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.

On August 11th from 9 AM to 10:30 AM, Gil Broza and I will be moderating an all-star line-up of Alan Shalloway, Jim Shore, Jean Tabaka and Mary Poppendieck who are panelists at the Agile 2010 conference.  Here is our summary of the panel:

What is Lean? Is Lean the next “big thing” I need to learn — or is Kanban enough? Is Agile still relevant? To add to the confusion, there seem to be several different interpretations of Lean Thinking in the Agile community! In this panel, four Agile/Lean thought leaders and practitioners will discuss the essential elements of Lean and its relationship to Agile. Our panelists will share their ideas about Lean, show similarities they see between Lean and Agile, and help attendees understand (and perhaps reconcile) any differences.

This panel came about during last year’s conference in Chicago where Gil and I discussed what does our community really know about Lean.  Are we trying to reinvent the wheel?  Are there misconceptions about Lean in our community?  In our conversation, it became clear we were really passionate about hosting a conversation between members of the Agile community and thought leaders on the Agile and Lean communities on this topic to help everyone get a deeper understanding of both.  We also wanted to make sure that the experience is very interactive with the audience members giving the panelists feedback on how well they communicated their ideas.

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.

A colleague of mine, Deb Hartman Preuss (@deborahh), tweeted “I have a strange job: getting things to happen in other people’s minds, bodies, hearts. Kind of like the faith healer who doesn’t touch you.” and it struck a chord with me.  A lot of what I do as consultant is help open people’s minds to new ideas and look at their actions, which is why I use a lot of games and simulations.  In my experience, games and simulations help people get into a safe space where they can reflect on their behaviors and understand why they might want to change.

One of my favorite games to help people understand the corrosive effect of push systems and working in silos is the “Invitation Game” created by Chris Sims at the Agile Learning Labs.  In this game, participants are asked to make three invitations to a party with six steps to complete (see below).  The game is played in two rounds and they are timed.

1. Fold the paper in half
2. Put a smiley face on the front
3. Write “You’re invited!” on the inside
4. Add your signature
5. Put a sticker\stamp on the back
6. Deliver the invitation

In the first round, individuals are teamed in groups of six and each person is given one step to do.  When they complete ALL their work, they hand-off their eighteen unfinished invitations to the next station; i.e. after folding all 18 sheets of paper, the next person makes 18 smiley faces and then passes along to the third person on the team.  Normally, the completed invitations look something like this – all look the same and are sloppy.

In addition, as an observer what you see is a lot of waiting around – due to the constraints of the game only one person can work on the invitations at a time and all the rest are waiting for their handoff – and not a lot of value being generated until the very end.  Another interesting observation is what inactive participants are doing while the active person is doing their task.  Sometimes they are giving helpful, unsolicited advice to the active person on how to do their job.  Things such as “Hurry up”, “You can fold six of them at a time”, “You don’t need such fancy face”, etc., etc.  Sometimes the inactive people are just waiting around with nothing to do or talking to another inactive participant.  If you ask the participants about the experience, they normally say it was stressful and they felt a lot of pressure.  The term “fun” is not mentioned at all.  IME, teams usually deliver their invitations somewhere between 12 to 15 minutes.

In the second round, we change the rules of the game a bit.  Each person is responsible for making three invitations, they have to make a complete invitation and deliver it before moving on to the next one.  We also time when the first invitation is delivered as well as the when the last one is delivered.  Here are the typical results from the second round.

What you see here is a really interesting and creative stack of invitations.  During the entire game people are relaxed and enjoying themselves.  You also see individuals looking at other people’s work for inspiration and drawing on new ideas.  People experiment more.  Many times, while waiting for the entire team to finish other team members will start additional invitations and deliver extra value to the customer.  Finally, if you look at the statistics, i.e. the timings, you see the second round really shine.  The customer gets value within the first two minutes and all the invitations for all teams in delivered 8 to 10 minutes – a productivity increase of nearly 50%!

When both rounds are complete, I lay out all the invitations on the table and ask the participants which invitations a customer would want.  The answer is always the same, the invitations from the second round.  The second round invitations are just so much more interesting and creative than the first.  In addition, by delivering the items one-at-time when completed, the customer gets more opportunity to provide feedback to the team on what they really want (or don’t want) in their invitations.  If the customer finds an interesting variation – they can sell it right away, show it to their stakeholders and\or ask the team to make more (“I need more invitations with stickers of ponies.”).

I also ask which round is more like everyday work and the answer is again very predictable – the first round.  In the first round of typical batch\handoff work, the customer is obligated to accept the invitations delivered even if they are sloppy, low quality and don’t meet their needs.  What would their management and stakeholders say if the customer asked for the resources (12 to 15 minutes) to make another batch of crappy invitations?  They already spent 12 to 15 minutes of six people’s time.  They can’t go back and ask for another set.  In the batch\handoff work, there is so much waste of time where people sit around doing nothing.  Fortunately, people display a great degree of ingenuity and find something to occupy their time – criticizing and interfering with the work of the people who come after them.  A very typical behavior in most organizations.

More good links to share with others.

1. Ouija Board Estimation\Seance Sizing – a new method for estimation that relies on team, not the undead.
2. Is the Agile Community Being Unreasonable? – InfoQ takes a look at the friction between the PMBOK and Agile principles.
3. Toyotas’ Journey from Waterfall to Lean Software Development – Henrick Kniberg takes a visit to Toyota and peaks under the hood to see how a Lean company develops software.  What he finds will surprise you!
4. Defining the Last Responsible Moment - Karl Scotland puts some meat on this fuzzy Lean concept by looking at the cost vs benefit of delay.
5. Managing vs. Coaching vs. Mentoring - Jurgen Appelo makes the distinction between these three concepts.
6. The Problems With Acceptance Testing – thoughtful entry by Jim Shore reevaluating the importance of automated acceptance testing on Agile projects.
7. Alternatives to Acceptance Testing – more from Jim Shore on what can be used in place of automated acceptance testing.
8. More on Automated Acceptance Testing - George Dinwiddie adds his perspective to the topic of automated acceptance testing.
9. The Path to Frequent Deployments – a report from Kent Beck, author of Extreme Programming, on how to  increase development speed by moving from annual to quarterly to monthly to weekly and finally to daily deployments.
10. How to Be a Great Tech Leader – Richard Kasperowski talks about the technical elements needed to succeed when running an Agile project.

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.

Finally had a few moments to write about my upcoming speaking engagement at the Orlando Scrum Gathering from March 8th to March 10th.  I am VERY excited about the chance to speak at a Scrum conference and I was lucky enough to be selected to provide two presentations in Orlando.

1. Prioritization with Pugh – this workshop is designed to provide Product Owners a new tool to help evaluate conflicting priorities and focus the discussion on factors that matter to the business by using a Pugh matrix.  Pugh matrices come from the Lean world and are an excellent collaboration tool to resolve conflicts from conflicting stakeholders.
2. Insights Into Scrum Illuminated by Lean – this Pecha Kucha will focus on how we can learn more about the essential elements of Scrum by looking at the Lean principles embedded natively in Scrum.

I came across a question on a usergroup asking the following (it’s condensed):

“In our projects we maintain product backlog and do high level estimates in story points. Then when we actually start the iteration we do estimates in the sprint planning meeting in story points and then when the story gets completed we mark the actuals against it. Our understanding of story point is one ideal day (i.e.6 hours). Our estimate for the story include analysis, design, coding and testing. Now the CMMI group is recommending us that we should divide our story into analysis, design, development and testing substasks and track estimated and actual efforts against them. Their argument is that by doing this, there can be some data available which will tell us on how are we doing on each of this area and where we need to improve. For example if the analysis tasks are taking longer then estimated then we should identify reasons and actions to handle it. My argument was that we can not go below the story level because in agile way of working analysis, design, development and testing is kind of merged into a story  and since the story is a smaller piece its not possible to break it further in such a way. I told them that this will be too burocratic and there will be lot of administrative overhead. The CMMI group told me that in their previous implementations they have done it only this way even in organizations where they are using agile methodology (Scrum, XP etc.) and this was the only way they could find to handle this situation.”

There are so many things wrong here, I will just highlight a few.  Having worked at a CMMI ranked company, from perspective of a contributor most of these rankings are pure bunk.  The CMMI ranking had absolutely no impact on the quality of the system delivered or the timeliness of our delivery.  In both aspects, the CMMI process produced a lower quality, more costly system than an Agile approach.  As applied at this company, CMMI only served to reinforce all the bad habits and waste of waterfall (I really hate the term waterfall since it is SO pejorative.  Just exactly who admits to doing waterfall? – CEN).

When I hear the phrase “this was the only way they could find”, it just sets off warning bells in my head.  My only advice is to trust your instincts in resisting the mindset from the CMMI auditors. From the short description, it seems to me they are trying to create mini-waterfalls within an Agile process. As for the improvement the CMMI auditors are looking for, they are simply suboptimizing by focusing on tasks – that is such Taylorism.  I am reading an excellent book by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde talking about using Lean thinking to scale Scrum to larger product organizations.  This book provides the intellectual firepower to destroy the last vestiges of the waterfall in modern software development.

From my experience of CMMI and talking with some auditors, in many instances you only need to show evidence that a practice is occurring in order to pass an audit. There are many legitimate and creative ways to provide evidence your are following the practices described in CMMI. If your instincts are telling you the auditors are wrong, trust them.  Learn what the auditors are looking for and work with them to provide the same information.  Don’t let their intellectual laziness strangle real change and innovation in your organization.

As a practical matter, you need to placate these CMMI folks because they obviously have the attention of management. I would try to understand what management is looking for with a CMMI rating – beyond the obvious we need a ranking to get more and bigger contracts. What advantages would it give the business? How would you know that the organizational change caused by CMMI is producing the effect your company seeks? Then I would show your management how Scrum is helping in some areas and where it is deficient. In the deficient areas, maybe CMMI can help. Perhaps the CMMI people are right and the processes are unstable. Think about what you could be doing to make the entire system more predictable (hint – think Lean, not CMMI).