Wow!  I have read a LOT in the last six months!  I guess that is one of the advantages of being on the road for about six months.

1. Understanding A3 Thinking – excellent description of how to use and create an A3: a Lean tool for executing Plan-Do-Check-Act (the Deming cycle).  This is the definitive source on A3, Henrik Kniberg has an Agile example and template on his site.
2. Getting the Right Things Done – good description of the concept of True North, developing strategy from True North and the respectful nature of Lean, the rest is kinda dull.
3. Pedagogy of the Oppressed – unique perspective on the characteristics of oppression, the oppressed and the oppressors; liberation for both the oppressed and the oppressors originates when the oppressed become fully engaged in the human dialogue of being, not simply exchanging roles with the oppressors.  Interesting connections to corporate life in the 21st century.
4. Project Retrospectives – discussion on the importance of making a deep-dive examination of a software project when it finally is complete with detailed exercises and agenda.  This is great book if you want to know more about retrospectives.
5. More Secrets of Consulting – just brilliant!  If you liked the first book, this one has so many practical gems for the consultant.  The only tedious parts of this book are the references to his other books.  My favorite tool: the Wishing Wand.
6. The Future of Management – this book was a favorite of the CEO at my last client.  There are many Scrum concepts in the case studies provided.  Too bad that many of the principles of self-organization and empowerment supported by the executives never filtered down to the teams
7. Coaching Agile Teams – WOW!  This is an awesome book, deep and rich with many profound insights on the various roles of an Agile coach.  In addition, Lyssa provides practical tools to improve both the coach and the individual.  This is definitely a book to return to again and again.
8. Training From the Back of the Room – this is my favorite book from the last six months since it has had the most impact on my personal performance.  It has changed my perspective on how to train adults with its sound theory of education and myriad of exercises which bolster learning.  Share this book with anyone who trains adults (thanks to “Agile Bob” Hartman for tweeting this book title!)
9. Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development – comprehensive companion book to Scaling Lean & Agile Development (which is very good on Lean and Scrum).  This book is full of good stuff, but just too long.  Unless you are a guru (or wanna be), stick with the first book.
10. Succeeding with Agile – Mike Cohn has put out another great book based on his years of practical experience with Scrum.  This book is also pretty long, but not tedious.  A great read if you have some experience with Scrum, but want to improve the overall experience, apply targeted improvements or figure out how to expand the reach of Scrum in your organization – it covers it all.
11. The Back of the Napkin – provides a framework on how to apply visual thinking tools to explain and sell ideas.  Since most of the work I do is conceptual, being able to draw a powerful picture is a useful skill.  A nice addition to my consultant toolkit and I look forward to sharing it with others (I didn’t find the companion book that useful, so skip it).
12. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series (not pictured) – these books were consistently entertaining, surreal and light; most were less than 200 pages.  The pace slows down around book 3 (Life, the Universe and Everything), but delightful nonetheless.  I cannot believe I just discovered them in my mid-30′s!

Believe it or not, there are a few books I did not get a chance to read.  I guess these will have to wait until after vacation.

• Leading Out Loud – about finding your authentic voice in business.  I bought this to get some ideas about leadership and self-organizing teams.
• Hope is Not a Strategy – I need to understand the sales process better and improve my ability to sell.  This looked interesting.

New stuff to read and learn before the holiday

1. The Zen of Scrum – Jurgen Appelo provides a 70-minute video overview of Scrum, roles and philosophy.
2. The Difference Between Waterfall, Iterative Waterfall, Scrum & Lean (in pictures) – Visual representations of these various processes.
3. Company Culture Affects Your Code – A short examination of influence of Conway’s Law and culture on your software projects.
4. Explosion of Agile Practices – A list of 50 or so common practices used on Agile teams.
5. My Progression Toward Kanban – Brian Doll provides a good overview of Lean software development techniques and his personal journey there.
6. Post Agile Companies – Cory Foy looks at three Agile organizations and explains why understanding the Agile principles and values is more important than doing the Agile practices.
7. How Great Leaders Inspire Action – Simon Sinek describes a simple model to inspire others in this 18-minute video from TED.
8. Iterative and Incremental Development – Explanation of the difference between incremental vs. iterative software development (IID) and the history of IID.
9. Why Estimate Twice? – Good overview on the common practice of estimating the size of features, while estimating the duration of tasks.

Sorry for the long delay – I’ve been swamped.  Now back to the great links.

1. Large-Scale Agile - Jim Shore talks about the seven factors to consider when trying to make Agile large.
2. What is the One Thing You Can Do to be More Agile? – various vendors at the Agile 2009 conference provide their answer to this question during this five-minute video.
3. Intro to Scrum Video – Bob Hartman and Arif Gangji provide an eight-minute video overview of Scrum.
4. In Praise of Middle Management – this article explains how leadership from middle managers is essential for driving change brought on by Scrum.
5. The Role of Test Manager in an Agile Organization – Johanna Rothman talks about how Agile transforms the role of Test Manager from one that schedules resources to that of coaching, removing obstacles and building organizational capacity.
6. 78 Things I have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching – Jean Tabaka shares her accumulated wisdom about Agile and change.
7. Top 10 Questions When Using Agile for Hardware Projects – In this interview, Larry Maccherone discusses how Agile is applied on software-hardware projects.
8. You’re Just Going to Fail, So Don’t Bother – Scott Downey, Scrum Coach at myspace, discusses why Scrum is so difficult for many organizations and identifies the six hard truths you eventually confront when using Scrum.
9. Agile Roots – A Personal History – Jim Highsmith, a signatory of the Agile Manifesto, discusses the origins of the Agile movement.
10. The Wrong Lessons from Toyota’s Recalls – and the Truth - Jeffery Liker gives his take on the Toyota recalls and what they say about Toyota’s highly touted manufacturing process.

Excellent links for everyone to share.

1. Pollyanna Pixton on Agile Leadership – a 30-minute video talking about the factors corporate leaders can influence which support Agile teams.
2. How I Learned to Program Manage an Agile Team After 6 Years of Waterfall – Sara Ford describes in brutal candor her experience becoming an Agile PM while working on CodePlex at Microsoft.
3. Explaining Agile – Mike Cottmeyer neatly summarizes his understanding of Agile.
4. How to Compare Elephant Herds - Dave Nicolette finally (?) explains why comparing teams through velocity is meaningless.
5. What Does a ScrumMaster Do? – for those of  you who are curious and wanted to know.
6. Replacing the Iron Triangle of Project Management? – short discussion on reevaluating a well-accepted PM paradigm.
7. Adopting Agile Development – the Role of the CIO – how senior leaders in your organization can help promote Agile adoption.
8. Moving Beyond Scrum – a look at some reasons why one might want to take the next step.
9. Tragic Mistakes When Adopting Test-Driven Development (TDD) - Scott Ambler discussing some pitfalls & obstacles companies encounter when they begin the process of using TDD.
10. Comparison of Open Agile with Scrum – introduction of a domain-independent framework for delivering value while using Agile principles via a compare-and-contrast with Scrum

Here are two weeks worth of linkie goodness for everyone.

1. 4th Annual State of Agile Survey - VersionOne, an Agile project management tool, has published their annual survey on the adoption of Agile; a great source of industry statistics and window into how other companies are using Agile.
2. From Waterfall to Agile – in this 16-minute video Ian Culling, the CTO of VersionOne, talks about the Agile journey and common pitfalls he has observed.
3. Scrum for Managers – in this 90-minute talk Mitch Lacey, CST and (former) Microsoft PMP, gives an excellent overview of Scrum and the new role for managers.
4. Protect People - Jurgen Appelo discusses the role of managers in creating a safe interpersonal environment so self-organizing teams can form and flourish.
5. Tips for First-Time Scrummasters – pitfalls to look out for on that first Scrum project.
6. Top 10 Estimation Practices in Agile – excellent, excellent summary of current practice on Agile teams today.
7. Assessing Agile Readiness – a 20-minute video from Joshua Kerievsky discussing the process of kicking off Agile at your company.
8. Getting Better Agile Transitions - Mike Sutton describes some factors to consider when selecting a coach to help your company become more Agile.
9. 10 Rules for Better Management – a short checklist on ways to become a better manager; I like to item on control charts.

Here are links to the best of the blogs for the week of Dec 18th 2009.

1. A ScrumMaster’s Checklist – a comprehensive checklist from Michael James offering four areas a ScrumMaster should pay attention when coaching: the Team, the Product Owner, the organization and the technical practices.
2. Agile Leadership: Methodology Ain’t Enough – the Hacker Chick brings us a blog article about the management beliefs and behaviors which support the growth of Agile teams.
3. When Should QA be Engaged in an Iteration? – Hiren Doshi PMP discusses the role of QA on a Scrum team and tackles the myth that QA folks “have nothing to do until the end of a Sprint”.
4. Five Reasons to Hire a Coach for Agile Teams – Ester Derby talks about five pitfalls of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Agile coaching.
5. Scrum Doesn’t Do Anything – explanation of how Scrum only comes to life when people are added to the framework and the importance of the following the rules by Tobias Mayer.
6. Practical Agility: On Estimation – Dave Rooney describes the Agile estimation lessons he learned while undergoing a recent move.
7. Overcoming Technical Challenges for Adopting Agile Methods in the Enterprise – Vijay Narayanan over at InfoQ discusses the importance of having an development environment which supports your Agile process.
8. Flipping Out – short description of how Flickr uses Continuous Integration and a Single Code Base to add features to their application without branching.

There was a lot of great stuff to read this week, unfortunately I can only go with eight or so entries.  Cya next week!!

Last week, I completed the my Agile Team Training class.  I had a really good turnout (~20) and it was a lot of fun!  While reading the class reviews, a common refrains from the participants were they were surprised at how engaged they were in the simulation and how committed they were to the outcomes.  One participant even wrote these kind words:

“I was skeptical that it [SIMSOC] would provide any valuable lessons.  I was pleasantly surprised to observe behavior developed that mirrored my professional experience closely enough to be instructive.  I joined in more fully than I anticipated.”

For those of you that might be curious on what we actually did for the day, here are some photos from the event.

In my experience, having the right venue goes a long way to setting up a good learning experience so I was pleased to have this large space for the class.  This is the great space we had for the event, right on Mission Bay with plenty of natural light, windows looking outside and good food to eat.

During the simulation participants are divided into different regions.  For this game we had three regions: Green, Yellow and Red.  In this photo, the Red Region trying to understand the SIMSOC rules and figure out a game strategy.  The members of this region quickly coalesced around a common goal, but had some initial difficulties convincing others.  Unfortunately, their riot in the first session was unreported by the head of the mass media (MASMED) and did not have the intended effect of getting the rest of society to pay attention to their concerns.

While SIMSOC looks like people are just sitting around in chairs all day, the game is much more dynamic than the photos depict.  This a member from the Yellow Region visiting the Green Region to discuss game strategy. Somewhere around the third session, there was freedom of movement and people began meeting face-to-face to discuss issues and share ideas.  Very soon after that, the Red Region proposed a compelling national program to organize the society around and the game came to close during the sixth session.

Here are some the things the participants learned about teamwork during the class:

“Maintain the big picture to maximize individual contributions.”

“We were all seeking cohesiveness and cooperation.”

“Common goals across teams had an enormous impact of behaviors.”

“Finding common goals is really needed.”

“Not reaching out and trusting teams would have made that [reaching our common goal] impossible.”

“I was pleasantly surprised how cooperative we became with each other.”

“People do not start out in trust.”

“Working with different teams [can be challenging] because they have different local goals.”

“How very important trust is to building high-performing teams.”

“Define the common goal makes you more efficient and motivates the team.”

“Trust others on the team, they have best interest in mind.”

It would say it was a very satisfying, compelling and educational day for everyone. I look forward to the next time I host this game.

Does this sound like your team?

• Boring stand-up meetings that never end.
• You need ten people in the room to make a decision.
• Planning meetings are just about handing out work assignments.
• Everyone has a different reason for why the current release is important.
• Difficulty expressing your ideas at the whiteboard or in front of the computer.
• An upset stomach just thinking about having to work with the “difficult” person.
• Just writing the code people tell you to write and not contributing to the design.
• Rather be at an all-hands meeting than a code review.
• Blind to what other teams in your company are doing.
• Having nothing to say at retrospectives.

If your team feels listless and like more of the same but with all these new “Agile” labels attached, then perhaps you could use a refresher of some essential interpersonal skills to improve your daily interactions with your peers and management.

In this one-day course, we will reawaken the parts of your brain which govern communication, observation, collaboration, conflict resolution, teamwork, decision making, facilitation, critical thinking and listening.  Through the use of simulations, we will strengthen these skills, give you a chance to try out a few new ones and prepare you to become a contributing member of a collaborative, self-organizing team.  Oh, did I mention it is going to be a lot of fun?

Sign up today!

Your day will start off with some basic introductory exercises and explanations and then we begin the first session of the simulation, named SIMSOC.  SIMSOC (pronounced sim-sock) can be thought of as a live-action version of “The Sims” combined with the cutthroat drama of “Survivor”.  The goal of each session is to remain “alive” and further your personal goals.  Some patterns of behavior will be more successful than others and it is up to you to discover the right strategy so you remain alive by the close of the day.  At the conclusion, you will be able to identify the forces at work in the simulation, how they are relevant to the workplace, the key interpersonal skills needed for a collaborative, self-organizing team and what you can do to make your Team better.

Your facilitator will be Carlton Nettleton, President of Look Forward Consulting (www.lookforwardconsulting.com) .  Carlton has been coaching individuals and teams on how to implement Agile principles and practices and is passionate about helping your business and team succeed. He has nearly ten years of experience working with software products and services in both a technical and business capacity from small start-ups to FDA regulated medical products.

Sign up today!

On November 12th, I will be facilitating a first of its kind training for Agile Team members.   Through the use of simulation, I will help the participants reawaken dormant skills such as how to communicate with your peers, give (and receive) feedback, conflict resolution, decision making and other key soft skills each Team member needs to function in a fast-moving Agile Team.  At the completion of this one-day course, I hope to give participants a better appreciation of what skills are needed to communicate effectively, solve problems collaboratively, identify common communication patterns (and anti-patterns) and the application in the participant’s workplace.  Also, this is going to be a lot of fun.

In my work with Agile teams, I have observed that the greatest improvements of Team come when teaching the Team members soft skills.  These soft skills are more valuable because they allow Team members to connect with each other as individuals and foster true ownership of the work.  Too often people come to work on auto-pilot, go through the motions of their career and go home profoundly dissatisfied.  In my opinion, much of this can be traced back to a poor work environment which encourages isolation from the people we work with and the work we do.

With the Agile community’s strong emphasis on “individuals and interactions”, you would think as a community we would have some trainings that help people improve their soft skills, yet that is not the case.   Over the past couple of years, we have seen an explosion of training provided for leaders of Agile teams – the Certified ScrumMaster program is an excellent example – or we teach Team members technical skills – the classic two-day TDD class.  These are all really good things to teach people and they are useful to know.  They form a solid foundation for technical excellence and help create and sustain the Team environment.  However, they don’t teach people how to work together as a Team.

The simulation, named SIMSOC*, will begin the conversation of “How are we going to work together?  How are we going to make this time we spend together more valuable?”.  SIMSOC (pronounced sim-sock) can be thought of as a live-action version of “The Sims” combined with the cutthroat drama of “Survivor”.  The goal of each session is to remain “alive” and further your personal goals.  Some patterns of behavior will be more successful than others and it will be up to the participants to discover the the right strategy to remain alive by the end of the day.  No two strategies will be the same and there are no pre-planned outcomes.  Apart from a few basic “natural laws’, the participants are free to do as they choose, which creates fertile opportunities for cooperation and conflict.  By the end of the day, I hope to arm the participants with an alert mind, some valuable experiences on what types of communication and collaboration strategies which work and curiosity about the next steps they need to take to build and grow that awesome team that makes you excited to get up and go to work each day.

* SIMSOC was created by noted sociologist Dr. William Gamson to examine the role of leadership organization, power and social change and has been in use for over 40 years in both the business and educational world.

I was having a really interesting conversation with Susan Elliot Sim at Agile Open SoCal.  I was asking her why is it so difficult to get peer-reviewed articles published on Agile.  She responded by telling me this story, with the instruction to identify the emotions you feel when hearing\reading the story:

“Suppose I told you I was going to tell you that in order to understand what is wrong with your dog – he’s been limping and you think something is wrong with his leg – we are going to take him to a dog psychic in Nevada and this dog psychic is extremely good, highly recommended and gets great results and you take your dog there.

You ask the dog psychic, ‘Can you ask the dog if his leg hurts?’.

The dog psychic talks to your dog and turns to you to say – channeling your dog, ‘Well…thank you for asking about my leg, but that is not what’s bothering me.  It’s my back.  It hurts a lot when I jump up and down off the bed, especially on cold mornings, so could you please get me a ramp to make that easier?’

‘Also, I really like it when you come home to play with me during the day and I remember that time we went to the park and chased the birds in the pond, so let’s do more of that.’

‘Oh, and I really don’t like that dog food we have been eating all these years.  Yes, I know that I eat it all up and I probably shouldn’t have, but I didn’t want to hurt your feelings cause you do so many nice things for me.  However, since we are finally having a conversation after all these years, I thought you should know.’

And you respond to your dog, ‘Oh my God!  I never knew you felt this way about so many things.  When we get home, I am going to make all these changes.  I am so glad I spoke with this dog psychic!’”

So how did you feel after hearing this story?  It is a bit farfetched isn’t it?

According to Susan, this is experience is very similar to what academic researchers think about Agile – it is nothing more than dog psychics.  That you really have to believe in dog psychics in order to get any value out of them.  In addition, the people who believe dog psychics sound a bit evangelical in talking about how great dog psychics are and yet there is no (scientific) evidence on the mechanics of dog psychics.  I thought this anecdote is a really good concept to keep in mind when we encounter skeptical people; sometimes we just sound loony.