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Podcast Interview on Coaching with Evan Baltz

 

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Agile The Comprehensive Guide What is Agile? There's a new framework in town and it's called Agile. It's very simple, in fact there are only three roles and two ceremonies. Try it and let us know what you think! Agile Has 3 Roles Agile Has 2 Ceremonies Daily Status Update When : Every morning at 9AM Format The Boss receives a status report for each ticket on the group's board                                        e.g. "I made progress on this yesterday and will continue progress today" Anyone who has not yet spoken must now speak up and convince the Boss they are indeed doing work                                   e.g. "Though it is not represented on the board, I did work yesterday and will continue                   ...

  Purpose: Learn the art of prioritization Tools: If you are in a big room, each participant will need a pad of post-its and a wall on which to work. If you are virtual, have each participant use a designated “wall” on their section of the virtual board. You may have to be creative. Round One: Write down everything you did this morning between waking up and arriving at work, one activity per post-it. Also on each one write down the amount of time that activity took. EXAMPLE Add up the total amount of time – in this example, 110 minutes. So, in this example, let’s say your alarm went off this morning at 7:00 AM and you sat down at your desk ready to work at 8:50 AM. Round Two: You hit the snooze a couple of times this morning and didn’t get out of bed until 7:20 AM but you are still required to be sitting at your desk ready to work at 8:50 AM. Having lost 20 minutes, which post-its will you eliminate from your morning? You decide to forgo your shave (5-o-clock shadow is in style the...

courtesy of Dan Greenberg These are the Agile Rules as specified in the Agile Manifesto: 1. User Stories are required. Every user story must use the format As a _____, I want _____ so that ______. If it is not written in that format, the Agile police will arrest you. 2. Story Points. Must use the Fibonacci sequence. However, not the full Fibonacci sequence. You must use 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 (note the deviation, for us math geeks, fibonacci would be 21, 34 instead of 20, 40, but Agile mandates the use of 20, 40). Every story must have a size on it in story points. We cannot overemphasize how important these numbers and metrics are. But oh no you better not talk about hours. You can secretly do some hours-to-points calculations in your head if you want (okay, this will take me about 3 days worth of work, that’s about 5 story points…) but if you say that out loud, you are NOT Agile and the Agile police will issue you a citation. 3. You must operate in Sprints. You must use 2-week Spr...

Legend has it that the first Model T salespeople working for Ford had a big challenge. When taking potential customers out for a test drive, instead of pushing the brakes to stop the car, they would often shout "WHOA!" as if trying to get their horse to respond to a verbal command. I think something analogous happens with Agilists as we try to help organizations benefit from Agile. Often, they hire us, are our "boss" (or at least client), and when they try to run an Agile transformation using their older way of thinking, it puts us in what I am calling the "Agilists Dilemma". If we go along with the command & control/waterfall approach, then we are in effect saying "whoa" to the car, but if we push against that and try to use an Agile approach, we risk being seen as insubordinate, or violating the rule "The customer is always right". In my 12 years or so as a coach, I have found this to be one of the more challenging ...

You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you're too busy. Then you should sit for an hour -Zen Proverb https://onbeing.org/blog/the-disease-of-being-busy

In the internet age, we love to use memes with quotes. But the quote is only as good as the truth contained within it and the authority/knowledge/wisdom of the person being quoted. So who is "Rear Admiral Grace Hopper". Here's some highlights of her resume/life/qualifications: 1. Born in 1906 (14 years before women were allowed to vote in the US) 2. Earned a PhD in math at Yale and taught at Vassar 3. Is often credited with creating the term 'computer bug' because literally, one of the punch cards in her computer stack failed due to a 'bug' that had died on the card, causing a misread. 4. Was one of the original creators of the COBOL language 5. Became the first female Admiral in the US Navy. This person, driven by logic, math and computer programming, working in one of the most structured and mission critical organizations in the world, the US Navy, said that doing the same things we have always done just because we have always done it that wa...

As highlighted in this Harvard Business Review, something discussed in Malcom Gladwell's book "Outliers" is that in certain cultures (he speaks of country culture), disasters often happen because of a rigid heirarchical structure that prevents (out of fear) a subordinate from correcting or directly and honestly directing someone who out ranks them, with often disasterous results. In one example, a first officer on a Korean Air Lines plane tried to, politely tell the captain they were about to crash into a side of a mountain, but was so afraid and trained by his culture, that he did not dare. (source: https://www.reservations.com/blog/resources/power-distance-index/) This often happens with challenged/failed Agile Transformations. Google did some groundbreaking research several years ago and found the ONLY common thread for their best teams was "psychological safety" the idea that team members could mention anything to anyone regardless of rank, without f...

Kill the Product Backlog – An Essay (guest blogger Dan Greenberg)   Agile (a set of values and principles) and Scrum (a tangible set of roles, artifacts, and events) each aim to eliminate wasted time and make work simpler, more enjoyable, and more effective. Yet, in many cases, when I walk into environments that have undergone Agile transformations or Scrum adoptions, I get a vibe that "this Agile thing" or "this Scrum thing" has added a whole bunch of work and overhead that didn't use to have to be done. There are off-the-record complaints that people used to be able to just come in and do work and now they have to update Jira, sit through brutal release planning sessions, report velocity, attend ten million status meetings, and prepare for terrifying demos. Upon reflection, most of that has to do with someone's obsession with this thing called the Product Backlog, a term that I'm starting to wish the Scrum Guide had left out. Here is...

If you don't buy Geoff Watts' ( Geoff Watts ) new book "Team Mastery" you are REALLY missing out! I have lots of books and other materials on Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Organizational Transformation, Coaching (Lyssa Adkins  Lyssa Adkins - she/her !), etc. But THIS is the FIRST book I have seen that focuses on creating great, mature teams! Nice work Geoff! GO buy his book!! https://lnkd.in/gt_e-gF

https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/the-5-hour-rule-if-youre-not-spending-5-hours-per-week-learning-you-re-being-irresponsible-791c3f18f5e6

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." - Michael Jordan

Thank you Christen McLemore!   https://www.linkedin.com/in/christenmclemore/

ScrumAlliance is making a valiant effort to help people know what it takes do achieve the benefits of REAL Agile... "Sustainable Business Agility is a mindset shift that happens throughout an organization over time, which enables the business to adapt quickly to constant change in the market and new technologies."

JJ Sutherland recently published his book "The Scrum Fieldbook", and it contains some incredible nuggets of wisdom, which we'll share with you over the coming days and weeks, here is a favorite on a good gauge on one aspect of the culture where you work... "Examine your organizations response to failure.   Is it a valuable learning opportunity or a time to point fingers?"   - JJ Sutherland in his new book

Some good new materials from ScrumAlliance, focused on behavioral and culture change - the 'tough' part of Agile Transformation... https://sustainableagility.org/sustainableagility/home

Sports heroes like Michael Jordan inspire us to think that there might be such a thing as a 'clutch' pressure performer who improves when the heat is on... Our minds fool us into thinking we are doing better work when we are under pressure... But it's all a huge myth... Take a look at this ~3 minute clip from a National Geographic series called "Brain Games" and check out "Performing Under Pressure" by Hendrie Weisinger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jgP-wKQOrU And be sure to check out this book: https://www.amazon.com/Performing-Under-Pressure-Science-Matters/dp/0804136726 From Performing Under Pressure... The Bottom line - pressure is the enemy of success:  It undermines performance and helps us fail. Pressure adversely impacts our cognitive success Pressure downgrades our behavioral skills In pressure moments, most people perform below their capability The influence of pressure on derailing your performance is often d...