Agile Mindstorm

Do you need a meeting?

Do you also doubt that all your meetings are worth organizing? So, decide to remember how to write code and developed very simple (no difficult formulas, calculations and similar stuff, no fancy UI or whatever) add-in for Outlook which reminds you about meeting costs.

Goal is to remind you before sending new meeting request – Do you really need this meeting and disturb other people? Be efficient!

If you click “Yes” add-in will add message into body to make sure that all recipients are effective! Cost is calculated by taking 30 EUR as price per person multiplied by number of people.

So please try it out. Your thoughts about this idea are very welcome.

Some details about application:

Works with Outlook 2010 and 2013
Code is available in GitHub - https://github.com/ruckiand/Projects/tree/master/MeetingRate
Installation is also here - https://github.com/ruckiand/Projects/blob/master/MeetingRate/MeetingRate/publish.zip
Screenshots:

Team metrics: who and why needs them?

Why do I need metrics?

I am not working very close with teams on daily basis recently and it’s not so easy to gather information in order to take actions or discuss priorities. But I need data to have an overview on important areas in the department, foresee problems and understand how I can help.

What do I want?

Teams’ metrics can be useful only if you seek this:

Visualize problems and discuss when noticed
Focus on trend, not absolute value
Foresee the future
Take actions proactively
Keep the balance among areas

Metrics game?

Don’t forget, metrics are needed to get better. So, treat it as a game.

Elements of the game:

Evaluate initial state of each area
Set goal for each area
Each team every Retro of Retros tells if certain area improved (+11), unchanged (-1), worsen (-9)
- What does it mean: improved, unchanged, or became worse? It doesn’t matter how teams decide since trend is important, not absolute number
Metrics must be actionable. You must agree on rules and take actions. Sules samples:
- if something doesn’t change/reduces 3 times in a row, all teams must help team which has most of the problems
- if something doesn’t change/reduces 5 times in a row, each team must include improvements into sprint as high priority
- Discussion must take place
Everything can be changed at any moment if you find it not valuable

If you find first two elements difficult to implement, you can omit this for the first version

One simple, but important NO
Don’t map these metrics to any reward/bonus system

Sample table:

Area/Team	Team 1	…..	Team X	Start	Current	Finish
Area 1	+11		-9	50	Previous + ((T1 + … + TX)/# of Teams)	100
Area 2	-1		+11	100	…..	300
Area 3	-1		-9	60	…..

And this is how your visualization might look like:

Best answer when ask for estimates is NO

You’ve been a lot of times in a situation when you have a problem (or at least you think so), money to solve that and you ask someone for estimates to understand when you are going to get your solution.

As a product owner you want to hear that you will get that thing in one sprint, not three.
As person looking for outsourcing company you might want to spend less money.
This list can go longer, but basically you want hear a number.

In most cases people who request estimates don’t event expect to have another answer – discussion. They just need estimates to make their decision or pass over this information further so others could do that instead.

I instead expect to hear following answer a team – “No, you don’t need that! Because…” or “Hm, no. Let’s take a look at alternatives…” or “Why? Did you think of this?”

This “NO” means following to me:

team knows the domain
there is trust between me and team
there is a valuable discussion
we can achieve better results

Otherwise you have a bunch of doers or an army, but maybe it’s just what you prefer better.

Chaos Report, Agile and your company

I’ve never read Chaos Report before, but heard a lot about it. So decided to find out what it is all about. Not sure if this is THE one, but i managed to find document with word chaos in the title dated 2010. This was extremely interesting reading.

This document lists all typical problems projects have and explains what exactly doesn’t work. And do you really expect that “Agile” is out of the box solution for these problems?

User involvement

Scrum and Kanban are supposed to solve this problem. But what you can notice in most cases that PO becomes a proxy for a team and users are still far away from developers and feedback is not provided.

You still need to ensure business communication (talk their language), align understanding of quality (usually it’s different for developers and users), manage expectations

Clear business objective

The fact that your users are not close enough to your team and you don’t know what and why you are doing, most probably will lead you nowhere in a long run.

Law of long-tailed monster

You will always build too much of what you don’t need and not enough of what you need. So you know what will happen if you have the fastest development process in the world, but don’t spend enough time on thinking what you are doing – pile of not useful crap.

Panda’s Law

Inaction is failure. So if you don’t know which alternative to choose don’t spend hours/days months in discussions. Take actions and learn fast.

Law of Fools

I think you saw million of times when people are looking for a tool, not a problem’s solution, but “Fool with a tool is still a fool”. That’s why we often hear that Scrum, Kanban or whatever fails. Do you really know what problem you are solving? Do you have enough knowledge about these tools and how they should be used?

Power is not in the methodology or a process, but in an open mindset and ability to change and adapt!

You can download the document here – http://insyght.com.au/special/2010CHAOSSummary.pdf

Your team in 1 year

While I was in a ITSpring conference in Minsk I participated in interesting assignment during talk of startoplan.ru owners. This assignment again showed me the power of visualization.

Assignment itself is very simple:

Draw your team/company in 1 year (in silence, not shapes but something meaningful). You have 15 minutes
Give your picture to a neighbor
Facilitator start asking simple question – what is missing on the picture? And the fun begins

These guys’ findings after doing this assignment hundreds of times are following:

90% of people forget money. It means that money is not a motivator and no one cares about that?
If there are money on the picture it’s completely unclear where do they come from and why clients are paying

Btw, I was missing money in my picture too, you can see it below

Do you have the same findings after playing similar games?

Topics

Agile Mindstorm

Do you need a meeting?

Team metrics: who and why needs them?

Best answer when ask for estimates is NO

Chaos Report, Agile and your company

Your team in 1 year

Interesting

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