This is part 1 of a 12 part series on the Principles of agile I've been working on a big project and as the project has grown, I've been thinking about how Agile is supposed to work and how my project is following (or in some cases not following) the principles that are part of agile. For this first article, I'm going to talk about Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. MORE
I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some of things that keep me busy when I’m not doing my day job. Podcasts Note to Self - I recently started listening to this one and find it very engaging. The topics are around how technology fits into our lives. I find Manoush Zomorodi entertaining and informative. Design Matters - This one isn’t really about design as much as it’s about how people got to where they are. MORE
18 
Anyone that's been around Agile for a while has probably heard of the Design the Box exercise. The idea is to help the team define and understand the product vision. I'm getting near the end of a project. We've had some challenges in terms of making the right decisions on scope. This has manifested itself in completing user stories only to have the business team say "I know that's what I asked for, but I don't think it's right." We didn't do a Design the Box at the start of the project. MORE
This is part 2 of a 12 part series on the Principles of Agile Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Another challenge for people new to agile is this idea about welcoming change late in the project. It's not that they don't expect changes, it's the approach taken to deal with it. Usually there is a Byzantine approach that involves change review boards, change request forms and impact assessments. MORE
There's another idea from Tim Brown's Change by Design I thought was worth writing about. It's the idea of divergence and convergence. Early in a design project (or any project), we want to collect lots of ideas. This is divergence.creating lots of possible choices. Linus Pauling , winner of 2 Nobel prizes, stated "To have a good ide, you must first have lots of ideas." If you're writing user stories, don't try to limit story creation. MORE
I came across another interesting idea in Change By Design. It was presented as Toyota's ideas around training and had 4 principles: There is no substitute for direct observation Proposed changes should always be structured as experiments Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible Managers should coach, not fix This idea of experimenting caught my attention. MORE
80 I haven't had much of a chance to write any posts lately. I've been on a project that has left me little time for other things, but on this Sunday I decided to take a step back. There was a learning in Daniel Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko ; "persistence triumphs talent." I had a boss that taught me this early in my consulting career, that putting in your 40 hours of billable time wasn't enough. MORE
Empathy is an important attribute in Design Thinking. In order to solve our customer's problems, we really need to understand them. We need to walk in their shoes. But there's a limit to how far we can take this. We can spend hours talking to an astronaut, but we will never truly understand what it's like to walk in space. Agile has this idea of the Product Owner, but you don't see much written in agile about empathy. MORE
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. One of the challenges I often face when I start working with a new client that has not been following agile is the amount of time expected from their business people. Their approach has always been that the business people meet with business analyst (BA), tell them what they want, and come back 9 months later to see what got built. MORE
I'm currently reading the book Design the Life You Love by Ayse Birsel. The book takes a look at Design Thinking and applying it to your own life. It is based on the success that the author has had as a product designer. MORE
Yesterday was the first full day of Agile2014. In general it was a pretty good day. The original keynote speaker, Aneesh Chopra, apparently had to cancel. His replacement, Sam Guckenheimer, provided an overview of Microsoft's journey to agile. It was an ok case study with some interesting information, but it wasn't a motivational keynote to get us all charged up. Talking to some of the organizers later, I found out they made a conscious decision not to pay for a headliner keynote speaker. MORE
When I was young, I had a riding lawn mower. We had a big yard out in the suburbs and the riding mower made the job quicker. Today I live closer to downtown in a house with a smaller yard. I’m currently using an old fashion reel mower…no motor, just foot power to make it work. MORE
When I first learned Scrum , the idea was to have 30-day (4 week) iterations with a demo at the end of each iteration. Today I see teams that have iterations from 1 to 4 weeks, or in the case of Kanban, no iterations at all. So the question is, how often should there be a demo? I’m a believer of getting sign off on a user story once it's done. This usually comes from the person who wrote it, who may be a proxy to the product owner. MORE
I have a customer with a challenge. We've been working on an application and finished our first release. The business folks looked at it and came up with a list of "must-have's" they want before going live. The IT folks are pushing back, trying to keep additional work to a minimum before going to production. They even threw out the phrase "minimal viable product" or MVP as a way say what's the least that can be done. However, MVP isn't about doing the least amount of work and calling it done. MORE
I heard the term "Ready Ready" being used at work last week. I've heard of "Done Done" but this was a new one on me. I remember the first time I heard the concept of done done. When a developer finishes coding, the story is done but not done done. There are a number of other steps that have to be completed before it is really done, that is done done. The team should come up with the definition of done at the start of a project. MORE
By LibertyGroup25 (Own work) Henry Ford pioneered many of the ideas that are now commonplace in business, including ideas used in Design Thinking. He has been quoted as saying "If you ask people what they want, it would be a faster horse." This hits on the design thinking principle of divergence. MORE
I'm at the Orlando airport, departing from this year's PMI North America Global Congress. I've attended at least part of every North America congress since 1999, and even a few of the ones in Europe. While I did enjoy it, this year's was definitely not among my favorites. I missed the first day's activities due to a personal commitment. I heard mixed/negative reviews of the opening keynote, Drew and Jonathan Scott, HGTV's Property Brothers. MORE
Over the past weekend I went ice climbing with my son. He is a pretty serious climber and I've picked it up because of him, but neither of us have ever ice climbed before. We went to a place near Cedar Falls Iowa that ices down a grain silo. MORE
I've been reading the book Change by Design by Tim Brown. It's part of my overall interest in design in general. I have found a number of interesting ideas in the book so far, and I'm not even half way through it. One concept had to do with constraints. Anyone that has worked much on projects know that constraints are a big part of it. He talks about three aspects of constraint; feasibility, desirability, and viability. MORE
The topic of design has been crossing my path lately. I see a lot of overlap with Agile principles. One of the principles I came across is called Gall’s law. It states that "all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked.” It was introduced by John Gall in his book Systematics in 1975. This is very similar to the Agile principle of simplicity. It can be seen in the practice of Test Driven Development. MORE
I’ve come across a number of articles lately that have talked about the importance of a good morning routine (like this one ), so I have been trying to practice some of these techniques. One practice is to start the day with meditation, not checking any electronic devices. I'll admit, sometimes when I'm working from home I'll turn on the TV while making my morning coffee before heading up to the office, but I don't start responding to email first thing in the morning. MORE
18 
When my team first started holding a daily scrum meeting, it honestly felt awkward. I was accustomed to meetings with in-depth communication. So at first, the act of the team standing around giving brief answers felt stilted and strange to us – or maybe it was just me. MORE
I’m currently working with a client that is adopting agile, which really means there are people around that have done agile, but it’s not widespread nor is anyone on my particular project experienced with agile. As is common in these situations, I’ve gone through at different points to try to help them develop their agile mindset. My developers are well-versed in agile, but the client is acting as the product owner, so their understanding of agile is important to project success. MORE
I’m on my way to Colorado for a weekend of outdoor adventures, climbing and mountain biking. As I was looking over the route for the climb (Kelso’s Ridge up Torrey’s Peak and a possible double with Gray’s Peak) I remembered an article I recently read on applying the principles of lean climbing to business ( here ). I’ve done a couple 14ers before, so this will be my third and maybe fourth, all with my son. We plan on being lean on this climb. Enough water and food, but not much more. MORE
A number of themes surfaced during Agile2014. One of the big themes was scaling agile. There were a number of presentations on the SAFe model , Discipled Agile (DAD) and the new framework by Jeff Sutherland. There was also a lot of discussion on how Spotify scaled agile (be sure to download the paper). I appreciated the opportunity to hear about DAD from the creators, Scott Ambler and Mark Lines. Mark gave a presentation on how this framework was implemented at Panera Bread. MORE
I recently had the opportunity to hear Tom Peters speak and I have to say that even at the age of 71, he still has a lot of energy and passion. He began the talk with his experience coming out of college with an engineering degree. He found the math and science classes did little to prepare him for the real world, the people part of the equation, or the “all important last 99%” of being successful. MORE
Three of my favorite presentations at Agile2014 were on soft skills; Diana Larsen’s Best Job Ever , Lyssa Adkin’s Facilitating Intense Conversations , and Jean Tabaka/Em Campbell-Pretty’s Creating Agile Tribes Diana Larsen was the keynote presenter on Wednesday. MORE
Taking agile, a process otherwise optimized for small, cross-functional, collaborative teams and making it work at scale is fascinating. You have to change some elements, and retain others, as you redefine the context. MORE
I’m making my way through the Tim Ferris' book Tools of Titans. It’s well over 600 pages but it has a lot of useful, interesting advice, though I'll admit some of it is a bit out there. He breaks the book up into three areas; Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise. The book is really just a summary of podcasts done over the years with some other advice added in. One piece of advice I appreciated is what he called the canvas strategy. The idea really came from Ryan Holiday. MORE
There's an interesting decision making technique that I came across in the book Decisive. It's called 10/10/10. The technique was developed by Suzy Welch. She has a book by the same name. The idea is to think about how you will feel about a decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. The idea being discussed in Decisive is how to avoid short-term emotion when making a decision. Bad decisions, they say, are made while having strong emotions such as anger or greed. MORE
25 I started reading the book Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath. They have a couple other books I've read, including Switch and Made to Stick , so I thought I'd give this a try. I'm only about a quarter through the book, but so far, I am enjoying it. It's easy to read and has some good examples to support the ideas. The book is about how to make better decisions. MORE
I was flying home from a client visit last week at the airport getting ready to board the plane when the gate agent announced that the flight was gonna be delayed by ten minutes due to some unspecified mechanical issue. Ten minutes later they announcement another ten minute delay. They did this two more times. So what was going on? Did the airlines not want to admit upfront that they had a 40 minute delay so they fed the delays to us ten minutes at a time? MORE
Agile is about delivering value, so it is important to understand the value you are delivering within an iteration or release. However, I seen many teams that focus on how many story points they deliver but not really thinking about the value of those story points. So are there ways to measure value? The answer is, of course there is. One way would be to use the Planning Poker approach, but instead of estimating the effort for each story you can estimate the value of the story. MORE
I ran an exercise at the beginning of a new project last week; Empathy Mapping. This is part of an overall approach of using Design Thinking along with agile development. The idea to empathy mapping is to get to understand your users. MORE
Zen Project Management
FEBRUARY 5, 2016
I came across another interesting idea in Change By Design. It was presented as Toyota's ideas around training and had 4 principles: There is no substitute for direct observation Proposed changes should always be structured as experiments Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible Managers should coach, not fix This idea of experimenting caught my attention.
Zen Project Management
JANUARY 12, 2016
There's another idea from Tim Brown's Change by Design I thought was worth writing about. It's the idea of divergence and convergence. Early in a design project (or any project), we want to collect lots of ideas. This is divergence.creating lots of possible choices. Linus Pauling , winner of 2 Nobel prizes, stated "To have a good ide, you must first have lots of ideas." If you're writing user stories, don't try to limit story creation.
Zen Project Management
FEBRUARY 23, 2016
Anyone that's been around Agile for a while has probably heard of the Design the Box exercise. The idea is to help the team define and understand the product vision. I'm getting near the end of a project. We've had some challenges in terms of making the right decisions on scope. This has manifested itself in completing user stories only to have the business team say "I know that's what I asked for, but I don't think it's right." We didn't do a Design the Box at the start of the project.
Zen Project Management
OCTOBER 27, 2014
I recently had the opportunity to hear Tom Peters speak and I have to say that even at the age of 71, he still has a lot of energy and passion. He began the talk with his experience coming out of college with an engineering degree. He found the math and science classes did little to prepare him for the real world, the people part of the equation, or the “all important last 99%” of being successful.
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Zen Project Management
OCTOBER 11, 2016
Agile is about delivering value, so it is important to understand the value you are delivering within an iteration or release. However, I seen many teams that focus on how many story points they deliver but not really thinking about the value of those story points. So are there ways to measure value? The answer is, of course there is. One way would be to use the Planning Poker approach, but instead of estimating the effort for each story you can estimate the value of the story.
Zen Project Management
FEBRUARY 8, 2017
I’m making my way through the Tim Ferris' book Tools of Titans. It’s well over 600 pages but it has a lot of useful, interesting advice, though I'll admit some of it is a bit out there. He breaks the book up into three areas; Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise. The book is really just a summary of podcasts done over the years with some other advice added in. One piece of advice I appreciated is what he called the canvas strategy. The idea really came from Ryan Holiday.
Zen Project Management
JANUARY 6, 2014
Over the past weekend I went ice climbing with my son. He is a pretty serious climber and I've picked it up because of him, but neither of us have ever ice climbed before. We went to a place near Cedar Falls Iowa that ices down a grain silo.
Zen Project Management
APRIL 30, 2015
When I first learned Scrum , the idea was to have 30-day (4 week) iterations with a demo at the end of each iteration. Today I see teams that have iterations from 1 to 4 weeks, or in the case of Kanban, no iterations at all. So the question is, how often should there be a demo? I’m a believer of getting sign off on a user story once it's done. This usually comes from the person who wrote it, who may be a proxy to the product owner.
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Zen Project Management
DECEMBER 15, 2015
The topic of design has been crossing my path lately. I see a lot of overlap with Agile principles. One of the principles I came across is called Gall’s law. It states that "all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked.” It was introduced by John Gall in his book Systematics in 1975. This is very similar to the Agile principle of simplicity. It can be seen in the practice of Test Driven Development.
Zen Project Management
OCTOBER 13, 2015
I'm at the Orlando airport, departing from this year's PMI North America Global Congress. I've attended at least part of every North America congress since 1999, and even a few of the ones in Europe. While I did enjoy it, this year's was definitely not among my favorites. I missed the first day's activities due to a personal commitment. I heard mixed/negative reviews of the opening keynote, Drew and Jonathan Scott, HGTV's Property Brothers.
Zen Project Management
AUGUST 1, 2014
Three of my favorite presentations at Agile2014 were on soft skills; Diana Larsen’s Best Job Ever , Lyssa Adkin’s Facilitating Intense Conversations , and Jean Tabaka/Em Campbell-Pretty’s Creating Agile Tribes Diana Larsen was the keynote presenter on Wednesday.
Zen Project Management
JUNE 6, 2016
I heard the term "Ready Ready" being used at work last week. I've heard of "Done Done" but this was a new one on me. I remember the first time I heard the concept of done done. When a developer finishes coding, the story is done but not done done. There are a number of other steps that have to be completed before it is really done, that is done done. The team should come up with the definition of done at the start of a project.
Zen Project Management
MAY 31, 2016
Empathy is an important attribute in Design Thinking. In order to solve our customer's problems, we really need to understand them. We need to walk in their shoes. But there's a limit to how far we can take this. We can spend hours talking to an astronaut, but we will never truly understand what it's like to walk in space. Agile has this idea of the Product Owner, but you don't see much written in agile about empathy.
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Zen Project Management
APRIL 10, 2015
I have a customer with a challenge. We've been working on an application and finished our first release. The business folks looked at it and came up with a list of "must-have's" they want before going live. The IT folks are pushing back, trying to keep additional work to a minimum before going to production. They even threw out the phrase "minimal viable product" or MVP as a way say what's the least that can be done. However, MVP isn't about doing the least amount of work and calling it done.
Zen Project Management
JANUARY 30, 2015
There's an interesting decision making technique that I came across in the book Decisive. It's called 10/10/10. The technique was developed by Suzy Welch. She has a book by the same name. The idea is to think about how you will feel about a decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. The idea being discussed in Decisive is how to avoid short-term emotion when making a decision. Bad decisions, they say, are made while having strong emotions such as anger or greed.
Zen Project Management
MARCH 31, 2016
I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some of things that keep me busy when I’m not doing my day job. Podcasts Note to Self - I recently started listening to this one and find it very engaging. The topics are around how technology fits into our lives. I find Manoush Zomorodi entertaining and informative. Design Matters - This one isn’t really about design as much as it’s about how people got to where they are.
Zen Project Management
AUGUST 9, 2014
A number of themes surfaced during Agile2014. One of the big themes was scaling agile. There were a number of presentations on the SAFe model , Discipled Agile (DAD) and the new framework by Jeff Sutherland. There was also a lot of discussion on how Spotify scaled agile (be sure to download the paper). I appreciated the opportunity to hear about DAD from the creators, Scott Ambler and Mark Lines. Mark gave a presentation on how this framework was implemented at Panera Bread.
Zen Project Management
MARCH 30, 2017
I started something new in February, a bullet journal. I've played with different tools to help me keep organized and remember stuff, and this is my latest.
Zen Project Management
JUNE 3, 2014
This is part 2 of a 12 part series on the Principles of Agile Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Another challenge for people new to agile is this idea about welcoming change late in the project. It's not that they don't expect changes, it's the approach taken to deal with it. Usually there is a Byzantine approach that involves change review boards, change request forms and impact assessments.
Zen Project Management
APRIL 20, 2015
When I was young, I had a riding lawn mower. We had a big yard out in the suburbs and the riding mower made the job quicker. Today I live closer to downtown in a house with a smaller yard. I’m currently using an old fashion reel mower…no motor, just foot power to make it work.
Zen Project Management
AUGUST 24, 2015
I’m currently working with a client that is adopting agile, which really means there are people around that have done agile, but it’s not widespread nor is anyone on my particular project experienced with agile. As is common in these situations, I’ve gone through at different points to try to help them develop their agile mindset. My developers are well-versed in agile, but the client is acting as the product owner, so their understanding of agile is important to project success.
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Zen Project Management
JULY 23, 2015
I’m on my way to Colorado for a weekend of outdoor adventures, climbing and mountain biking. As I was looking over the route for the climb (Kelso’s Ridge up Torrey’s Peak and a possible double with Gray’s Peak) I remembered an article I recently read on applying the principles of lean climbing to business ( here ). I’ve done a couple 14ers before, so this will be my third and maybe fourth, all with my son. We plan on being lean on this climb. Enough water and food, but not much more.
Zen Project Management
JUNE 9, 2015
I’ve come across a number of articles lately that have talked about the importance of a good morning routine (like this one ), so I have been trying to practice some of these techniques. One practice is to start the day with meditation, not checking any electronic devices. I'll admit, sometimes when I'm working from home I'll turn on the TV while making my morning coffee before heading up to the office, but I don't start responding to email first thing in the morning.
Zen Project Management
JULY 29, 2016
I ran an exercise at the beginning of a new project last week; Empathy Mapping. This is part of an overall approach of using Design Thinking along with agile development. The idea to empathy mapping is to get to understand your users.
Zen Project Management
JULY 29, 2014
Yesterday was the first full day of Agile2014. In general it was a pretty good day. The original keynote speaker, Aneesh Chopra, apparently had to cancel. His replacement, Sam Guckenheimer, provided an overview of Microsoft's journey to agile. It was an ok case study with some interesting information, but it wasn't a motivational keynote to get us all charged up. Talking to some of the organizers later, I found out they made a conscious decision not to pay for a headliner keynote speaker.
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Zen Project Management
JULY 2, 2014
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. One of the challenges I often face when I start working with a new client that has not been following agile is the amount of time expected from their business people. Their approach has always been that the business people meet with business analyst (BA), tell them what they want, and come back 9 months later to see what got built.
Zen Project Management
MAY 29, 2014
This is part 1 of a 12 part series on the Principles of agile I've been working on a big project and as the project has grown, I've been thinking about how Agile is supposed to work and how my project is following (or in some cases not following) the principles that are part of agile. For this first article, I'm going to talk about Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Zen Project Management
MAY 21, 2014
I haven't had much of a chance to write any posts lately. I've been on a project that has left me little time for other things, but on this Sunday I decided to take a step back. There was a learning in Daniel Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko ; "persistence triumphs talent." I had a boss that taught me this early in my consulting career, that putting in your 40 hours of billable time wasn't enough.
Zen Project Management
JANUARY 6, 2016
I've been reading the book Change by Design by Tim Brown. It's part of my overall interest in design in general. I have found a number of interesting ideas in the book so far, and I'm not even half way through it. One concept had to do with constraints. Anyone that has worked much on projects know that constraints are a big part of it. He talks about three aspects of constraint; feasibility, desirability, and viability.
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Zen Project Management
DECEMBER 28, 2014
I started reading the book Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath. They have a couple other books I've read, including Switch and Made to Stick , so I thought I'd give this a try. I'm only about a quarter through the book, but so far, I am enjoying it. It's easy to read and has some good examples to support the ideas. The book is about how to make better decisions.
Zen Project Management
MAY 22, 2017
I was flying home from a client visit last week at the airport getting ready to board the plane when the gate agent announced that the flight was gonna be delayed by ten minutes due to some unspecified mechanical issue. Ten minutes later they announcement another ten minute delay. They did this two more times. So what was going on? Did the airlines not want to admit upfront that they had a 40 minute delay so they fed the delays to us ten minutes at a time?
Tyner Blain
MAY 24, 2017
Taking agile, a process otherwise optimized for small, cross-functional, collaborative teams and making it work at scale is fascinating. You have to change some elements, and retain others, as you redefine the context.
Project Bliss
JUNE 19, 2017
When my team first started holding a daily scrum meeting, it honestly felt awkward. I was accustomed to meetings with in-depth communication. So at first, the act of the team standing around giving brief answers felt stilted and strange to us – or maybe it was just me.
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