Agile games, simulations and learning activities
A colleague approached me recently with a request. He was about to meet with a new division of his company and lead transformation activities at the team level, so he wanted advice on the best agile games to include. As usual, I turned my advice into a blog post so that (hopefully) others can benefit from my experiences. We all know that games are fun and that humans are hard-wired to play. Like most coaches, I use games, simulations and other learning activities fairly liberally in my engagements, but I want to be clear: I never play games just to…
My Path of Servant Leadership
A few years ago I came to realize that I am passionate about serving others. I’ve probably been aware of this sub- or semi-consciously for most of my life, but it wasn’t until I became a student of the Agile principles and methodologies that I learned the name for my greatest calling: Servant Leadership. Over my years working with and “managing” teams, I knew that traditional models of leading people were misaligned with how I was wired. The expectations described by business school (in the general sense) and my supervisors had always left me wanting more – having enough self-awareness…
What is a ScrumMaster?
In addition to our regular podcasts, I host a couple lean coffee meetups every month where we get people dropping in who are less experienced yet very curious about Agile methodologies and lean principles. One common theme at these in-person sessions centers around the role of a ScrumMaster, and it’s a topic that engages us old-timers just as much. Many of us have been serving as ScrumMaster of our teams, but the job description changes for every workplace and every team. For this reason, I trust the responses from my peers; still, we’re often left with more questions than “correct” answers.…
The Pair-Coaching Domino Game
Back in March I led a pair coaching workshop at Scrum Day Orange County 2015. My goal with the session was to examine a few pair-coaching roles, share a list of competency areas for Scrum Masters, and use dominoes to demonstrate viable situations where pairing will help the coach, her team, or the larger organization. (You may remember that I enjoy exploring this topic, and that I wrote about it earlier in the year. It seems that I’ll be talking about more this summer at the Scrum Alliance Coaching Retreat, possibly at the Agile Open SoCal and certainly at Agile SoCal in…
Encouraging a Bring Your SELF to Work Day with your teams
Most of us work in teams. We go to work and see the same folks each and every day. We check in when we fill our coffee mugs, and we offer a “see ya tomorrow” when we leave. In between, we work with them – either as a group, in pairs or quasi-independently with occasional interactions. We might spend more waking hours with these people then we do with our family and non-workplace friends. But how well do we know them? If you’re working with or on a team, you have a vested interest in getting to know each other. Doing…
Patterns in Pair-Coaching
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…
Kafka, Agile Coach
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.…
Roadmapping with Coffee and Hats
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…
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…
Capacity Planning worksheet for Scrum teams
[ UPDATE July 2016 – I no longer subscribe completely to the concept of capacity planning, at least to this level of detail. I will keep this post available, but I will not maintain the fancy spreadsheet 😉 It’s fun to geek out with numbers and formulas, but we could do better having meaningful conversations with our teams. ] The topic of Capacity Planning came up in a recent coffee, and I decided to introduce it to my new team. I just developed a spreadsheet (illustration below) that helps make visible the number of hours that each team member is…