Author Archives: Victor Bonacci

Vic is joined by Brett Palmer (@brett_palmer) and Larry Lawhead (@LarryLawhead) for a lively morning of Agile and coffee. Today our heroes discuss the following topics: Agile Planning – discussed WSJF and Donald Reinertsen’s book “The Principles of Product Development Flow” User Story Mapping Roles in pair-coaching Servant Leadership AgileGathering.com has the info about our upcoming Agile Coach Camp US West, April 10-12, 2015

Vic is joined by Brett Palmer (@brett_palmer), Jon Jorgensen (@waterscrumban) and Larry Lawhead (@LarryLawhead) for a lively morning of Agile and coffee. Today our heroes discuss the following topics: Agile Budgeting – Larry lent his copy of Agile Estimating and Planning to his CEO. Will he get it back? The power of Standing for Agile – getting the team to arise Mike Lavery (@baconPhilosophy) asks about tips for moderating the initial Product Backlog meeting Framework Regression pain – when can a team create a circle of excellence? Initial product backlog mtgs are always the toughest with new teams. Are there best practices for moderating the meeting?#askAgileCoffee —…

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Vic is joined by Dale Ellis (@thedigitaldale), Dr. Dave Cornelius (@DrCorneliusInfo) and Larry Lawhead (@LarryLawhead) for a lively morning of Agile and coffee. Today our heroes discuss the following topics: Agile Coach kits – what do you keep handy? Dale mentioned a handout by CarbonFive. He actually meant Lane Halley‘s Lean UX recipe cards. You can find them on Slideshare here and here. Your most memorable retrospective Story Mapping User Story Mapping, by Jeff Patton “Why Documents Fail And What You Can Do About It” (video on YouTube) “Why are we still failing with agile?” @jasonlittle asks book: The Servant by James C Hunter why…

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For this episode, Vic is joined by Larry Lawhead (@LarryLawhead), Dale Ellis (@thedigitaldale) and Dr. Dave Cornelius (@DrCorneliusInfo) for quick and efficient morning of Agile and coffee. Today our heroes discuss the following topics: How does practicing Agile/Lean change people? The Value of Scrum to Organizations Roadmapping with Lean Coffee and Six Thinking Hats – see Vic’s recent post book: Six Thinking Hats by Edward DeBono Techniques for remote retrospectives mentioned: zoom.us, trello, kanban flow, surveymonkey, etc. Scrummaster as leader – getting things done book: The Servant by James C Hunter What makes a good scrum coach? Want more? Visit our brand new forums on the…

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Agile coaching demands many skills of the practitioner. In addition to being conversant in common agile processes, we are also called to serve as teacher, facilitator, mentor, counselor, negotiator, and leader. Of course, this is a partial list; there may be no limit to the skills identified as valuable to our coaching profession. Where did you learn these skills? If you weren’t born with these skills or have them injected into your being, how did you acquire them? Books, videos and training courses can help, but on the job is perhaps the quickest and most lasting method. Did you have someone…

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For this episode, Vic is joined by Jon Jorgensen (@WaterScrumBan) and Dale Ellis (@thedigitaldale) for a lively morning of Agile and coffee. Today our heroes discuss the following topics: Training vs Discovery – learning styles, immersive learning, guided discovery, peer stimulus Positivity-resistant peeps – believe in your team, like attracts like books: Joy, Inc by Richard Sheridan & Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni Agile mechanisms without values – Deathmarch Agile, Scrumbut DevOps, Docker, Agile – automated testing, microservices slides, videos for DockerCon 2014 Want more? Visit our brand new forums on the AgileCoffee website. BTW, have you gone to iTunes or Stitcher to…

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At the latest lean coffee, we had two cards with a similar question: how do you neutralize the bad apples / stop the eye-rolling? Later that night I remembered something I thought might apply, so below I try to craft it into a parable. (This post offers a huge tip of the hat to Robert Anton Wilson whose first chapter of “Quantum Psychology” describes a similar “parable about [this] parable”. Chapter nine of “The Trial” by Franz Kafka includes this central tale which Wilson treats as zen koan.) There was once a young scrummaster who had achieved some early success.…

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Does your IT organization make a practice of yearly roadmapping? Mine does. The current shop, the previous one, the one before that, and on and on. Just about every technology department I’ve been a part of does some form of yearly roadmapping exercise. The one characteristic that they all share? They’re drudgery. The process of creating a roadmap seems a staple of the yearly business cycle, but that doesn’t mean that it has to suck. I work with technology folks who, independent of the sales pipeline, are asked to list, size and prioritize some set of initiatives that are either wanted…

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This just in! We’re announcing that Vic will serve as facilitator for the upcoming Coach Camp. To learn more and see who will be attending, point your browser to AgileGathering.com for all the info about Agile Coach Camp US West, April 10-12, 2015 For this episode, Vic is joined by Jon Jorgensen (@WaterScrumBan) and Dale Ellis (@thedigitaldale) for a lively morning of Agile and coffee. Today our heroes discuss the following topics: Offshoring Wisdom – is this practice achieving its objective of lowering the organization’s development costs? Tenure and Great Teams – How can we retain our people? How long does it take for a coach…

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For this episode, Jon (@WaterScrumBan) and Brett (@brett_palmer) find themselves reminiscing about their trip to Indianapolis for Agile Coach Camp last September 26-28, 2014. There they met Bryan Beecham (@BillyGarnet) of Iceberg Ideas and Mike Bowler (@Mike_Bowler) to discuss the following topics: Using LEGO to teach technical topics – Mike has begun posting some of the LEGO exercises for teaching TDD and other XP principles on his site at gargoylesoftware.com. Brett referenced Rory (Story) Cubes and Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Diana Larsen and Ellen Grove. Bryan paraphrased Kent Beck from Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. Continuous Learning – Learn as fast as possible,…

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