Like many other Agile practitioners, I have seen too many cases where an organization wants to adopt Agile, but believes that all they need is a little training. Of course, the most extreme would be when a group believes they can send one person off to become a Certified ScrumMaster and then they can simply train everyone else. While this intuitively sounds foolish, and many people could begin to articulate the shortcomings of this mental model, I’ve struggled to present a clear and succinct view of what exactly why this model doesn’t work. Although I recently came across a very good model that captures what I tacitly knew already. I hope this is valuable to the rest of you out there trying to make the case for coaching. more »

Thanks to everyone from the Mass Bay PMI Chapter for coming to see me speak about Agile in the Enterprise. It was a great discussion and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have made my slides available from tonight’s presentation, they can be downloaded here.

Also, several people expressed some interest in local Agile groups so that they could learn more. I would point out three specific ones that have monthly meetings and support vibrant communities of both learners and practitioners:

• Agile Bazaar
• Agile Boston
• Nashua Scrum Club

Odd Question, isn’t it.  We spend all this time focusing on getting the story to be the right size, chiseling away on the ones that are too big to fit in a release, and so on.  Then we turn around and fight the good fight when Scrum and Agile scales up and we are faced with keeping multiple teams working in peace, harmony and synchronicity.  It is this last problem that I keep on dealing with, particularly when trying to introduce Agile QA.  I got so frustrated that I took Jim Highsmith’s advice about “more being written about Agile than is known”, stopped reading Agile and read other things – like the Harry Potter series and 20^th century history.  It is here I re-read the words that on May 25, 1961, changed a generation’s life. President John F. Kennedy said in his, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” before a joint session of Congress.

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

It struck me it was ‘the’ perfect story. It has a role, action that had to be taken, and a goal.  But most of all it had a very tangible, clear, and explicitly well defined definition of DONE – “returning him safely to the earth.” What a story!  What an Epic! What a way to get a nation – a world – to focus.   But it wasn’t a user story – it had this timeboxing clause,”before this decade is out,” that started the clock ticking.

I refer to it as a Focus Story. It serves as the transforming agent changing a poetic visiony user story into a ‘Mission Statement” and a Commander’s Intent”. With it in place, at the top of Product Vision, enough guide rails are in place to make reasonable initial roadmaps, release plans, prioritization criteria, and definitions of done.  But most of all we have a means to understand core values criteria “safely to the earth”.

We also have triggers to inform us when we are losing focus –  Meetings get longer, Done isn’t understood. Pieces don’t fit and the conventional mindset you have been struggling to win over sighs and goes back to its safe place of waiting for the fad to die.  When these show up it is time to revisit the focus story and build a bigger focus or wrap up what you are doing.  Otherwise you risk having “O”rings show up on your Columbia launch.  Nobody wants to be part of that type of bad day.

I recently spoke at the two Agile Journal Events; one in Boston and one in Newark and I spoke as the keynote about Agile Software Development and how there is so much more value to it than just turning out software faster, cheaper and with less defects.

There really is a lot of say about this, and I intend to write more,  but for now I wanted to make my presentation available. It can be downloaded here: Agile Beyond Faster, Cheaper and Less Defects

George and I presented our Agile Battlemapping presentation at the Agile2009 conference.  I had an absolutely fantastic time and based on the feedback we received from the audience, it appeared that everyone else had a good time too.  This was the first time we had added the practical exercises.  First the audience members individually drew battlemaps of their own projects or programs followed and then they combined into groups to create prioritized response strategies.  I look forward to making further enhancements and to the next time we present it.  Click below do download a PDF of the presentation.

Agile 2009: Mapping the Change Battlefied

Coaching has some really important benefits in helping organizations adopt Agile methods, Lean, <insert process improvement of your choice here>.  This is especially true in large, complex organizations with deeply-traditional cultures that seem resistant to change.

Are you considering a coach?

If you aren’t, are your organization and projects at risk? more »

I apologize for the delay in posting this presentation. Here is the third, and final presentation we offered at the Mass Bay Professional day on May 2nd. Presented by Giora Morein, it is focused on the challenges an organization faces as they try to grow an Agile initiative beyond a single team.

You can view the presentation here