Cherie Silas and I discuss the importance of professional coaching skills for Agilists. In short – they are paramountly important.
If you want to up your coaching game – our next Coaching in Agile Environments program cohorts are starting in July. Check it out and sign up!
Is Scrum Master role a Luxury in Times of Turmoil? Erica Henson, Jim Sammons, and Alex Kudinov share their thought.
With Coronavirus taking over the world and people are forced into a remote work situation, Jim Sammons, Erica Henson, and Alex Kudinov are discussing how Scrum is affected by this.
While ICF standards are rigorous and extensive, their explanations are way too convoluted and complex for a lot of people to navigate. Aspiring coaches get lost in the multitude of priorities, requirements, and programs that promise quick and easy path to their desired ICF credential. Here we make them clear and simple to understand.
How many times a day are you walking into the conversation where people jump into discussing solutions that lead nowhere, lack a clear purpose for the people involved in the conversation, don’t make sense altogether without the additional “why” discussion? I know I am having those conversations day in and day out.
We are the society of doers, go-getters, and my recent survey of approximately 3 dozen of Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches support that claim. We are the community of proactive, goal seeking, “missing accomplished” kind of individuals who, in its majority, rarely step back and ask the “why” question. By the way, I am not a proponent of asking that specific question, a bit later on that.
However, we charge into action with no clear goal, no sufficient understanding, no true north star. And that is pervasive throughout our life, businesses, and culture. We pay the homage to the luminaries such as Sinek, we cite ad-nauseum the Scrum Guide with its pervasive Sprint Goal, and then we punch in the clock, and go about our daily doze of deliverable outputs.
How can we ensure that all we do has a meaningful, solid, and worthy goal behind it. There are numerous techniques, tools, and practices. It does not have to be complex. But some steps should not be skipped, otherwise we are shortchanging ourselves and setting up for a less desirable outcome.
Ask any Agile practitioner these days what Agile values are and he, most likely, will recite you some lines from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Ask him the final line of the said Manifesto and the result might be quite different, but I digress right in the first paragraph.
Ask a Scrum practitioner and he’ll give you 3-4, maybe 5, if he’s real good, values Scrum holds dear.
Next ask a different question, “What ARE the values? What are we talking about here?” And you’ll be lucky if you hear a half-baked off-the-cuff answer. Sometimes it’s just like, “well, values are values, those are what’s valuable.” Duh…
A quite interesting viewpoint and a crisp definition comes from Mark Manson’s “Subtle Art of not Giving a F*ck”.
I call on the Scrum and the larger Agile community to correct our messaging while we walk the continual path of tackling hard problems. Be less dogmatic. Think Agile. Be more like water and Scrum On!
Flow of work and, most importantly, value are paramount. There are times when you keep looking at the process and don’t understand what is going on, what is wrong, and why stuff is not getting to done. All the answers to questions asked sound like a bunch of excuses (they most likely are not, but a bit later on this).
In the previous 3 articles I reviewed some of the most important Agile metrics that Dan Vacanti’s ActionableAgile software helps you to get with ease. Those were Cycle Time with the help of the Cycle Time Scatterplot, and a multitude of metrics, provided by the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD). In the latest article we looked at Work Item Age and its importance with the help of Aging Work in Progress Diagram.
Looking at the Cycle Time Scatterplot we discussed the significance of percentiles and how they can be used to predict the cycle time and avoid the trap of a single-number, point-in-time answer. This is cool, you’d say, but not merely enough, and I would agree. We need better techniques to predict possible timeframes for a completion of a set of work items. And, sometimes, we need to know how many right-sized work items can be completed within a given time frame.
Let’s face it, we live in a real world, where “When Will It Be Done question” is as omnipresent as ever. We cannot bury our heads into the sands of the #NoEstimates beach and hope the questions will go away. Let’s learn better ways to answer those questions.
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