You love your work. You love your family. It’s a difficult balancing act: which is winning at your house, these days?
Perhaps, right now, the fulcrum on this precarious teeter-totter is set for more teetering than tottering. How to move the fulcrum? Readjusting work-life balance, while desirable, may seem impossible given the projects we are embroiled in right now. How do we get into this situation? How do we get out?
In the entry “Essential Advice for Agile Coaches” I mentioned seven responsibilities that we have. These seven responsibilites can be used as a framework for self-evaluation and goal setting. I have created a simple spreadsheet tool to help track this work.
Hello all! I’m travelling and visiting and working over the holiday season so my posting frequency is going to be very low… My most exciting thing is that on the 28th and 29th I’m going to be delivering the ScrumMaster Certification course in Toronto to a great group of interesting folks. Have a great holiday season!
Article: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky.
Clay is writing about social environments enabled by technology and what we have learned about groups from these environments. He points to several failed online communities as well as research pre-dating the Internet and points out “Three Things to Accept” and “Four Things to Design For”. Both lists are critical for us to map into Agile organizations. I have some thoughts on how to make the mapping to those Three Things to Accept.
This simple simulation exercise helps people to understand the efficiency that can come from moving away from a waterfall or large batch process. The exercise can be done with 20 pennies, 5 people and a clock with a second hand.
In general, an organization should have one metric that is used to measure success. However, along the way, it may be useful to temporarily use other metrics to help motivate, track, or predict work. Here are two metrics that can be used in this temporary manner for Agile Work.
At the start of the iteration, a team commits to a goal and a certain amount of work. Burndown charts help a team to monitor their own progress against that goal. The team works together in a room with a process facilitator and product owner. Everthing seems to be okay, and yet, the team doesn’t fulfill its commitment. What to do?
This third and final installment of the “Agile Work Uses Lean Thinking” series introduces Team Self-Organization from a lean and agile prespective. Find out what lean practice relating to people is not commonly used in agile methods… (Previous installments are Empirical Process Control and Queuing Theory. A polished version of all three articles will appear soon as a downloadable PDF.
Over the last two weeks there have been about 15 new links added to this list. Lots of great stuff about agile and related topics such as lean, management, learning, etc. Have fun! Please see Agile Advice Recommended Materials
As a coach, it is nice to have some simple ways to show people the power of Agile methods. This quick little exercise is an excellent way to demonstrate the weakness of the waterfall approach to working with up-front requirements analysis versus the power of the agile iterative/adaptive approach. UPDATED 20051213!
Here’s a good article about the Toyota Production System (TPS). Agile work takes many of the ideas here and adapts them to a non-manufacturing situation. There’s an interesting comment about the “5 Whys”….
As coaches, we have a great deal of responsibility. Through our words and actions we lead and guide our teams and apprentices as they encounter the new way of working that Agile requires. We are responsible for their success as well as the success of the endeavor they are working on. How can we ensure we are doing everything in our power to live up to this responsibility?
Today I came across Tobias Mayer’s article Catastrophic Organizational Change. Much as his thoughts on the topic resonate with me, I think there is something still missing.
If coming back to Agile Advice and checking for new entries is getting to be a pain, consider signing up with Bloglet for an email subscription. I’ve tried it out for a couple days myself the emails I get are very non-invasive, with a simple link to the articles. If other blogs you read also allow Bloglet subscriptions, you can aggregate all the activity into a single daily email. Very convenient!
A “flow project” is a type of work where a team is working on many very similar, independent, small work items. This type of project is quite common in IT departments doing infrastructure work, maintenance work or support work. Agile Work practices can be applied to this type of project with just a little tweaking.