Hiccupps

After hearing good things about it for years, and failing to get one of the limited spots at its lean coffee events for almost as long, I was excited to finally be at Agile in the Ether last week . Here's a few aggregated notes from the excellent conversation.  How to encourage non-digital stakeholders to understand the value of discovery and outcomes over outputs? The business has scaled quickly and is large and stakeholders just want features They don't talk about problems and give people space to offer solutions Help them to think about how they experience the world outside work Lay out the risks/benefits of switching to incremental devlopment Get an ally who is respected (by them) to support your case Show business which haven't adapted, e.g. Blockbuster Show business which have adapted, e.g. McDonalds Let stakeholders observe interviews with users to understand their prioritie...

I watched Allan Kelly 's Reawakening Agile with OKRs presentation at the Cambridge Agile Exchange last night. You can find a lengthy summary in his recent article for InfoQ and there's a book too, but here's a few points that caught my attention. If you've been around the block you'll have doubtless come across OKRs — objectives and key results — and perhaps cynically think of them as the antithesis of agile working, a management tool for the top-down imposition of overcommitments. From that perspective, promoting OKRs as a way to save agile could look a bit like the kind of sharp tactics that unscrupulous second-hand car salesmen might employ: "OKRs, one careful owner, a nice little runner, thousands of miles left in this one." Fortunately, Allan is open about the history and specific about the contexts in which he thinks OKRs can add something. In his view, their backstory is why OKRs are also a useful hack for the kind of "mil...

Last night I attended a Heart of England Scrum User Group meetup where Mike Harris was asking So where did all this agile stuff come from? Luckily he was answering also: W. Edwards Deming . Mike's presentation was a high-level overview of the history of Lean and Agile in which he traced back to foundational work done by Deming and then to Deming's influence Walter Shewhart who integrated scientific methodology and statistics into industrial quality practices. I have read a little Deming but I'm motivated to look more deeply after this. In particular, Mike drew attention to the fact that Plan, Do, Study, Act and Plan, Do, Check, Act were, for Deming, very much not the same thing. I had never realised this.  The paper Circling Back: Clearing up myths about the Deming cycle and seeing how it keeps evolving by Ronald D. Moen and Clifford L. Norman talks about the strength of Deming's feeling about it, quoting him: The...

Last week, unexpectedly, I became a Licensed Scrum Master. I knew I was attending a course run by Scrum Inc  with a group of my colleagues, but I had no idea that there was a short online multiple choice exam and a certification for me at the end. It's easy to be sceptical and sniffy about the industry around Scrum, but I try to go into training events in a positive frame of mind , looking to participate, open to having my views changed. I'm not sure that there was a seismic perspective shift for me on this occasion, but I still thought it'd be interesting to run a personal retrospective. Some background first: I've never worked on a Scrum team, although I manage testers on them. I'm very interested in ways that software can be developed and tested, and one of my favourite books in that space is  Extreme Programming Adventures in C# by Ron Jeffries, a great practical example of iteration, reflection, and honesty. A disclaimer too: without much visibility of...