Agile Learning Labs

XKCD Shell

By Chris Sims

I just noticed that XKCD, my favorite geeky web comic, has a cool unix-like shell interface available!

In other news, there are seats available for this month's Agile Learning Labs Weekend Certified ScrumMaster workshop, and Weekend Certified Scrum Product Owner workshop.  Get 'em while they are hot!

Cheers,

Chris

Administrative Assistant Wanted

Agile Learning Labs is a small startup company in Foster City that delivers training and coaching to project managers, executives and software developers. We are looking for a part-time administrative assistant who relishes being part of a small team as much as we do. You will be responsible for managing the infrastructure of the business, from bill-paying and document preparation to providing support for the activities of the company's CEO, publications editor and salesperson.

 The position is part-time. Growth is part of our plan and this job could become full time in the future. We’re also open to a long-term relationship with someone for whom part time work is a lifestyle choice.

Job Description, Activities, Responsibilities

• Client invoicing and billing
• Arranging venue, catering and other logistics for events
• Maintaining the website's event calendar
• Scanning, transcribing, and summarizing workshop feedback forms
• Driving, to pickup office supplies, drop off promotional materials, etc.
• Maintain and restock training kits (office supplies, printed materials)
• Field email and phone requests regarding public training class details
• Prepare documents for approval by certification organizations
• Copy and distribute fliers
• Make travel arrangements
• Do scheduling for coaching clients
• Tracking receipts and expenses
• Contribute ideas toward the continuous improvement of the business
• Post workshop announcements to various websites and other promotion and publicity channels

Required Skills

• Excel, Word, and PowerPoint
• Stickler for details
• Has a car, insurance
• Good phone and email skills

Additional Skills - willing to train

• Quickbooks
• Blogging/Content Management Systems
• HTML

More Background

Our startup is at an important juncture; to date we have all pitched in on administrative tasks to keep our business running smoothly, but none of us is a strong administrator. This means you’ll have our gratitude, respect and cooperation as you take over these functions. Hiring this position is a milestone for us, as it will allow us to focus our energies where our own talents lie and step up the growth of our business, and we can’t overstate how much we value this new role and appreciate the expertise it requires.

As for your background and qualifications, we’re looking for confidence and maturity, a knack for organization and a passion for meticulousness. You might be a former copy editor who wants to make a career change. Or you might be a retired bookkeeper who wants to stay active. Your background and experience can take many forms, from running your own business, to heading a volunteer committee.

We’re looking to hire a real person, not just a set of skills or credentials, so tell us a bit about yourself, and we’ll take it from there.  Send your resume and cover letter to: IWantToWork@AgileLearningLabs.com

Try it!

By Steve Bockman

"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." - Yogi Berra

You've probably heard that before. Amusing as it may be, there's solid advice to be gained from Yogi's folksy wisdom.

Having been on a number of development teams over the years, I've heard my share of discussions theorizing about "the best way" (sometimes stated as "the only way") to accomplish a given task. In some cases, it seemed that more time was spent in discussing possible approaches than in actually implementing them.

The essence of Agile might arguably be distilled down to two simple words: "Try It!" In other words, spend less time theorizing and more time experimenting with ways to improve your work process or technical practices. "Try It!" is the "conduct an experiment" part of the scientific method. It also shows up in the Plan-Do-Check-Act problem-solving process, more popularly known as the Deming cycle. The spirit of "Try It!" is embodied in Inspection and Adaptation, two of the three legs in the Scrum framework.

So the next time you find yourself in a position where you and your teammates are unable to decide on the best course of action, think of it as an opportunity to conduct a short experiment. Here's a way to go about that:

• In 5 minutes, have each team member write down every idea for a course of action he or she can think of on a sticky note (one idea per
•    note).Put all of the sticky notes up on the wall for all to see.
• Eliminate all the redundant ideas.
• Have the team vote (you can use sticky dots for this) for their favorite ideas.
• Implement the most popular idea.
• If the idea doesn't work out as hoped, repeat the above process.

This method is almost certain to get you past any analysis paralysis. And you'll likely learn something useful along the way.

What Does Your Team Need? Girl Power!

By Hillary Johnson

Last weekend, Chris and I attended a marvelous event called Dare 2B Digital, aimed at addressing the gender gap in computer science careers, and at which 7th through 10th grade girls got to play at writing code, crafting business plans, and other techie things.

We held a session called "Teamstorming," leading a group of enthusiastic students in a series of the same learning games we use to teach teams of software developers on big, important enterprise projects to work together collaboratively.

We were completely blown away. The girls weren't just good: they were great. This was the most quick-witted, productive, outgoing and naturally cooperative group of individuals we've ever had the pleasure of teaching, by a significant margin. Chris and I have both mentioned to several people now our experience of finding the teenaged girls smarter, stronger, faster and sharper than their elders of any gender, and have heard a few theories about why this might be, the top three being:

They are unspoiled.
They are female.
They are female and unspoiled.

We laughed, too. But each of these notions has some merit. First, there is the unsullied youth theory: It seems patently obvious that many adults have a great deal of wariness, and weariness, to overcome before they are open to participating freely in a game-based exercise. Our teaching style is based entirely around games and simulations, and the younger a student is, the closer she is to the memory of learning almost entirely though play. It is not, however, particularly true that children are born collaborators, as any parent whose pre-school has a biter enrolled can tell you.

As for the gender question: Are females, by nature or nurture, better collaborators and problem solvers than males? To whatever extent our temperaments are deterministic, my hunch is that girls would respond better to the collaborative exercises, and the boys to the competitive ones. There is research-based evidence that there are gender-based differences in learning styles, but the same research indicates that the variation between individuals is greater than the variation between the genders.

So yes, the girls may benefit from being both female and unspoiled, but this doesn't mean they are superior to the male and the spoiled, it just means they're naturally suited to collaboration and have nothing to unlearn as they encounter collaborative situations.

But by adulthood, we are all engaged in activities that may or may not speak to our true natures. Girls don't tend to play with toy cars, but they grow up to drive real cars in the same numbers as men. And if you believe insurance companies' actuarial tables, they grow up to be the better drivers. On the flip side, I think this means that boys can grow up to be fine collaborators, as good as or better than their female counterparts, despite their greater inclination toward competitive styles.

I am not a big fan of determinism. Things do come out in the wash, and in the long run, even unlearning can be a productive process. As Chris will tell you, part of the reason he values Agile so much is that teamwork and collaboration do not always come naturally to him--he was once a boy who played with cars, after all. He has enjoyed being in a traditional leadership role, and can remember exactly what it was like to resist the urge to "help" a team, instead letting them solve their own problems through self-organization. Which is why he is good at teaching Agile techniques, especially to people who have a lot of un-learning of traditional top-down management styles to do.

The clear outcome, to me, is that the gender bias in the field of software development that persists today is entirely bogus. If boys have an edge when it comes to math--hence their delight in code--and girls have an edge when it comes to collaboration, then it seems stupefyingly clear to me that you're most likely to have a high-functioning team if you have both styles well represented, with plenty of room allowed for something even more important: individuality.

Better Retrospectives

By: Chris Sims

Today is retrospective day at Agile Learning Labs. Every month we do an all-hands retrospective to continuously improve how we run the business. It's timely then, that my latest article on InfoQ is Rules for Better Retrospectives. Check it out, and learn about James Carr's top five 'rules' for better retrospectives.

If you are just getting started doing retrospectives with your agile team, check out my 2-part post Agile Retrospectives.

Cheers,

Chris

Forget Maximizing Shareholder Value

By Chris Sims

I was a new manager doing annual performance reviews for the first time. I wanted to do a good job, and to truly align my group's work with the company's 'bigger picture'. I wanted to know why we existed, what we were trying to achieve, and what we valued. So I asked my manager.

The question seemed to upset my manager, and she referred me to her manager. He seemed equally annoyed, but explained to me that our one purpose was "to increase shareholder value". Now, would I please get my performance reviews done? I left that conversation feeling unsatisfied by the notion that all our work was for the sole purpose of making our investors wealthier.

The January-February Harvard Business Review magazine examines the idea of focusing on shareholder value in the article The Age of Customer Capitalism. Shareholder value is mostly determined by the company's stock price. The price of the stock, in turn, is mostly determined by the optimism or pessimism of the market.

For managers, the implications of this are clear: The only sure way to increase shareholder value is to raise expectations about the future performance of the company.

The article proposes the radical idea that it is better to focus on the creation of customer value. Employees can have a much more direct impact on the creation of customer value, compared to shareholder value. Besides, if you create customer value, you have a good chance of making a profit. It's possible that this will even influence investors optimism and lead to higher stock prices! What do you know? By placing the focus on creating value for customers, everybody wins.

Cheers,

Chris

Experiential Intro to Agile at Agile Open Northwest

By: Chris Sims

Today finds me in Seattle for the Agile Open Northwest conference.  This morning I lead a session called "An Experiential Introduction to Agile" which was based on our Experiencing Agile mini workshop.  I invited participants to share their insights on sticky-notes, with a promise that I would post them.  So, here they are. 

Cheers,

 Chris

• Estimation works better when done in smaller chunks.
• Easier to fix issues if we discover them sooner, even in mid-iteration.
• Success begets success
• We have been estimating at the beginning of our projects, when we know the least that we will ever know!
• Working in an agile, single-piece-flow, we saw progress as we went.  The felt better and we could work slower and yet accomplish more.
• Feedback is more useful when it arrives early, instead of at the very end.
• Going through a full cycle, quickly, facilitates more learning
• When we worked 'waterfall style' we had lot's of work-in-progress which became waste.
• Taking things (stories, features, units of work) all the way to completion helps us estimate future delivery.  Completing a 'phase' as in waterfall isn't nearly as good for this.
• It's really hard to know how much we will be able to get done in advance, even for simple tasks.  Much better to do some and then see.
• Requirements --> Completion  Since each phase in a waterfall is different kinds of work done by different people, the rate of progress for one type of work doesn't have any bearing on the timelines of other steps/phases.
• The exercise was a wonderful demonstration of how easy it is for even experts to fail.  No matter how good the 'big plan' it's probably wrong.  Better to work incrementally.
• I was surprised that even a basic experiential simulation like this can bring out all the real emotions of a real project.
• Basing our schedule on the original upfront estimate lead to much more waste, than adjusting our plan as we worked.
• People gain satisfaction from shipping
• Get customer feedback early and often!
• Not having to do try to deliver on unrealistic estimates makes for a more relaxed and productive environment.
• "You know the least you ever will about your project when you begin."
• Taking small units from beginning to completion was much more efficient that working in big batches.  We also caught bugs sooner, which is less costly to the project.
• Incremental tasks --> opportunities to learn how to do it better.
• Delivery in small batches allows customers to see product early, if they have changes those can be applied with less waste.
• Moving something from concept to completed & shipped more quickly, caused me to get more done and also gives me more satisfaction.
• Shipping in smaller increments felt better, a greater sense of accomplishment.
• Making a mistake on 1 item is easier to fix than on 20 items.  Much better to get the feedback early!
• We make all of our estimates at the beginning of the project, when we know the least ever.  Worst time to estimate!
• We shipped much more overall when we delivered in small increments.
• Customers don't always know what they want until they see something.
• Somebody is spending real money when you don't deliver.
• My team needs to figure out how to test early with no QA resources available.
• Psychological effect of incremental shippable production helps sustainability.
• Shipping all at once rather than small increments caused a lot of wasted work that was never delivered.
• Estimate by seeing how much we can do, as a complete task, in a time-frame.
• Slow down, think about it!
• Team morale was much higher when we took the 'agile' approach.

Better Software = Agile Software

By Hillary Johnson

This year's Better Software Conference in Las Vegas on June 6-11 is all about Agile, to judge by the program. The conference runs concurrently with the Agile Development Practices West conference (with twofer admission). Better Software is also bookended by certification courses in ScrumMaster and Agile Testing Practices early in the week, and the Agile Alliance's one day Agile Leadership Summit , chaired by Polyanna Pixton, on Friday.

In addition to the usual presentations on release planning, user stories and backlog grooming, the program has a lot of emphasis on what are sometimes termed "soft skills"--i.e., the ability of technophiles to interact with carbon-based life forms, sessions with names like: Selecting Agile Team Members, Verbal Agility and Better Decisions Through Collaboration.

There will also be fun and games. Chris will be leading a session called Eliminating Process Bottlenecks: The Theory of Constraints, which has participants building paper airplanes--and running a paper aerospace company--to explore problems and solutions.

InfoQ: Agile Coach Camp Announced

By Hillary Johnson

Chris' most recent InfoQ article is a preview of Agile Coach Camp, billed as the Open Space conference "delivering value to those delivering value." The conference, which takes place in Durham, NC next month, is a bit different than most Agile gatherings, in that aspiring participants must "audition" for admission by submitting a position paper, guaranteeing a high level of professional discourse. Check out Chris' article for a preview of some of the topics proposed so far. Last year, Chris facilitated a couple of sessions, including one on What Makes Agile Projects Succeed.

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.