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! 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 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! It has been a long week and we have had promising stories, improvements and changes to our community. How to make the change a solid part of our culture? I remember when I first attended an Agile Conference . Mark Dalgarno - organiser - said: "Time to take a breath. Look at what we have seen, learned this week. It's also time to contribute with at least one thing to the community". My mine blew up with so much good stuff and so excellent trainers. The list of ideas was uncountable! But the day after the conference, was Mark going to monitor if  I was "changing"? Of course, not. We cannot leave the responsibility (entirely) to our trainers, books, coaches, the weather or anything else. This is not matrix. There are no pills to make you a judoka or a Java Ninja. There's a small portion of the change (improvements) that has to be on us. Accepting the need for it and triggering as a follow up action. As Mark said. Try this week just one action...

Hola! Kalispera! Today is my second day in Athens. Worth saying how amazing the experience is being so far! And the weather is contributing! (And the food!) Yesterday I mentioned about the idea of incrementing value by delivering user stories in small chunks over this post: http://agilein31days.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/incrementally-provide-incremental.html We had no option today to move our thoughts to a real scenario. And It was also a great opportunity to move ourselves to the battlefield since it was the last day of the sprint. Time to start over and inspect what happened... We took a breath, we had an espresso freddo   and then we started inspecting/adapting from particular examples. We tried to find a valid 'waterfall' story from the previous sprint to proceed with the first observations. "What would have we done if we had taken this story now?". "Can we take into consideration an incremental delivery approach?". Eureka! Two members of the team...