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.

Being a ScrumMaster is much more than just showing up for the Scrum meetings and lobbing in a few facilitation techniques to keep things moving along.  Yet I think many project managers who are new to being ScrumMasters misunderstand what is required of them.  I feel they read about Scrum in one of the many excellent books on the topic and think, “Facilitation…four meetings…lessons learned…planning…task tracking.  OK, that looks easy – I can do that in my sleep.”  All they can see are the transactional aspects of Scrum.  Since that is all what Scrum is to them, they bring the empty project management mindset to the work and the result is a functional Scrum without any purpose, rituals without any meaning.  And this is where I think many project managers turned ScrumMaster stumble with the role.

An excellent ScrumMaster has a real presence with the Team.  To become an excellent ScrumMaster one must go beyond the simple transactional elements of Scrum and focus on the transformative aspects of the work.  As ScrumMaster you need to focus, really focus, on the needs of both the Team and the individuals as you work to improve the environment they work in.  You need to be both physically and emotionally there for them in a profound way.

Scrum’s great promise is that it reconnects people to each other work through empowerment and true collaboration.  As ScrumMaster it is your responsibility to facilitate collaboration, to help people feel comfortable and willing to take both professional and personal risks.  This does not happen in a fifteen minute Daily Scrum, or a two-hour Sprint Planning meeting or during a Sprint Retrospective.  Those rituals have very specific goals and individual coaching is not one of them.  The moments where one-on-one coaching happens and trust is developed are the times when the people are doing the work.  It is those moments when one notices a Team member’s joy, disappointment, frustration, happiness and anxiety.  You catch them being real and experience the moment with them.  This only happens when you share physical proximity, observe and be present when these moments happen.

In Scrum, we strive to give the Team members slack and ask them to limit multitasking to preserve their focus.  We expect the same from the ScrumMaster and that is why I recommend new ScrumMasters only focus on one Team.  If as a ScrumMaster you are lurching from fire-to-fire, meeting-to-meeting, team-to-team you are still operating in the old project management paradigm and it needs to stop.  People on the Teams need your help.  Stop being so busy and focus on what the Team needs for a change.

I am very excited about this post because it represents a new direction and a deeper understanding of what I want to do with my business.  As many of you may be aware, the process to become a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) has been undergoing some change lately.  It has been interesting to watch the process evolve and I wanted to make my intentions public after completing two of the five co-trainings suggested by the process.  It has been a great honor to co-train with Tobias Mayer and Lyssa Adkins and I have learned a great deal about training, communicating effectively, improvisation and being authentic.  Thank you very much for your mentoring, time and sharing.

In 2007, as an internal coach for a large biotech company in San Diego, I was asked to create two-day ScrumMaster training modeled off the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) curriculum.  In this class, I covered the basics of the Scrum framework and some common tools\add-ons used by Agile teams like user stories, estimating and release planning.  Over the course of eighteen months, I trained over forty people on the Scrum framework and coached a number of Scrum internal teams.  While I was able to teach the rituals, roles and artifacts of Scrum, I felt something was missing.  For the longest time I was puzzled why many of the students were just not embracing Scrum in their day-to-day work.  Clearly they had a problem, but it was just not obvious where it originated from.

Recently, I have come to a new understanding of what Scrum means to me and reevaluate what I had considered valuable in the past.  After some reflection I have come to realize the problem did not lie with the students, but with the information the instructor provided them and how they were instructed.  At the time, I had thought Scrum was simply an effective framework for getting things done, just another another bag of tricks for good project management and it was taught as such.  Today, I understand that Scrum is about cultural change and establishing new values in an organization.  If Scrum is about values, then the focus of the education should be about the values and principles of Scrum.

This has been a profound change in my thinking about Scrum and has altered the way I interact with Teams.  In the context of the CSM class, I have revamped the curriculum away from the standard Powerpoint presentation describing the Scrum rituals, artifacts, roles with me as the center of the course to a participatory, collaborative exploration of the Scrum values and principles, making connections to the Scrum framework with the learners at the center.  The result of this change is a CSM course that concentrates on the Scrum values of respect, openness, courage, commitment and focus, generates discussion of how those values are important to the learners and assists the students in making connections of these values to their lives and Scrum.  When the conversation shifts to instruction about the Scrum framework, roles and commonly used Agile tools, they are explained in the context of the Scrum values and as further illustrations of the values in action so they become real and tangible for the participants.

In my opinion, the role of the CST in CSM, or Certified Product Owner, class is to guide the learners through a series of collaborative exercises and discussions to examine what the Scrum principles and values mean to them, why they are important to the framework and begin to connect the participants to the meaning of Scrum.  I feel the students bring with them a great deal of knowledge and life experience to each class and my job as a CST would be to create an environment where they can self-organize around their own knowledge and then guide them into a fuller understanding of how Scrum works based on their needs.  The peer-to-peer learning environment I am trying to create provides students the opportunity to learn from each other, respects and draws upon their years of professional and personal experience and turns them into active participants in their learning.  Essentially, I see myself as the participants’s ScrumMaster in learning.  I feel this learning experience better equips the students with the ability to facilitate and improvise Scrum in their organizations because they operate from a definition of Scrum that matches their own life experience, not the instructor’s.  In addition, this instructional model where the instructor leaves the center and allows the learners to take this space, allows the participants to observe how the role of ScrumMaster is done well.

Passing on some good summer reading.

1. Core of Agile and Scrum – essential principles of Agile and Scrum that transcend the software development.
2. Three Legs to an Agile Transition – George Dinwiddie looks at how teamwork, visible progress and continuous improvement are key to change organizational culture.
3. Why Multiple Product Owners is a Bad Idea – read the article to find out how having multiple people setting priorities short circuits the role.
4. Nobody Can Do Agile – Simon Bennett explains why Agile is about thinking, not doing.
5. Agile Requires Cross-Functional Teams – Johanna Rothman discusses why cross-functional teams are essential for Scrum and other Agile processes.
6. Sir, Please Step Away From the Team – common the changes in management style for managers when Agile teams start in your organization.
7. Story Time! The hidden Scrum meeting – ever wonder when the requirements and the analysis happens on a Scrum Team?
8. How Does a PM and SM Coexisit? – a reader asks Michelle Sliger how the role of the project manager changes with the introduction of ScrumMasters.
9. Truly Agile CMMI – a short blog and video about a company that gets both Agile and CMMI.
10. Millennials and Scrum, Made for Each Other – Lyssa Adkins talks about how the Scrum values and principles align with a new cohort entering  the workforce.

Just wanted to share a bit of my personal Scrum journey for those who might be interested and why I find Scrum to be very compelling.

I became a CSM during 2005 after attending an early CSM course provided by Ken Schwaber, Paul Hodgetts and Tobias Mayer.  Before that experience, I had been using Extreme Programming (XP) to write and deliver software for three years.  Ken’s CSM class helped me understand that while interesting, XP is mostly an internal conversation among developers about how to build great software.  Scrum, on the other hand, is about creating cross-functional, collaborative Teams to deliver astonishing results to the business.  What most impressed me about Ken’s description of Scrum was the importance of providing transparency and the role Scrum can play in raising the professionalism of our community.  It was with that vision that I became more interested in how I could practice Scrum and I was on the lookout for experiences that would allow me to see Scrum in action.

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.

Some new links to share and idea to learn.

1. What Does an Agile Coach Do? – Considering an Agile\Scrum Pilot?  Don Gray talks about what you might expect from your new Agile Coach.
2. Should the ScrumMaster Also Be a Member of the Team? – Clinton Keith provides his perspective to a common question\scenario many Scrum teams face when starting out (with good dialogue in the comments).
3. Pathologies of the Daily Scrum – Experience report from a session at Agile Ottawa identifying ways daily standup meetings breakdown and some suggestions to improve your daily meetings.
4. Institutionalized Agility – Rob Myers discusses some of the common obstacles when your organization decides to “go Agile”.
5. Balancing Agile – Special guest poster, Alan Shalloway, talks about the role of management in an Agile process.
6. Do You Need Iteration Zero: A Case Study – Jim Shore examines a common practice when starting up new Agile teams and critically evaluates how necessary it is today.
7. Why Your Agile Project Cannot Be a Success – List of 32 items that increase the risk of failure for your Agile project and point to signs that you do not understand Agile.
8. The Dangers of Agile Development – Jeff Anderson takes a humorous look at some of the real risks posed by Agile projects.
9. Making Change Stick – Steve Denning looks at the ten practices\principles to understand when leading a change effort.
10. The Myth of Utilization – If your computer slows down at 100% utilization, then why do we ask our team members to do the same?

There has a been a bit of a date change for the Welfare CSM class I am co-teaching with Tobias Mayer.  We still have plenty of openings in the class, so please sign-up today.

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.