Category Archives: Newsletter-Communication

Agile, Agile_Role, Coaching, LeSS, Newsletter-Communication, Norms & Principles, Scaling, Scrum

SEPTEMBER 02-04: CERTIFIED LESS BASICS (CLB) COURSES | VIRTUAL

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Reviewing Before Class
Additional Relevant Assets
Upcoming Virtual LeSS Training:
Agile, Agile_Role, CLP, LeSS, Newsletter-Communication

07/02 – LESS TALKS: Why Is Independent Teams With Microservices a Bad Idea?

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Materials TBA

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Upcoming Training (group discount: group_disc):

Agile, Agile_Role, Behavioral Science, CLP, Event, Events, LeSS, MeetUp, Newsletter-Communication, Organizational Design, Scaling, Scrum, Team Dynamics, Transformation

06/23 – LESS TALKS: What is “UNDONE” Department And How To Eradicate It?

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Synopsis:

What is Undone Department?
“Undone department—This department, ideally, does not exist.
Unfortunately, sometimes the teams are not yet able to create a true shippable increment every Sprint. This is reflected by their “Definition of Done” not being equal to “Potentially Shippable.” The difference between them is called Undone Work. Someone needs to do this Undone Work, and a common “solution” is to create separate groups that pick up the “undone work”—the undone department. More on this in the Definition of Done chapter.
Undone departments such as test, QA, architecture, or business analysis groups should never exist in the smaller LeSS framework groups; rather they should be integrated into the teams from the start. On the other hand, we unfortunately still frequently see an operations or production undone department in LeSS adoptions, as they often cross organizational boundaries.
A goal in every LeSS adoption is to remove the undone department. How long will this take? The answer is highly dependent on how fast the organization improves its capability.” – from the 3rd LeSS book (Large Scale Scrum: More with LeSS)
Agile, Agile_Role, Event, Events, LeSS, MeetUp, Newsletter-Communication, Norms & Principles, Organizational Design, Scaling, Scrum, Transformation

05/12 – LESS TALKS: Meet Diana Larsen: “How do limits empower your Agility?”

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On 05/12, a visionary pragmatist, Diana Larsen is co-founder, Chief Connector and a principal coach, consultant, and mentor at the Agile Fluency® Project spoke to Large Scale Scrum Meetup of NYC.  Diana co-authored the books Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great; Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams; Five Rules for Accelerated Learning.   She co-originated the Agile Fluency® model and co-authored the eBook, The Agile Fluency Model: A Brief Guide to Success with Agile.
Diana’s Presentation:

Exercise on Types of Limits (Audience)

  • Limit: Definition of Done
  • Commit to just a small task (that contributes to a larger goal)
  • Sprint duration
  • WIP limits
  • Limits on what behavior is acceptable
  • Single-task until it hurts
  • Time-boxed scrum events
  • Limits to help teams: Only permit a story that has value directly to a customer
  • WIP, CONWIP, personal WIP, portfolio WIP, just Whip it
  • Brainstorm better, Focus your content, Give yourself deadlines
  • Limit to a number of organizational layers and managers
  • Sprint goals /product areas to reduce context switching and increase focus
  • Limits of emphasis on individual performance (in favor of team performance)
Agile, Agile_Role, Event, Events, Newsletter-Communication, Norms & Principles, Organizational Design

How to Identify “Agile Masquerades”? What Alternatives Could We Offer Instead?

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My (Gene is here) great opportunity to present at Agile Coaching and Beyond meetup, of Bucharest, Romania on April 21st, 2020.  Many thanks to Amir Peled for having me on the podium. Great crowd and questions.

Presentation Materials

Some of the most salient points in the presentation:

  • Are you relying on quality talent to assist you with your agile transformations?: a quick (~10 min) recap of Gene’s presentation in Phoenix, AZ about the most classic dysfunctions related to the coaching profession
  • Misunderstanding of agile coaching role – Why organizations get this part mostly wrong?
  • Talent dilution, industry-wide – Why are there so many inexperienced agile coaches in the market?
  • “Bad business“ – Why reliance on staffing firms and head-hunting agencies for agile talent procurement causes more harm than good?
  • Fallacies of big solutions – Why Big Bangs and ‘all–at-once’ transformation attempts are ineffective?
  • Centralized coaching towers – Why creating ‘Centers of Excellence’ and enforcing ‘best practices’ and ‘operational models’ leads to local optimization? Why placing such ‘org constructs’ inside ‘standard’ power structures (e.g. Architecture tower, PMO) further worsens the situation, while jeopardizing individual safety?
  • Rebuilding vertical organizational towers horizontally – Why ‘flipping’ conventional functional areas of control (e.g. QA department, BA group, PMO) on their side and calling them ‘Communities of Practice (CoP)”/chapters/guilds, while preserving reporting lines and other conventional dynamics (e.g. still doing individual performance appraisals by community/chapter/guild, leads to negative outcomes) is the same, as “rearranging deck seats on Titanic”?

 

Next virtual LeSS Training:

Agile, Agile_Role, Behavioral Science, CLP, Coaching, Event, Events, LeSS, MeetUp, Newsletter-Communication, Organizational Design, Scaling, Scrum, Team Dynamics, Training, Transformation

April 09-10: Certified LeSS Basics (CLB) Course | Virtual

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Another engaging and highly interactive Certified LeSS Basics (CLB) virtual class is complete.   People attended from many corners of the map: UK, USA, Canada, Argentina, Spain, Kuwait, Australia.  The students engaged in a highly interactive collaboration, with questions and exercises, using Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) technique, exploring the following topics: Agile Big-Bangs, Internal Contracts, Local Optimization, Product Definition, Fake Projects/Programs/Portfolios, Scrum Master Role, Fooling with Tooling.
Note: the below graphics are not conclusive decisions or ‘best practices’. They are just an example of brainstorming, based on each teams members’ experience.

System Modelling: Agile Big-Bangs
System Modelling:  Internal Contracts
System Modelling: Local Optimization
System Modelling:  Product Definition
System Modelling: Scrum Master Role
System Modelling: Fooling With Tooling
System Modelling: Fake Projects, Programs, Portfolios

More Kodak Moments

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Agile, Agile_Role, Behavioral Science, CLP, Coaching, Event, Events, Kanban, LeSS, MeetUp, Metrics & Reporting, Newsletter-Communication, Organizational Design, Scaling, Scrum, Team Dynamics, Training, Transformation

04/07 – LESS TALKS: Irony With Fake LeSS (is_Scrum) Adoption, with Dr. Wolfgang Richter, CLT

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Dr. Wolfgang Richter is the founder and CEO of JIPP.IT GmbH (https://www.jipp.it/), an Agile Change Agency. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Certified LeSS Trainer (CLT) and Coach and works with Scrum and Agile Methods since 1998. He and his team specializes in improving processes and structures by using agile methods and principles. Agile Transformations is one of the main activities. Scrum and LeSS are his preferred approaches for internal and customer driven projects.

This is going to be a fun story. Lots of IRONY.
When an organization hits Large-Scale Scrum, it is most likely to begin with a fake adoption. Scaling per sé is not easy. And it is not recommended. However, large enterprises rarely have a choice. So what can be done to handle the burden of scaling? Which pitfalls can be observed regularly? What is against all odds likely to succeed?

Agile, CLP, Event, Events, LeSS, MeetUp, Newsletter-Communication, Scaling, Scrum, Team Dynamics, Training, Transformation

Common Misconceptions About Agile Multi-team Software Development

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Michael Jamesis a software process mentor, team coach, and Scrum trainer with skills in Product Ownership (business), Scrum Mastery (facilitation), and the development team engineering practices (TDD, refactoring, continuous integration, pair programming) that allow Scrum to work. MJ has been involved with LeSS (Large Scale Scrum) longer than anyone else on the US West Coast. He is a recovering “software architect” with programming experience back to the late 1970s, and including control systems for aircraft and spacecraft

Edited Version (about 32 minutes)

Original Version (about 60 minutes)

We often hear that the Agile approach to multi-team development is to pre-divide products into small independent pieces for different teams to work on, perhaps using implementation approaches such as microservices and coordination approaches such as “Scrum of Scrums.” This advice illustrates widespread blind spots in the Agile coaching and training community. We will challenge those in this online discussion.

To get the most out of this session, we suggest reading the comic book that went viral Why “Scrum” Isn’t Making Your Company Very Agile, How Misconceptions About The Product Owner Role Harm Your Organization, And What To Do About It.

Related artifacts:

Upcoming LeSS Training On-Line
Agile, Behavioral Science, CLP, Coaching, Event, Events, LeSS, MeetUp, Newsletter-Communication, Organizational Design, Scaling, Scrum, Team Dynamics, Training, Transformation

03/03 – LESS TALKS: “What is Your Product?”, with Ellen Gottesdiener

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To be product-aligned and customer-focused, everyone in your product development ecosystem needs to agree on the answer to the question, “What is Your Product?” Many organizations don’t have clarity on what their product or products are. Ambiguity and disagreement on the answer contribute to slow response to changing customer and market needs and less than satisfying product outcomes. It thwarts your efforts to scale agile product development and causes a plethora of organizational and communication woes.Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) rightly states that this question—and the imperative to answer it—is one of your most important decisions for successful product development. A clear answer to “What is Your Product” powers all aspects of product development, including product management roles, team organization, and product activities. The implications are vast and deep, especially in large enterprises. Product definition is one of the paramount steps in LeSS adoption. Depending on how a product is defined (how widely) an organization may consider simple LeSS or LeSS Huge. Based on the ladder, team structure and alignment is defined, product owner team is created, etc. Product definition has a significant impact on LeSS organisational design.Based on ongoing work with a variety of organizations, Ellen shares techniques for enabling product development leaders and communities to define their product using a cohesive set of product definition principles. In this keynote, Ellen will share why this question is so vital to your product success and ways she’s helped organizations co-discover the answer to the question, “What is Your Product?”

Whether your organization’s product or products are a primary source of revenue or are essential for your business operations, you will learn techniques that help instill product-thinking and shared understanding.

Ellen Gottesdiener’s Bio

Ellen is a Product Coach and CEO of EBG Consulting focused on helping product and development communities produce valuable outcomes through product agility. Ellen is known in the agile community as an instigator and innovator for collaborative practices for agile product discovery and using skilled facilitation to enable healthy teamwork and strong organizations. She is the author of three books on product discovery and requirements, frequent speaker, and works with clients globally. In her spare time, she is Producer of Boston’s Agile Product Open community and Director of Agile Alliance’s Agile Product Management initiative. You can connect digitally via:
https://ebgconsulting.com/blog/
https://twitter.com/ellengott
https://ebgconsulting.com/newsletter.php
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellengottesdiener

Agile, Agile_Role, Behavioral Science, CLP, Coaching, Event, Events, Kanban, LeSS, Metrics & Reporting, Newsletter-Communication, Norms & Principles, Organizational Design, Scaling, Scrum, Team Dynamics, Training, Transformation

03/03 – LESS TALKS: Meet Ron Jeffries & Chet Hendrickson @ LeSS NYC (‘Dark Scrum’ and more…)

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First and most importantly: Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson are long time friends and colleagues who both had a huge impact on what defines AGILITY.
About Ron:

Ron Jeffries is author of Extreme Programming Adventures in C#, the senior author of Extreme Programming Installed, and was the on-site XP coach for the original Extreme Programming project. Ron has been involved with Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Agile for over ten years, presenting numerous talks and publishing papers on the topic.

Ron is the proprietor of www.XProgramming.com, a highly-ranked source of Agile Software Development information. He was one of the creators, and a featured instructor in Object Mentor’s popular XP Immersion course. Ron is a well-known independent consultant in Scrum, XP and Agile methods, recently specializing in helping Scrum teams get Done-Done.  Ron is one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto.  Read Ron’s post on ‘Dark Scrum’ at: https://ronjeffries.com/articles/016-09ff/defense/

About Chet:

Chet Hendrickson has been involved with Agile Software Development since 1996, when as a member of Chrysler’s C3 project he helped develop Extreme Programming. In 2000, Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson, and Chet wrote Extreme Programming Installed. It detailed XP’s core practices, how to do them, and how they work together to help teams be successful.

Chet is the first signatory to the Agile Manifesto.

Since 2002, Chet has been an independent consultant, coach, and trainer. In 2009, he was asked by the Scrum Alliance to help develop the Certified Scrum Developer program. Chet and Ron Jeffries taught the first CSD course and continue to offer them in the United States and Europe. He has been a Certified Scrum Trainer since 2009.

Ron and Chet were the curators of the Scrum Alliance’s Agile Atlas website and in that function created the Alliance’s official Scrum description, Core Scrum.

Chet and Ron Jeffries often work together and are popular conference speakers, bringing an interesting mix of humor and deep knowledge, and the odd cat picture. The are a fixture at the Agile Alliance’s annual conference, Agile 20xx, as presenters in the Stalwarts track.
Last year, Chet attended Craig Larman’s LeSS class in NYC and this is what he had to say:
https://www.keystepstosuccess.com/2018/06/may-30th-june-1st-certified-less-practitioner-course-with-craig-larman-nyc/