Agile Mindstorm

Agile Teamwork: Do you have a buddy?

Individuals can do great things, but two highly motivated peers can accomplish even more when they work together.
Take a look at all heroes. They all have sidekicks! Here are several examples:

Batman & Robin
Don Quixote & Sancho Panza
Starsky & Hutch
Mario & Luigi
Robinson Crusoe & Friday
Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn

So, do you have a (coding, designing, project) buddy at work? Imagine you start something. Don’t you think it’s wise to have someone to ask these questions:

Can you explain it to your buddy? Does it makes sense? Is there anything you forgot? Is there a better way?

Working alone is dangerous both for people and the company. You must have a team or a buddy to achieve the best!

Why do we need a Scrum Master?

If you search Google you will easily find a description of the role and most probably you perfectly know it.

But why there is still an open discussion takes place. Should a Scrum Master be the only role? Can a Developer (QA, whatever…) perfectly perform this role? Here is normal team:

Team’s output – perfect product; Scrum Master’s output – highly performing team

As it can be seen role of a Scrum Master is critical for the team. Scrum Master is the person who challenges the team and focus on improvements. Key aspects that allow to achieve that:

Observation

Only person who is not committed to a sprint can focus on observing team’s work, fostering difficult discussions and thinking about long term improvements. From my experience it’s much more difficult to do that being a developer acting as a Scrum Master.

It’s written in a lot of books – to improve the system you must be outside. How often do you see a football team coach who is also playing on the field? If you did, it definitely wasn’t a game of professional teams and in all cases this model fails.

Why doesn’t this work? Everything is simple. While you are on the field you don’t see how the whole team performs. You don’t know when it’s best to make substitutes e.g. to give someone a rest before a very important match next week or just to avoid injuries; you can miss when opponent changes tactics or you noticed problems other team has and new learned tricks can be applied.

- Substitutes or injuries can be mapped to handling conflicts, fixing small bugs or implementing some practices

- Change of tactics can be mapped to desire to innovate, learn and build long term value

Protection

I believe by “protection” everybody thinks about external “threats”: Product Owner with new requirements, other teams with questions, noisy room and etc.
While it’s true I think it’s more important to protect team from themselves – over committing, forgetting about technical debt or non-functional requirements, resistance to new practices, lack of courage to say “no”.
Protection gives possibilities for the teams to keep the pace and improve.

Resume

You must spend a lot of time on the activities above to grow teams. Decision who is going to perform Scrum Master’s role depends on how fast you want to improve.

Tao Te Ching

I’ve recently read one interesting book (short version) called “Tao Te Ching” a modern interpretation of Lao Tzu perpetrated by Ron Hogan. Download link is below.

Decided to take out some quotes which i found very valuable for myslef. And this is how i interpreted them:

„Stop wanting stuff;
it keeps you from seeing what’s real. When you want stuff,
all you see are things.“

In a lot of management and business books we read that to be successful as a company or a person we need higher purposem enjoy by doing the task itself. But there is always strong desire to fall back and focus on „stuff“, companies are compared by furniture, size of the office, free goods, …

„The Masters get the job done without moving a muscle
and get their point across without saying a word.“

It‘s much easier to work a lot rather than stop for a while and think a bit: „Do we really need this feature?“, „How can we improve that?“, „Why are we doing this?“

“When you act without expectations, you can accomplish great things. If that’s not possible, go to Plan B:
Be simple. Be real.
Do your work as best you can.
Don’t think about what you get for it. Stay focused. Get rid of all your crap.”

Nothing to add here. Straight to the point. You are working not for the manager, but to do great things.

“You can go far
if you don’t have anything to carry. The more you acquire,
the less you can really see.”

If you work because of material things, it is going to be very difficult to accept new challenges. It will be too scary to lose things in case of a mistake.

“Learn how to stand still
if you want to go places.
Get on your knees
if you want to stand tall.
If you want wisdom,
empty your mind.
If you want the world,
renounce your riches.
Push yourself until you’re exhausted, and then you’ll find your strength.”

Only challenges, experiments, real problems, mistakes can help you grow and learn. That’s why we must challenge ourselves and always question existing things.

“Do what you have to do,
not for your own benefit,
but because it needs to be done. And don’t do it the way
you think it should be done,
do it the way it needs to be done.”

Sometimes I always want to cut corners in order to achieve results faster, but afterwards lack of preparation or patience always strike back.

What are your thoughts?

p.s. you can download book here. i found the e-book free to download.

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:

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