Agile Advice - Working With Agile Methods (Scrum, XP, Lean)

For the past three months I have been working with Paul Heidema (our VP of Marketing) to use OpenAgile to run our business.  I thought it might be interesting for folks to see a screen capture of how we have arranged things in CardMeeting to do our planning and tracking. The yellow cards are labels for our Cycles, the white cards are Work Queue items, and the blue cards are Tasks related to the item.  The orange cards represent special information (eg. obstacles or ongoing work) and the green cards represent reflections and learning for each Cycle.

I have been practicing Agile for the last few months for my job. With Mishkin we have been following many of the Agile rules as a small team. It has been very successful, and the learning is tremendous.

So, like Mishkin, I wondered if I could use the same practices at home. A few days ago I asked my wife, Laila, if we could try using cards, a work queue, and cycles. She thought it would be great idea to put all our tasks on post-its and not have to remember them.

Yesterday we made the work queue, did some estimation, and decided what we would commit to for our first cycle. We consulting and decided that one week cycles would make the most sense for our schedules.

Right away I noticed a relaxation that came over Laila. I guess that it is very tough to maintain a work queue in your head day-in and day-out. I will continue to post my thoughts on our progress.

Has anybody else used agile practices outside of your work? How did it work? What did you learn? Maybe my wife and I can learn from you and avoid those challenges.

I’m fascinated by the idea of applying agile methods outside of software… be it to business management, family and household, or, as I and my father have been exploring over the last two and a half years… agile classroom management. Here’s how I do it in my Agile Project Management / ScrumMaster Certification courses:

(more…)

What happens when you are iterating away, your team is totally groking agile, delivering great results every couple of weeks, and then unexpectedly, suddenly and firmly everyone is stuck!? An obstacle has come along that forces a full stop. A barrier has been placed in the path. What do you do?

(more…)

What happens when you delay adopting agile? Well, one large client I have worked with has found out…

(more…)

I don’t usually talk too much about personal stories here - I try focus on agile methods pretty directly. However, the last two days have been interesting enough that I want to share them, and a lesson from the experience.

(more…)

Well. Last iteration was great! I didn’t document it, because it was trivial: I had one full day coaching engagement plus a two-day public course. And then the rest of the week I did nothing!!! What a joy! Anyway, now onto iteration 6 - cleaning up from the cancelled iteration and catching up from the vacation.

(more…)

Something that I would have thought impossible has happened. By understanding how incredibly limited my capacity to do work is, I am getting a greater and greater sense of freedom and contentment.

(more…)

My third iteration was a big bust. I have re-planned, but there is very little different from my iteration 3 plan. I have chosen the same 4 items from my Work Queue. I have updated the tasks slightly based on experience from the last iteration so that I have 22 tasks. Even with more tasks, I have actually reduced scope slightly so that the tasks are finer-grained.

(more…)

Last week went totally wonko for Berteig Consulting. My planning was bad, bad, bad!

(more…)

Two things I realized that have almost certainly thrown off my ability to complete all the work I committed to for this iteration:

1. I’m doing a course on Thursday and Friday that I completely forgot about thus lowering my capacity by at least 28%!
2. I discovered that my “Save a Spot” feature on my agile course signup page was broken.

There are consequences to these things! Read on for a little treat…

(more…)

I’ve almost finished reading The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. I wanted to share a couple of paragraphs that give a great example of the idea of Generalizing Specialists that is such a key part of Agile Work. Here’s the passage:

(more…)

This second iteration when much better than the first. I committed to an amount of work that was much closer to my real capacity, and I stayed more focused on that work. Here are the results of my demo, retrospective and planning for Iteration 3 which I am calling “Automation” for reasons which will be described below.

(more…)

I’ve completed my iteration planning for my second iteration. As a reminder, I’m doing this because I want to be working only 50 hours per week by July 2007. My sole improvement item from last iteration was to use get better at committing to an amount of work within my capacity. Here’s what I have planned:

(more…)

My first iteration using Agile Work for my business development has come to a close. Here is what I did for a “demo” and retrospective.

(more…)

Wednesday is nearly done and I’m looking at my list of tasks and cringing! I’ve only done a few out of the forty for this week. What’s going on?!

(more…)

I’ve done my iteration planning for my first iteration called “Beginnings”. The length of my iterations is one week (including weekends). Here is the list of backlog items that I have committed to (some detail removed):

(more…)

Recently, Dimitri Zimine wrote an excellent little story about context switching. Joel Spolsky writes in “From the ‘You Call this Agile’ Department“:

Dmitri is only looking at one side of the cost/benefit equation. He’s laid out a very convincing argument why Sarah should not interrupt her carefully planned two week iteration, but he hasn’t even mentioned arguments for the other side: the important sale that will be lost.

Okay… I’ll bite.

(more…)

Just a quick anecdote: one client I have has decided to use Agile Work to develop the user stories as part of a large project they are embarking upon.

(more…)

I recently had an eye-opening experience with one of my coaching clients. We were trying to find a way to reasonably have a single team work with several important stakeholders throughout an organization, each of whom had a different project for the team. Up to this point, the team has been time-slicing between these stakeholders. It is stressful work, constantly switching gears. The last time we were there, we started to look at the value the team was delivering to each group. This is where the surprise came.

(more…)

Early today, Pete Deemer (who presented at the May 2005 Scrum Gathering - notes from his presentation are about 3/4 of the way down the entry), posted his experiences of using the Scrum framework, with adaptations to manage his personal life. He has graciously consented to sharing his story here.

(more…)

Alistair Cockburn is the author of several important books in the agile software development literature including Agile Software Development and Crystal Clear : A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams (Agile Software Development Series). I had heard that he had a story to tell about using agile methods and principles on a house renovation project. I contacted him by email and he agreed to an email interview.

(more…)

Yesterday I co-facilitated a meeting with another Agile coach. Near the end of the meeting, one of the participants made a comment to the effect that I probably didn’t imagine when I was growing up that I would be a meeting facilitator. Strangely enough, in a way I did!

(more…)

Scrum is one of the Agile Methods that can be applied in many different fields of work. Last year, I was able to present the basic Scrum framework in a two hour session to a class of media students at Keyano College in northern Alberta. They used Scrum for their class project - a documentary video. One of the students really took to Scrum, and used it in his next class to save another group project… and get the best mark in the class! Full story follows…

(more…)

I posted an article on Slashdot about Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google using agile methods for software last Sunday and it was accepted… my first one on Slashdot John Brothers did a nice summary of some of the comments.