March 2019 – Agile Archive

March 30, 2019March 30, 2019

Scrum And DevOps

DevOps is not about tools and automation in the delivery pipeline. In fact, as we have learned tools and automation is only one-third of DevOps. In overall, DevOps is about Collaboration & Collective Ownership, Focus on the flow of value delivery and Learning and experimentation culture. But sadly, many tooling vendors position DevOps as tools and process for the delivery pipeline. This will get the management excited because many managers think that after buying and installing the “DevOps” tools without changing their organisation will make their company instantly agile. This is like putting the cart in front of the horse.

In this article you can read that Scrum and DevOps actually share more in common than most realise. Just like how Scrum is not about tools and process, the DevOps Three Ways is also about values and principles: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-and-devops

March 30, 2019March 30, 2019

Use this OS Canvas from The Ready to help rebuild your organization from the ground up:

Read about it here: https://medium.com/the-ready/the-os-canvas-8253ac249f53

March 30, 2019March 30, 2019

How to Work with Complex User Stories That Cannot Be Split

Most user stories can be split. It may be hard to find a good way to split some stories, but most can be split. These are known as compound stories—stories that are made up of multiple smaller stories.

There is another type of story: the complex story. Complex stories are ones that cannot be split. They are inherently large or complex and there are no subparts to be pulled into separate stories.

Even with a complex story, you don’t want to let the story linger open for three, four or more sprints. Doing so

Makes velocity less predictable from sprint to sprint
Increases the risk of a developer going astray from user expectations , and
Allows the team to develop the bad habit of leaving work incomplete at the end of an iteration

Use Progress Points to Identify Accomplishments

Read about it in this article: https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/how-to-work-with-complex-user-stories-that-cannot-be-split

March 30, 2019March 30, 2019

Use ‘25/10 Crowd Sourcing’ to quickly generate new ideas with groups

‘25/10 Crowd Sourcing’ is a structure that allows you to rapidly generate and sift through a group’s boldest actionable ideas in less than 30 minutes. Christiaan Verwijs has applied this structure both to small (12–20 members) and large groups (>150). Not only is it an innovative way to identify bold, ‘out of the box’-solutions, it is also appreciated by participants for its highly active nature.

Read about it here: https://medium.com/the-liberators/use-25-10-crowd-sourcing-to-spice-up-your-scrum-events-56fdd127e1dc

March 30, 2019March 30, 2019

Management quote

March 30, 2019March 30, 2019

How to Define and Describe an Organization

It can be difficult to give order to the mess that is an organization. After all, business is the commercialization of human interaction and well, people are messes of complexity. This tool, the Org Charter, helps make sense of all that complexity: https://academy.nobl.io/how-to-define-and-describe-an-organization/

March 30, 2019March 30, 2019

Team mission and purpose through Ecocycle planning

Saskia Vermeer-Ooms had the opportunity to facilitate a Team Mission workshop with one of her HR teams. She decided to use a string of Liberating Structures: 9 why’s – Ecocycle planning – What? So what? Now what?

Read all about her workshop here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/team-mission-purpose-through-ecocycle-planning-saskia-vermeer-ooms/

March 30, 2019March 30, 2019

Facilitation Canvas

Anthony Boobier created the Facilitation Canvas as a tool to help facilitators prepare to run a session. He uses it as part of their ICAgile team facilitator course. The canvas is made up of 8 boxes, each with an associated set of prompt questions that I have found work well as a guide when filling it out.

Read all about it here: https://medium.com/path-pattern/the-retrospective-a-known-recipe-for-improvement-with-my-own-spice-da534c6628cc

facilitation-canvas Download

March 30, 2019March 30, 2019