Need a new game to teach Scrum ideas? CardZinga!
One of the most popular exercises for teaching Scrum concepts (empiricism, self-organizing, etc.) is the Ball Point Game (BPG), and most Scrum trainers I ask say they’ve used it. If you’ve taken a Scrum class or two, you’re likely to have played it, too. (Here’s a link to a video I recorded in 2012 of a large team playing BPG.) When playing the Ball Point Game, a team will organize themselves around the goal of getting as many balls as possible passed through the system within a defined period of time. There are a few specific rules / constraints, and groups will typically undergo…
Lean Coffee in the workplace
Recently I was asked about using Lean Coffee (LC) in the workplace, something I’ve been doing for the past few years. While I’m a strong advocate for LC’s workplace applications, I’d like to start with my view of the broader picture. (I’ve written about my experiences with LC before, but this post has more experiences to back it up.) I’d originally heard about Lean Coffee three years ago when I met Jim Benson at SFAgile2012. I immediately fell in love with the framework, so much so that I switched my twitter handle to @AgileCoffee. Once I returned from the conference, I started a bi-weekly…
Scaling Me, Scaling You
I just scheduled our next meetup and threw these two questions out: How many teams is too many for one roving scrummaster? How many members before a team is too large? What’s great is that the group can discuss / debate the question. Despite being in Scrum environments for over six years, I don’t have THE answer, but I DO have some opinions based on solid experiences. Without playing too much of my hand prior to the actual meet-up, here’s what I’m thinking: Roving ScrumMaster I was hired here at SendGrid as an Agile Coach tasked with leading the transformation…
SendGrid’s history with Agile
I thought I’d highlight the milestones SendGrid has had in our Agile journey. Ground Zero When I started at SendGrid in May 2011, the organization was on the verge of adopting Agile and Rally’s agile software solution. In other words, the decision to move to Agile had been made prior to my start. (In fact, it was a key selling point used to get me to join SG.) The company was barely 18 months old, still a start up and had an Engineering staff of 10-15, tops. Hired as the first project manager and Agile coach, I was responsible for putting…
notes from retro: reducing distractions
By our Agile cadence at SendGrid, team retrospectives (and demos) fall every other Tuesday. Today one of my teams is coming up with a focused set of actions to try to solve the problem of distractions / context-switching. This team deals with many of our system-critical services (mail processing and delivery), so it’s staffed with really smart folks. (Well, really smart folks are on all our teams, but the features these folks work on receive a bit more attention than others.) They get interrupted often with everything from questions about our daemons and architecture to brain-teaser solutions and lego designs. Distractions are…