Showing posts with label agile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agile. Show all posts

Hello and I am here.

 I never realized it had been a year since I posted here.

My life updates have been mostly about work and I may have been doing this for too long. There's no team behind it, no editor, and no brainstorming sessions- mostly been me running this since 2008 along with a full-time job and a family.          

So, since we are just on time to start this weekend, I thought we could relook at the couple of articles I have posted in the community.

So, here are a few articles listed below that I have been writing and didn't share:

1.  Triads in Agile: The Path to Efficient Decision Making

2.  Quiet Quitting: How Agile can help combat that            

3. 3 Common Complaints in Scrum Team


Let me know if you get a chance to read through these articles.


(Pic courtesy: Pexel)

Rethinking Agile as Bold, Kind and Human

Feb 26, 2021 | | 0 comments |

 This post was first published  in Projectmanagement.com. Click here to read. 

Agile has become ubiquitous in project management, with teams using it to spark out-of-the-box thinking and drive countless projects across the finish line. Yet almost as quickly as the approach popped up, companies and project leaders began to oversell it—and what seemed to be a radical way of thinking has become mired in repetition and monotony.  

Agile was about being open and transparent, and people having the utmost importance in the process. Now, if you ask anyone about agile, it’s all about the three questions: What have you completed since the last meeting? What do you plan to complete by the next meeting? What’s getting in your way? There’s also the fear of being constantly monitored and the fact your performance is measured by your team’s velocity. 

Breaking out of this mold can prove difficult—who has the time? But with much of the world working from home, now might be the best chance to rethink agile as boldkind and human



Let’s look at how that might work.

Agile is bold: Challenge the process. Question what’s right for your team and be open to experiment. To get everyone engaged, encourage team members to ask questions. And try incorporating at least one fun icebreaker in each team stand up to get people to open up and spark discussion. 

Agile is kind: Just because the data seems all over the place or you don’t achieve a desired project outcome, the team is not always wrong. Look for insights, do anonymous retrospectives, dig deeper and listen more. Avoid making assumptions. Instead, remain empathetic and open as you talk through challenges and navigate team members to arrive at a solution. 

Agile is human: Agile won’t work if the team can’t work together and it’s up to leaders to foster a sense of camaraderie. One way to build this spirit of collaboration and rapport is through simple exercises, like using a sticky note or sharable spreadsheet where team members anonymously write one thing they’re good at or that they’re proud of outside of work. Then allow other team members to guess that person’s identity. This isn’t about who wins, but it gets the entire team to communicate in a low-stakes environment.  

What are the biggest challenges your team has come across with agile—and how have you overcome them?

(Pic courtesy: Pexel)

Agile| 6 Ways to Keep Agile Teams on Track

Aug 25, 2020 | | 0 comments |

This was first published on projectmanagement.com

Agile teams are being tested. The world has changed, and many teams—no matter what their structure was prior to the pandemic—are working from home, on top of dealing with increased COVID-19 challenges. While the demand for deliverables and work continues, the roles, responsibilities and efficiency of agile teams come into question. 

An agile team can, in most cases, work around the uncertainty and still get things done. To keep your agile teams moving forward, implement these six strategies:

1. Focus on the planning.

Yes, everything is subject to change, but planning is essential. This exercise (release planning, grooming or sprint planning) allows team members to understand the upcoming work and ask the right questions on time. Additionally, it’s a great way to train team members to provide estimates after going through the requirements in detail. This allows for better planning, wonderful execution and timely delivery instead of spillovers. Teams can use a variety of platforms available online to get the training done. Tools aren’t as important as the interaction itself. 

2. Track team health.

Working from Home




I always think the organic way to look at team health is through the consumption of buffer percentage. It is simple because during planning, your team assigns hours to tasks and you get the total hours you will need to complete the user stories. You also know the team’s total capacity (availability of the team during the sprint). Create a team buffer of about 10 percent and then plan for the sprint.

If during the course of the sprint your team consumes the buffer and still has spillover, you can increase the buffer. Track the consumption of the buffer percentage and determine if the team is estimating correctly, and if they are clear about the user stories. Buffers can let you know the team’s performance and, with it, the trend of the team’s deliverables. 

3. Prioritize retrospectives.

Teams must have a growth mindset, and nothing is better for fostering one than the ingrained cultural habit of retrospectives in agile teams. There are creative ways of conducting retrospectives during these times, even if they require workarounds. For example, perhaps instead of just focusing on the work and aligned data, retrospectives can include personal challenges as well. This not only allows the team to gather and feel seen and heard, it also allows teams to evolve and see if there are ways to reduce personal challenges. 

4. Encourage leadership.

Leadership shouldn’t be limited to just a coach or the leadership team. In fact, team members should be trained to make decisions when it comes to work or conflict management. I have always found that when the team lead or management encourages an open mindset for teams, teams take up challenges or new learnings because of the support they receive. These teams always perform better in the long run. 

5. Determine the happiness index.

Apart from other team data, there should be an insight that allows you to understand how a team is doing emotionally. In a 2013 Harvard Business Review article, Rosabeth Moss Kanter explains that a happy team can better handle complex problems. Finding the happiness index is one of the most revelatory exercises you can do with a team. Simply ask everyone to rate their happiness working with the team on a scale of 1 to 5 and why. Keep it anonymous so people share honestly, and you will be surprised what comes out. These are all hints that can lead you to identify unresolved conflicts, build retention and discover serious issues. 

6. Take action.

Many of us have good intentions. But unless there are actions that follow, trust falls apart. Be careful in committing too much and always follow up, whether it involves actions required from the last retrospective or something that has come to your attention.

What are some ways you keep your agile team on track? 

(Pic courtesy: Pexel.com)


2020- Whats in it for us?

Hi and thank you for stopping by. 
Pic: Pexel.com 

2020 has been good start. This is the year I am looking forward to amazing opportunities and life. 

This year the blog will focus on three things: Personal Development, Happiness and Creativity. And yes it will have occasional updates on the process side of project management or Agile. 

No matter what your choice of profession is; these 3 are the basic foundations- personal development, creativity and happiness. 

So, what will I be doing differently now? Every post title comes with a pre-fix of which category it belongs to. So you can choose to read the post or not.

Based on what I write here, my others streams of self expression/social platform will be of aligned as well. Heres how:

YouTube- I started it as a self-learning and experimentation platform for me. This channel is focussed on exactly the same theme as the blog. The goal is obviously to reach out more with the content. 2019 was a great learning for me in this platform. So, postings here are 2-3/month. This year, I hope I can regularize it a bit more and bring in more content. Your support means a lot.

Pic:https://www.instagram.com/somab2014/ 
Pinterest- This is my mood board, learnings, vision board. There’s one board that specifically aligns with this blog in the personal development space and that’s called “INSPIRATION”. If you have the same interest like mine and want a little more push everyday- the board might be just the one. 

Instagram- This was a visual journal for me, personal and just for me. Overtime this stays personal but open to public. From 2020, posts are 2 a week- Monday on Motivation and weekends  a little more personalised J
Twitter- This has been a sore point because I haven’t been as active as I used to be. I will let you know if I really get back on this. For now, I post sometimes, retweet and read up once in a while. 

Facebook-  And the SIPM Page gets a post 1-3/month. I have to rethink how I will interact here, but generally I created the page to repost the blog’s content….however from now on I think I will start posting other interesting links also here. There’s so much to learn, that the platform can be used for sharing amazing works and reads by others. Let me know what do you think? Would you like that? 

That’s my plan for 2020 and thank you once again for being part of this community.  


Debunking Six Misconceptions About Agile

This articles was first published in ProjectManagement.com

For those of us in the project management community, agile is a familiar term. But despite its prominence, it’s often misunderstood. 
All too often, teams and organizations focus on the wrong things or are misinformed. And eventually, agile takes the blame. 

Here are six common misconceptions that can lead to an anti-agile mindset:
  1. It is all about the tool. Any tool that’s hailed as what makes agile works is still just a tool. Yes, with distributed teams it helps to have a tool where everyone has access to project details and data. However, when introducing your team to agile, your training shouldn’t be tool-centric. I prefer teams to see and understand how agile really works—the simple use of sticky notes or a whiteboard does the trick. The move to a tool can and
    will happen eventually, and when it occurs, you don’t have to send multiple follow-ups to ensure the team is populating the data. 
  1. Agile is changing requirements in the middle of the sprint. While agile is known for inspecting and adapting, changes can get out of control. I hear teams talking about changes happening so often that they can barely focus on the work, or they are constantly handling changes. When the pressure to change a requirement is happening too often within a sprint and ends up becoming a norm in the team, the product managers or sponsors need to jump in to determine what needs to be built. Otherwise, team members tend not to focus on the work because they know no matter what they do today, everything will change tomorrow. 
  1. Agile doesn’t use data. The idea that data isn’t tracked is wrong. In fact, there are many ways to look at data. However, we also have to be mindful so data isn’t just being used for the sake of data, leading teams to start bluffing around it.  

  1. Agile doesn’t offer predictability. You’ll often hear that there was better predictability before—and now nothing works. Sponsors always need to know the timeline. And yes, this can be done in agile. In fact, using and tracking the right data can bring in the predictability your team needs. The velocity metric will let you know how much a team can handle in a sprint. So, whether it’s a burndown chart, sprint or release planning, there are multiple ways to get the required predictability and commit accordingly.   
  1. Agile doesn’t offer time to think. I recently was in a session about thought leadership and someone mentioned agile being the greatest blocker because there was no time to think. Interpretation, I believe, is the biggest problem of all. You can still block a certain percentage of your team’s capacity or yours to try out new ideas, participate in hackathons or learn a new skill that adds advantage to your product or service. If you are not speaking up about the problems, you should. And if flexibility isn’t allowed, that’s because of the team culture, not the process. 
  1. Agile is all about micromanagement. One of the funniest misconceptions I’ve heard is that an organization moved to agile because leadership wanted everything to be micromanaged. Individuals didn’t understand that team capacity and complexity (as measured in story points) aren’t ways to track team members. Instead, they are tools to help team members make the right commitments during their sprints, commitments they can actually keep and deliver. In this case, a lack of explanation about why the organization moved toward agile triggered multiple miscommunications. So, the responsibility lies with management and the agile coach to take the time to explain the move to agile. Because instead of micromanagement, agile is really about the opposite. It, in fact, allows teams to be empowered, to be able to self organize, to be vocal and to get the work done. 

These are six misconceptions I’ve seen about agile. What are the common ones you’ve encountered?


(Pic Courtesy: Google Images)

This is How I work- Dhaval Panchal (Executive and Agile Coach)

Experienced Executive Agile Coach and Organization Design consultant - Dhaval Panchal is founder of Evolve Agility, a Texas based coaching and training consultancy. Dhaval is ScrumAlliance Certified Enterprise Coach® (CEC), Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST), Certified Agile Leadership-Educator (CAL-E). Dhaval Panchal is actively involved in local Houston Agile community. Dhaval has led large scale Agile transformations for companies in Oil & Gas, Banking, Insurance, Gaming, and Medical business domains. He has more than 17 years of Agile implementation, coaching, and transformation experience.


When do you wake up every day? What’s your alarm set to? 

I do not have a fixed time for waking up every day, but there is a pattern. I workout two or three times per week. I get up early by 5:30 am on workout day and other days including weekends, I wake up later at 7:00 am. 

2. Tea or Coffee? 

Both, but my preference is black tea.

3. Any rituals to set the tone for the day in the morning?

I like to sip on my tea, before I am ready to think through rest of the day. I like working out early in morning, so by 8:30 am, I am energized and ready for rest of the day. I also have long commute (40+ m) and listening to spotify playlists feels good to get oriented for day.

4. Where do you work? 

I work at client site, or at my home office. 

5. What do you listen to while working?

At client site I am mostly leading workshops or working with teams so I am listening to people.  When I am working at home, I listen to songs on Spotify. Choice of music varies greatly on my mood. My default is Sufi Qawwali, and at times when I need to concentrate I prefer Hariprasad Chaurasia, his mastery of flute is flawless. I have a few curated playlists that have songs from hip-hop, Bollywood, reggaton, country, pop, heavy metal, Jazz etc..

6. What are you currently reading?

I generally have two or three books that I am reading at any time. Unlike while at school, my personal reading habits are for pleasure. Currently, I am reading 
1) Influence: The psychology of persuasion
2) Godel, Echer, Bach : an eternal golden braid
3) 1Q84 

7. How do you organize your work life?


I use a kanban board, and have post it notes hanging from my desktop monitor. It is very important for me to make a list of all tasks that I want to complete before I start working. This simple step takes me less than a minute, but it helps me to let go of worry and focus on task at hand. I also have a timer on my computer, where I typically set 25-45 m timer that allows me to stay focused for that time. I force myself to take a break, by walking around or some thing different, I am not always successful.


8.Any hacks you prefer for work? 

A few:

#) Never send long emails. If necessary call or talk to your email recipients first. Face to face conversations, or even on video conference/phone are far more fruitful than exchanging emails.
#) Listen more, talk less.
#) Don't blame others and circumstances.
#) Expect that I will make errors and trust that I will learn from them.
#) Show up on time, don’t make others wait. 


9.What are your favorite gadgets?

#) Jaybird BT headphone, these have lasted me many years and are very good, especially when I am working out.

10.do you have any must have apps in your phone?

# ) Twitter : I spend lot more time on this app than I should.
#)  Mail & Calendar

11. Any new addition to your routines? 
Don’t think I can fit any thing else in day to day.

12. How do you recharge?
Playing & goofing around with my children, long motorcycle rides, and reading books.

(Pic courtesy: Dhaval Panchal)


If you enjoyed this, you might also like another This is How I Work with Linday Scott of Arras People.

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Change Management & Scrum: Gamification Perspective

Aug 16, 2018 | | 0 comments |
This is a guest post by Madhavi Ledalla.
Introduction to Gamification
I have been studying about Gamification for a while and after having been part of several change initiatives, I started appreciating how the game design concepts can be used for change initiation and management. Gamification involves using game design elements in non-game design contexts. Gamification plays a very key role in increasing the employee engagement. The gaming elements and concepts behind the game design framework used to inspire people to get to the next level of the game play can be applied to non-gaming context as well to engage and motivate teams to reach to the next levels as deemed by the organizations.
There are many games in the industry which use simple game mechanics that include extrinsic rewards like badges, points etc. However the versatility of a gamified system depends on how the intrinsic motivators are exploited by providing real-time feedback to the players to reinforce the desired behavior. The key success of a gamified system is based on how effectively the gaming elements are used for engaging, rather than a means of showcasing extrinsic rewards. The desired outcome of a gamified system directly correlates to the motivation of the players involved. The idea of gamification and the universality of its application bring in a completely different dimension of thinking!
Game Design Framework:
The game design process typically goes through six steps as cited by “Kevin Werbach”, which are detailed below:
g1.png
Now let us try to understand the typical steps involved in Change management and then look at how game design steps can be used as a tool for change management.
Change Journey steps:
Any general change initiative whether it relates to agile transformation or not requires the following activities to be done at a minimum in most of the cases, though there could be exceptions depending on the context and organizations.
  • Identify the need for charge and define the desired state?
  • How will it affect the organization, leadership and teams?
  • Assess the organization readiness for the change?
  • Figure out who will lead the change?
  • How will the change initiative be facilitated?
  • How will the change participants be engaged and motivated?
  • Initiate the change.
  • The communication strategy.
  • Inspect and adapt the change initiative based on the feedback.
Change Management and Gamification
Having said this, I think that the game design process steps can be mapped to a change management process. In fact, the game design process may be used as a change management tool depending on the context, though it may not be applicable always.  Here is how I see them both map to each other as shown below.
G2.png
Having worked with a couple of agile transformation initiatives, I think the game design process steps can be used to initiate agile transformations too as it is all about change management.
Gamification and Scrum
There are several agile frameworks like Scrum Kanban, XP that can be used at the team level during the delivery and execution, depending on the context and the problem domain. I have been using Scrum from few years, and was thinking of doing something different to create more engagement and fun! Since I was reading on gamification, I thought why not I gamify the Scrum framework!  As I started working on it, I was surprised to appreciate that Scrum is already gamified to a larger extent as I describe it below.
G3.png
Scrum can be considered as a collaborative game play framework where team members engage with each other every sprint to deliver business value. Any game should have clear goals and rules- and every sprint has this. The gaming environment must provide constant feedback that helps players change their strategy all along the way and the sprint ceremonies are in fact meant for this! The ceremonies and artifacts in Scrum are nothing but the activity loops. For example, the burndown charts, Task boards- Daily progress indicators, Definition of Done, frequent feedback from Product Owners during the sprint, are typical examples of engagement loops used in a gamified system. Similarly the Sprint reviews, retrospectives, release burndown/burnup charts can be considered as examples of progression loops in a gamified system.
In my opinion, I think the concept of basic gamification is already embedded in the Scrum Framework to an extent. This is my comprehension based on what I read and understood about gamification, while I was figuring out avenues to apply this concept to Scrum teams.  However there is always a scope to add more elements to gamify the existing framework by using customized information radiators to maximize the team’s engagement by providing lots of feedback that will help them look at the current state and inspect and adapt!
My two cents
I would summarize by saying that we can always gamify the existing system to make it engaging by using data analytics, visual radiators, maturity levels and feedback loops. A word of caution is that too much focus on extrinsic motivators like the points, badges, rewards, levels may lead to teams getting pressurized to attain levels and may end up in misusing the gamified system and eventually start playing with the numbers!
Would be glad to hear from readers if any of you tried gamification while working with teams! Looking forward to learn from your experiences!
If you are interested in Agile, you can read more here.

If you would like to submit an article in SIPM, please send your article at Steppingintopm(at)gmail.com with the email titled as "blog article submission".


Interview: Authors of A Guide to Distributed Agile Framework

The book has been recently published in Amazon and if you have heard of Agile, work as part of Agile teams or would like to have  a better understanding how to make it across countries to work as one team- the challenges and the tools that will help you bribe the gap, this book is for you.

Today we are interviewing the authors of the book: John Okoro, Savita Pahuja and Hugo messer. 

1.First of all congratulations on the book, tell us how did three of you meet and decide to come up with the book?

John: We met on-line through shared interests, and at the Agile Singapore 2016 Conference. 

Savita: Hugo was already working on distributed agile blogs, models and mini books. When we met and discussed the topic, we figured out the common interest and experience on this topic. That’s how we decided to write a book.

We always wanted to share with the community our experience as well as experience of other people working in this space that’s why we have many practices shared by people in the community. 

Hugo: A few years back, I ran a podcast around distributed agile. The interviews with Savita and John inspired me and later, in our discussions, the idea of writing a book about it popped up. We initially started with 4 authors, but one was too busy to continue the effort. The initial idea came up as we saw ‘distributed’ was never answered fully within the agile community. Most frameworks touch upon it, but always look at distribution through their framework-lense. We thought it would be interesting to help address the specific challenges that come up when working distributed. We spoke to many people who struggled with it throughout the years. In my own company, Bridge, I have always had challenges with the distribution across Europe, Ukraine and India. With the book, we mean to help provide people solutions to these challenges. 


2.  You talk about the 6 bubbles of a distributed team, why are they so important to you?
 
John:  Many Agile teams struggle when it comes to working across countries or locations.  Having guidance and the experience of other distributed Agile practitioners is an important first step.  The bubbles are a good way to organize these ideas for easy consumption by our readers, and practitioners. 

Savita: These six bubbles are the main areas where teams struggle particularly when they are distributed. If organisations want to overcome the challenges of distribution, they should focus on all these six bubbles which are: 
Culture
Communication
Leadership
Product
Teams and tools
Organization                  

Hugo:The issue with distribution is that people see the ‘problems’ in other areas. For example, they believe they need to become better at ‘agile’ or ‘scrum’. Oftentimes, scrum doesn’t work perfectly because teams forget that culture influences their collaboration. Leaders forget that to grow a distributed organization, they need to organize work in a different way compared to ‘local agile’. We discussed what were the main ‘influencers’ of agile collaboration across the globe and summarized it in these 6 bubbles. We had more earlier, but since less is more, we simplified it to 6.  

3. Throughout the book you focus a lot on culture and the stories around it…what would you recommend the top 3 action items for any teams who work in distributed mode?

John
  1. Meet face to face at least once, there is no underestimating the power of building an in-person relationship. 
  2. Ensure there are truly Agile leadership virtues like servant leadership, empowering teams, and a growth (Agile) mindset in the organization.  With these Agile leadership virtues and the related practices in place the team is off to a good start. 
  3. Have collaboration tools in place like virtual electronic Agile Boards, Wikis, Virtual Pair Programming tools, DevOps tools to provide dependable and fast builds and deployment.  We talk about practices, and other tools that support distributed teams like high quality video conference. 


Hugo
  1. Create ‘one team’. No matter where people are and what company they work for, ensure people see their common ‘product/goal’. Have coaches to foster that ‘one team’ spirit
  2. Make sure people have a ‘rhythm’ in which they meet face to face as often as possible + they use high quality video and audio to communicate throughout their sprint cycles. 
  3. Get leadership support in order to get to the right team structure (onshore roles versus offshore roles). 


4. Tell us what is a team canvas and the benefit of having one?

Savita: Alex Ivanov and Mitya Voloshuk present a model called Team Canvas for team alignment that we find useful to align everyone on goals, roles and skills, values, rules and activities. The Team Canvas is a Business Model Canvas for teamwork. It is a free tool for leaders, facilitators and consultants to organize team alignment meetings and bring members on the same page, resolve conflicts and build productive culture, fast. It becomes more important to align team members on these attributes when they are distributed. It also creates a level of understanding about people on other site that improves collaboration. 

5. The team room with the wall as a focal point is wonderful, tell me how to convince a team what they can expect when they have a team wall?

Savita: Team wall is one way to improve transparency in the team. It is also helpful to align everyone on the common goals and the work they are doing. It keeps on reminding people on the agreed stuff.

Human by nature is visual and many studies have proved that visual information stick in the memory. That’s what team wall gives to the team. 

Hugo: Transparency and visualization are key in Agile. Without the traditional requirement documents, teams get lost. Team walls and other portfolio/product visualizations help teams to see the big picture of a product, the roadmap, the users, the progress, etc. 

6. Do you think through all these discussion and points, the goal is to bring the members of the team to a common understanding and set up an understanding  that leads to better quality work?

John: Our goal is to bring relevant perspectives and experiences, that are distilled into a set of virtues, questions, and practices. These can be used by our readers to continually improve (Kaizen) and help their distributed Agile teams to succeed. 

Hugo:  Yes I believe so; if we don’t have the discussions proposed in our book, people will blindly execute; business as usual. By becoming more aware of the specific challenges inherent in cross-country-work and having clear action plans to address them, teamwork and hence quality will increase. 

7.  Do you think the concept of distributed culture and its working agreement depends on team maturity? How should one overcome it?

John: Every distributed Agile team is different.  We suggest that teams should come up with their own working agreements that are suitable for their own teams.  If a team is very mature it is likely they will very easily agree to and follow their team working agreement.  On the other hand, newer, less mature teams may need more guidance from a ScrumMaster, Agile Coach or facilitator to stay in alignment with their working agreements. 

Hugo: It surely helps to have mature teams. If I am a junior and just join a software development team, I don’t know yet how to be productive, how to communicate well, etc. As I don’t know that yet even for a local context, working in a global team will bring a lot of challenges. If we have a mature team with experience working in agile for a couple of years, they’ll more easily adapt to the global setup. 

Thank you for your time for the interview.

To buy the book click here.

If you are like this interview, you might also like 44 other interviews done right here. If Agile makes you happy, click here.