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Failure is good, really!

July 21, 2011 By Carlos Buxton 2 Comments

I think most of us have heard the story about Thomas Edison a few hundred times:

When asked about why he failed to create a light bulb in 1,000 attempts, Edison allegedly replied, “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.”

Regardless of how many times I hear it, I always wonder the context it is being employed in and by whom. I am not always sure that the right insights are drawn by some of those quotes. One instance comes to mind in a conversation I had with someone while attending the Agile Coach Camp in Montreal 2011 (great fun!). Somehow the conversation made it from empiricism to efficiency and over to effectively managing people to make them more productive (!) before I could comprehend it all. I think my listening skills glitched for a minute; I never even saw this line coming. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Coaching Tagged With: , , ,

Greenshifting and Redshifting within Projects

July 14, 2011 By Brian Bozzuto 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking recently about the various roles project stakeholders play, and how they may distort the environment around a project until that distortion in turn impacts the reality of the project. Let me offer two key examples. The first, coined by Scott Ambler, is known as greenshifting. In this case, the further information moves from the team, the better – hence “green” on a status report – the project looks. This is a common dynamic, one that most people have experienced first hand. The team members report out numerous challenges, which the project manager – who is there to make sure problems don’t emerge of course – puts as positive a spin on it as he can. This may get filtered up through any number of managers who need to present their work in the best light, such that a project under serious duress will appear to be in perfectly good shape. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Coaching, Leadership, No Tags, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

What’s in a Sprint Goal?

July 6, 2011 By Brian Bozzuto 5 Comments

Based on the results from last month’s poll, it seems many people are finding themselves in a situation where some of their work is not fitting within their sprint. Indeed, nobody reported that they were consistently delivering all work, and nearly a third were reporting that half or more of the committed work was bleeding over into the proximate sprint. This ultimately begs the question: should a team always be meeting its sprint commitment? Is missing a goal a good thing or a bad thing? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Coaching, CrAgile, Project Management Tagged With: , ,

Teams over Projects

June 27, 2011 By Brian Bozzuto 8 Comments

Thanks to Derek Huether for bringing up the excellent topic of bringing projects to teams instead of spinning up a new team for every possible need within an organization. Having looked at numerous organizations trying to balance the demands of running too many projects, this is very good advice. However, I think there’s more to this than simply bringing projects to teams. It does not yet answer the root cause of why we try to run too many projects, nor does it answer the key question when that executive responds, “well, Agile’s great, but I would need 5 times my current staff to run all my projects as Agile projects” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Coaching, CrAgile, Enterprise Agile, Leadership, Product Development, Project Management Tagged With: , ,

Coaching is Not Letting Your Teams Fail

June 20, 2011 By Giora Morein 4 Comments

Failure is not always bad.  We learn through our failures.  So why not first let your team fail?  It is almost like TDD – set a goal, watch the team fail to achieve it, and then show them how to achieve it.  Poetic, no?  No.  People are not lines of code.  Teams first discovering Agile need more than education – they need guidance.  Guidance means leading the team on the right path; showing them the pitfalls to avoid; warning them of impeding hazards.  A coach’s job is not only to teach a team how to do Agile, but rather to help them achieve success.

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Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Coaching Tagged With: , ,

Why a ScrumMaster is like a Quarterback

March 30, 2011 By Mike Dwyer 3 Comments

The other night as I was taking my evening break from the Agile World, I was confronted by 2 aliens who were very upset with our regard for sports in general, the Human Race overall, and for some reason me in particular.  In fact they were so irritated they didn’t try to put a probe in me.  I was crushed.
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Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Coaching, Agile Presentations, Agile Transformation, CrAgile, Project Management Tagged With: , , , , ,

Collaborative Play to Solve Problems

December 22, 2010 By Brian Bozzuto Leave a Comment

Most people within the Agile community seem to be firmly committed to the use of games and interactive exercises for training. I fondly remember first being introduced to the XP Game as a powerful way to demonstrate the values and principles of Agile Software development. While the use of games and play is growing in popularity, I fear that many people hit a roadblock. They frequently see games & play as limited exclusively to the “fun training” domain and don’t appreciate just how powerful it can be for actually solving problems. Indeed, the more I explore this domain, the more I realize that collaborative problem solving is their most valuable use! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Coaching, Agile Transformation, Leadership, Product Development, Project Management Tagged With: , , ,
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