Agile in 31 days

Hola once again! Wow! It's nearly the end of the month! Reaching the 29th entry of the month! Posting stuff 29 consecutive days! Let's make room for a cortado ! Few days ago, I posted something about how useful attending conferences can be. Check that out  here . Today I'd like to illustrate one example of a learning experience. A mechanism that I brought back to my team in Athens. " Resolving conflicts ". As a non-native English speaker, I took the liberty of requesting a bit of consideration from the audience in case they couldn't understand me well so that I could try to rephrase it, repeat it or just speak up. That's how I created my safe environment. I was protected. We could start off at that moment. This was just a simple example on how to accept other needs in order to contribute to someone else's safe environment creation. Why is that important to me? It is easy to discern that any attack to my speaking English could have killed my c...

Hola! Coffee and collaboration! Yum yum! Collaborate. Innovate. It has been a great year cooperating and learning from many people from many different areas and companies.

Hola! A long fun weekend is coming! So I am preparing myself with a big cup of coffee! Education is important. I assume that we agree in this and I don't have to bring valid reasons on why this is important. So, sticking to the point, there are several methods: - Self-teaching . Reading, writing, webinars, researching, attending meetups for instance... the world is not enough! - " Microwave-teaching ". While working is another way if you are under a company that has a nice "try" and "fail" culture in the atmosphere. "We can make the invest of trying something that nobody knows what it is, but we can assume the loss in learning and trying, no matter if it doesn't help us". The action of stimulating your creativity is indeed a success by definition although it is just you alone in the dark. - Training (external or internal) . No discussion on how useful they are. Just a comment. You may have spent your last 8-10 years on a topic th...

Hola amigos! Have you ever tried Bonka coffee before? It's just great! I am having my second of the day! Yup! Energy! From the day 0 (zero) I had the idea of using this blog to illustrate that "Agile is way of life" and can be applied to our day-to-day. This also means that when it comes to move companies into the Agile direction that is not exclusive of IT companies. If you have come across my previous posts, there is one in particular " Sa-tis-fac-tion " which I brought it as one of the basics when introducing an Agile coaching into organisations. If you read it meticulously, there is not a single reference to Unit Tests,  Java, or any technical stuff. So today, we did a similar first "encounter" and we faced few minor improvements that we could implement into a wine shop in Marbella . "Agilizing" it  as in a Kaizen way :-) Your wine shop in Marbella These are our few ones: 1. Adding metrics to be able to better evaluate...

Hola amigos! Today I've seen the best mug ever for my espresso coffee! Keep the calm and ramble on!  I love Led Zeppelin! Kinda strange day. I am back to one of the companies where my professional career adventures started almost 10 years ago! I was almost a rookie when I joined them and now look at me... I am still a rookie in many senses!  This company is based in Málaga so I offered myself to provide with Volunteer Services to help them to implement better Scrum practices given my experience in this area. This is also a way to earn SEUs that allows you to apply for the Certified Scrum Professional (see Category D ). So is it really non-compensated work? Well I did not get a pence but It does not look like I am Mother Teresa either. Anyway. What have we covered today? We went directly to the core, to the root. How a developer works on his day-to-day? What is the process of bringing a change request, new project developments into a customer? In the outsid...

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...

Hola! This is the first entry of my 'Agile' Blog. Welcome and please feel free to read it while having a coffee! This is a Blog created to document and track the last thirty-days of 2014 focusing on the Agile vision . The aim is to post real-life experiences related to Agile - somehow. As I defend in many places and conferences also to demonstrate that "Agile" is not just following ceremonies. The most important part (and surely the most difficult) is the Agile mindset. Being Agile via thinking Agile. The idea is to illustrate via my day-to-day examples that Agile is just everywhere. Let's start off.. My company has just sent me to visit one of our teams which is based in Athens to provide with Agile training/coaching. Compared to other companies, I can say that this is quite an Agile team. However, as in other teams, there is a lack of what I called "aggressive" mindset.  The conservative Scrum implementation tend to transform the sprint da...