Agile in 31 days

Hola! Cold afternoon here in London. Anything better than a double espresso? I don't think so! Me: Which topic should I talk about today? Why do you like your Cupra? You: How do you want me to know? Me: Aren't you interested in following this up with something interesting? You: Which topic do you consider you should write about to make this post more interesting? Me: What do you think about educational games to explain Scrum via playing? You: Why would not like it? Can you explain a funny one? Me: What about a Scrum Master Role game? As you can see this is a real-post-live example of one of my favorite-educational games from tastycupcakes.org See: http://tastycupcakes.org/2012/11/questions-only/ for further information The quickest and simplest way is to get someone that dictates the answer, the ways to walk. This makes our life easier. It makes us very comfortable. "Everything is under control." But... don't we think we should be able to be in ...

Hola Hola! Maybe not the right time for a coffee. No. There's always a good time for it. Agile coaching is tough. Very tough. Essentially we (people) are... tough. You need to have a strategy (your epic) and a full set of tactics (user stories) that align to a common goal. Within my career. When providing Agile coaching, this is structured in few phases: 1. Understanding of the current situation and who the people are and behave. This is a continuos work since people are not predictable and you cannot even draft an immutable plan. However, we need to start from a point, let's say our sprint 0. We will be learning as we go. Last week for instance. Our starting point was the understanding of our evolution as a team and an individual brief profile description .  " We know how we are (Now!) and what brought us here" 2. Additionally, provide with sufficient materials, documentation to read as a guideline to self-"learn" and estimulate the idea of...

Every now and then, few Spanish people from my company arrange a pub and few beers to talk about anything we feel in regards "Agile". Self-organised. No rules. We just talk about anything that worry us or not. Today we brought the micromanagement as one of the biggest issue on agile teams :)

Hola! Let's enjoy together a cup of a coffee. I feel like I'm in a "espresso" mood. That usually means "good vibrations". I've just finished one of my best training experiences. Ok, maybe I tend to exaggerate. But I am able to say that I'm feeling great. Isn't that awesome? Expressing emotions that bring you personal rewards. "Hey man, this is fantastic!". Perhaps this is due to the fact I am in a continuos brainstorming mode. How can I bring Kanban into my organisation? Now! I had a very limited - and real - idea of Kanban before these two days. "It must be like scrum but continuously prioritising. No sprint plannings, just put stuff into a queue and kanban will ensure somehow it will go to production when is done". "Kanban is a bit chaotic while Scrum is partially predictable and less disruptive". Well, and after two days, I am able to consider those as valid comments yet. This is still partially true. ...

Hola! Please have your coffee first! If you were going to present kanban to an audience, what would be the best way to do it? Using a kanban board :) Lots of stuff happening these days around kanban... 

Hola amigos! Tomorrow I am attending a Certified Lean Kanban Foundation Training! I am very excited about it! I have the feeling that I have been "doing Kanban" for many years but I have not really been inducted on the foundations! So, from tomorrow, Tom Reynolds will guide us through. To make it more exciting we have been told to do some pre-homework. I have to choose in between few words from a list of Kanban concepts (I suppose) and share them tomorrow (underlined the picked-up ones) Kaizen Kaikaku Little’s Law Value stream Retrospective Cycle Times Kanban classes of service Make process policies explicit Due to my recent trip to Japan I had no other option to "google"  for Kaizen and Kaikaku . Kaizen seems to be related to "change for the better" whereas Kaikaku is something like "radical change". Slow changes against bigger ones. Mostly I think they describe "the speed of a change". It sounds interesting the...

Hola! Please please do not forget your shot of coffee! Let's go! I've just realized of a curious example in Agile from my experience going out for dinner in Athens. As in Spain for Tapas , here in Greece it's quite common to order small dishes so everybody can share and try a bit of them. Mezes  ( wikipedia ). It obviously requires a bit of "coordination" as I am going to present you in the next few lines. Your sprint planning meeting is basically the agreement where we read the menu and we confirm the order to the waiter. Our sprint will take around 2 hours, we have evaluated the food in value (price), and size (e.g. sardines meze is a bit small). Your definition of done consists of completing the mezes dishes as a team (quality is guaranteed by the way). One meze finished, one story delivered. Food is presented incrementally on the table. If we are sure we can take more, we don't mind asking again the waiter. "Excuse me, sir, I think we can take m...