Agile in 31 days

Hola amigos! Starting the day with a hot cup of coffee! I've just got up and I feel like a rolling stone! I am certainly preparing a long post about those "managers that want to become Agile". Absolutely ridiculous. I will be quite brief today though, just want to (as in a Mike Vizdos way) "focus on  # deliver " So. I met a guy, Matt Harasymczuk , few weeks ago in a meetup from  ACE  that presented "the next project management methodology to revolutionize our development". It was absolutely great! He approached the idea of the importance of thinking, understanding that we are people and the idea of cultural change.  Absolutely. I cannot agree more. Slides here . Overall, for today I just would like to re-quote (this is like a re-tweet, right?) a sentence that was the main core of the presentation and leave that on you guys to think about it: " Agile is not a destination, Agile is a direction ".  Tony Grout, IBM How does it fe

Hola there! How is the weekend going coffee-lovers? Weather in Málaga is so good! And I went to see Malaga FC playing Spanish Cup and we won  the game! (we destroyed Deportivo) I cannot complain! Malaga FC is just awesome! Focusing. The daily stand-up, daily scrum or just stand-up is considered to be the most important meeting of the Scrum world. But why? And why not? Many not very-scrum teams usually think that this meeting is just useless and reduce the concentration as to be thought as a break or an interruption which breaks the rhythm. Obviously I quite disagree with it. What would you expect I was going to say? :) It is just a short daily meeting where we have to know what we did the day before, what are we doing tomorrow and what are our blockers. The method to extract this information is via focusing on the individuals. The individuals themselves will be acting as a part of the cake - that is the team - and in orders will speak 1-by-1 about their own progress. A go

Hola there! I am about to take a flight that departs to Málaga and just realized that i haven't posted a single coffee picture! Big mistake! Thinking further, I ended up with Twin Peaks !   Most of you 70s and 80s born people remember it. A story about Laura Palmer's brutal homicide surrounded by mysteries and strange stories based on freak people from Twin Peaks, extraterrestrial stuff, dwarfs and spirits. " A town where noone is innocent ". Wow! What a summary! Well, along with The Wire, this is my favorite series have ever seen in TV. Not my intention to spoil it if you haven't had a chance to see it. It's a must-see. The story's main character is and FBI agent - Cooper - who can delay whatever important business just for a cup of coffee. True love. That's how I came my mind into it.  Then thinking further. How the hell David Lynch (co-creator) came up with this story? Who knows. This is when I start linking it to agile stuff. I

Fail Think Improve Fail Think Improve Fail Think Improve Fail ..

Hola amigos! Do you know that even in McDonald's you can order coffee? It's true. Surely not the best one but I have to confess that I have ordered once. I remember in Prague where the coffee in general is just "not the best in the world". Of course it didn't improve but I had to try with it since I had no better choices. I am bringing the (or one of) biggest fast-food restaurant for a reason. Few people that I know believe that we should not call it "restaurant" but this is not why I am talking about it. Think yourself on what actions do we execute when we just want to eat food (as in other places). 1. Nobody gets us a seat. 2. You have to stand-up to order the food. 3. You wait for the food to be cooked and you pay immediately before being served. There is a difference now from the pubs. You don't provide a table number. You just wait to get the food. We don't provide with tips. 4. The food "shows up" and you find a place to ea

Hola my friends! Bit late for a coffee I think. Maybe a no caffeine one? It's Monday and I'm in love as The cure used to say. Yesterday we talked about the distributed teams and how to find the gaps. Today I want to talk about one of those exclusive co-located tools. The whiteboards. As a former boss said: "everybody loves drawings, graphs". Whiteboards is the essence of the agile manifesto. Who wants a fully-documented State diagram in Uml when we do have simple whiteboards?  Posts ago we  focused on the importance of the focus . What's important? How can our mindset acknowledge that easily? I don't think we can find any other powerful tool in Agile implementations to make visible what do we need to do. Just walk around, go for a coffee and come back. You will come across the whiteboard all day long. I don't need to remember what are our goals! They're just there! I will have a look at the whiteboard to check again on further implementati

Hola! Very good morning folks! I am having my second coffee of this lovely and cold day in London! I like watching  BBC News  on Sundays while I am checking out how my beloved football club performed the day before in "La Liga". Malaga FC won yesterday . These are real good news to start off the day. It is also sad that I have no other option to follow my team up remotely. Sign of the times, I guess. Well, suddenly the BBC presenter introduced us  'Wi-Fi Orchestra' . This is basically a live music experiment with 11 people performing at the same time music on 9 different subway stations in NYC (tube if you live in London) thanks to the free Wi-Fi (and Skype). All of them conducted by a director called Ljova. Maybe this is a campaign organised by Skype to sell us the advantages of using Skype as a tool to collaborate remotely. In any case, this is a real demonstration of a good cooperation, an excellent level of communication and a big understanding on where are