third and final iteration. Still no errors, I might add. If anyone is looking to hire a crack ball-passing team, I've got one for you.

What did they do so right?

They didn't mess with what worked. "Let's stay in our positions, as we're used to the behavior of the person we've already been passing to." 

At the same time, they did not settle for incremental improvement, but looked for the leap--"Can we keep our process the same, but pass two at a time instead of one?"

During their planning phase, they did more than they talked, trying things out. "Talk is cheap," one of them said.

When they did talk, it was to inquire. "What are the questions we should be asking," another said at the outset of the third planning round.

The debrief elicited a lot of good stuff, too:

"Since we had no drops, I wonder if we weren't being too risk-averse. We might have had more productivity if we'd allowed more error."

"Haven't we all been in places where a lot of attention was given to optimizing writing code, when people spend 5-10% of their time writing code, and the rest looking for bugs."

"It's exhausting to work on a project when your sense of owner is greater than the owner's."

"We all spend a lot of time grousing about what the people upstream are doing, and seldom give any thought to the people downstream from us."

"Is there such a thing as too much optimization?"

Sound fun? Come play on August 3 & 4, when we'll be running the same class at the Alliance Francaise in San Francisco--vous etes tres agile, non?

Agile Games Par-tay! Yes siree...

By Hillary Johnson

Think we don't know how to have fun here at Technical Management Institute Agile Learning Labs? Oh yes, we do! We're throwing a wild party on Wednesday, April 29th at Ristretto Roasters in Portland, OR with our pal and test obsessed training partner Elisabeth Hendrickson of Quality Tree Software. It's a warm-up for our day-long class May 1st for Agile coaches and consultants on how to create agile games, but it's also a stand-alone event. There will be coffee, pastries, and the opportunity to have some geeky fun playing Agile learning games with your compatriots. It's free, so come on down!

Agile Games Party
Ristretto Roasters
3808 N Williams Ave
Portland, OR 97213

6pm-9pm, April 29th

There's still room in monday's public class on Agile Project Management

Chris and I are at Disney World for a few days of R&R after hosting the Open Space at the Orlando Scrum Gathering, but the park will have to be pretty supercalifragilistic to compare to the conference, which was wonderful. So much engagement--250 people there, and yet it felt intimate. I left feeling I had got to know more people than I'd normally meet in a year. Check out the wiki to get to know some of them yourself.

There was a large PMI presence for the first time ever, and despite some joking by the Scrummies about feeding them to the alligators in the hotel's atrium, a lot of positive, productive interaction occurred--there was a meeting of hearts if not quite of minds... yet.

Speaking of the meeting of hearts and minds, on Monday, March 23rd, we'll be back in the Bay Area and Chris will be leading a full-day workshop on Agile Project Management at the SD Forum offices in San Jose. Lots of experiential learning in this one. We have had a great response, and you'll be joining a group that includes PMPs at large and small companies, as well as job-seekers looking to add marketable skills to their resume. Visit the TMI Website to find out more of the basics, or go straight to the registration page to see special recession-buster pricing, a course description and the gritty details.

Is there such a thing as Agile Project Management? Gosh we hope so...

... because Chris is leading a day-long public workshop on Agile Project Management on March 23rd, at the SD Forum offices in San Jose.

The question, however, is one being hotly debated between Australian PM guru Pat Weaver and assorted commenters on his blog, in a post titled Agile is NOT a Project Management Methodology. Weaver claims that "Agile is not an IT project management methodology any more than choosing to use pre-cast concrete in preference to brickwork is a construction management methodology."

He goes on to say, "What is lacking in most commentary I’ve seen on Agile is any sensible discussion on using Agile within a project environment. The critical changes to scope management, change management, cost management and time management needed to effectively deal with the fluidity of Agile, within the constraints of a project, need discussion."

Ah, good point. This is just the kind of stuff we hope to address in the workshop. How does Agile work in conjunction with project management--and how doesn't it? Weaver actually hints that traditional project management may not be all that compatible with Agile--although in a subsequent post on Managing  Agile Projects he goes into some rather brilliant detail analyzing just how agile and PMBOK can work together, concluding ultimately that they can and do go together quite well: 

...align the PMBOK to an Agile project delivery method and the overarching PM process will enhance the probability of success. Treat an Agile project in the same way as a traditional Waterfall project and the PM processes will guarantee failure!

Intrigued? Read the rest of Pat's writing, then come on out for the class! We promise to elucidate further, and cover all of the finer points of applying project management techniques in an agile environment, including:

• Estimation
• Release planning
• Prioritization
• The rhythm of iterative development and delivery
• The flow of deliverables
• Roles and responsibilities
• Communication on an agile team
• Empirical process control
• Agile metrics
• Simple tools for managing agile projects

To register for the class, click here. If you see Chris or me at P-Camp, or SD West this week, hit us up for a flyer.

Chris is on the Cranky Middle Manager Show talking about Agile

If you want to hear Chris explain agile in layman's terms, have a listen to this episode of the Cranky Middle Manger Show, where Chris is the featured guest. The show is hosted by our friend, Wayne Turmel, who is jovially cranky in a way that only a stand-up comic-turned-management trainer can be.

We did a pilot for a two day course with Wayne in Chicago last year, aimed at introducing newly-promoted individual contributors to the dark arts of management. It was a lot of fun, and would be even more fun to do in-house at your company now that you have a hiring freeze and need to bootstrap your junior people into management... but I digress.

Wayne dedicates each show to a historical figure; it's always someone fascinating you've never heard of, and it's always eerily apt--don't know how he does it. This episode is dedicated to Gaius Marius, "reorganization consultant to the Roman Army."

Another Cranky standard, the quote of the week, is from the Kaballah, and is also astonishingly relevant to agile practice:

"Every phase of evolution commences by being in a state of unstable force and proceeds through organization to equilibrium. Equilibrium having been achieved, no further development is possible without once more oversetting,"

Management 2.0 - Becoming the kind of leader you would follow

I have teamed up with Wayne Turmel, host of The Cranky Middle Manager Show, to create a 2-day workshop to help you move beyond being 'good at your job' to helping others excel at theirs. When we take this show on the road in 2009 the price will be $1,000 a seat, but we are holding a 'dress rehearsal' in Chicago on December 15 & 16, for a mere $450.

Learn more about the workshop

Claim one of the last available seats

Cheers,

Chris

Agile Project Management Class Full

Greetings,

The June 17th Agile Project Management workshop is full. Thank you to everyone who expressed interest!

Cheers,

Chris