For the Agile Alliance I wrote an experience report about how to overcome the struggling many organisation have in getting the various roles in place. In this experience report I share my approach with striving for role agreements. The report is the fundament under my talk on the XP2020 conference that I gave earlier this year.
Summary: In order to have effective teams it is crucial that everyone understands their role. In small organisations I had success with mission statements for e.g. the Scrum Master and Product Owner. But what approach do you choose in a large department where opinions varies from team to team and exceptions rule? Where management is in a transition from traditional management toward agile leadership? I learned that in a multiple team session the search for a single truth is futile and it is better to stimulate communication and alignment. The result of this approach was that a dialogue was started, and PO, SM and managers aligned rather than getting stuck in a discussion on the formal role description.
In the video below you’ll find the registration of this talk.
On 24 september the CorporatiePlein was held. With more than 500 registrations from employees of housing corporations, its the largest and most visited online event for housing corporations in the Netherlands.
I gave a presentation about agile. In my talk I explain why agile is beneficial for housing corporations and give an introduction on what to consider with an Agile/Scrum transformation. The event and my talk is in Dutch (sorry, for the non-dutch followers) and can be viewed below.
Today the CorporatiePlein will be held. It’s the trade fair for professionals in the housing corporation business. With more than 500 registrations from employees of housing corporations, the tenth edition of CorporatiePlein will immediately become the largest and most visited online event for housing corporations in the Netherlands.
The event offers an online exhibition floor with dozens of suppliers and advisors with a focus on the housing association sector. Additionally the CorporatiePlein Online offers knowledge and content in the form of interesting presentations in the fields of Finance, Real Estate, Maintenance, Housing, Communication and Operations, Innovation & ICT.
I am proud to share Squerist will be present with 4 presentations on Robotica, Agile Testing, Agile transformation and the TROMP maturity scan.
My talk, about what Agile can bring for housing corporations will be presented at 11:30.
Friday 11 and Saturday 12 September the Agile Business Day was held in a virtual Venice. I guess we all missed strolling through the streets at night or taking a gondola on the grand canal. The Organization succeeded to create a local feel and made great effort to spark interaction to make up for the lack of physical presence.
Refinement
During the Agile Business Day I gave a presentation on refinement. Over the years I have guided many teams during their transition toward Agile. Initially most attention went to the ceremonies and understanding the agile values. Experience taught me that when the team gets up to speed refinement becomes a bottleneck. Unfortunately, I see many teams that do not unlock the full potential of refinement. Not only is the time spent on refinement often limited, many of the refinement meetings I join are inefficient. I meet teams that spent half the meeting watching the Product Owner entering the new backlog items in the workflow system. Although they poker the user stories afterwards, little time is left to discussions the best solution and risks that need to be avoided.
In my talk I explained:Advantages of good refinement and what I see in daily practise
How we can boost the potential of Refinement by organising it as a process rather than a meeting
Introduced a set of challenging questions that can be used to prepare your refinement, And last but not least,
Explained how they can be used to involve the off-site team members of distributed teams
You can find the slides of my presentation, below:
Also check out the article I wrote on this topic for the Agile Connection, it lists all the questions I discussed in my talk.
The need for experimenting and learning new techniques.
Afterwards I had a nice conversation with some of the participant about improvements within agile teams. How do you deal with team members that distrust each other, company cultures that are challenging and we discussed the time needed for experimenting and learning new techniques.
The agile principles state that as a team we should embrace technical excellence and focus on timely and continues delivery of quality solutions. This implies that we reserve time for hygienic actions, like cleaning up or code and reducing our technical dept. The ambition to deliver value solutions in the both the short term as well as the long term, implies that we invest in our knowledge and skills. During our conversation on the conference we discussed how hard it can be to convince the Product Owner and Stakeholder that time is needed for these things. But they are important.
I have been in an organization where we used the analogy of a bulldozer that pushed forward the sand it meets on its way. As the bulldozer moves forward the heap of sand becomes bigger. This was the symbol for the backlog of items like maintenance, working on technical excel and innovation. I repeat, as the bulldozer moves forward the heap of sand becomes bigger. Until eventually the bulldozer gets stuck in the mounted sand. Lesson learned: you can delay and postpone these items some time, but if you wait too long, it becomes too big and your delivery will discontinue.
But, how can we trigger awareness for this and get time for experimenting and learning new techniques. We should of course discuss this with our stakeholders and state the need an urgency for embracing new techniques. But in addition we can also create a pull by having the right profiles in our team. In a previous keynote I discussed roles that are needed to stimulate innovation. I explained we need Visionaries, Explorers and Experts.
The illustration below indicates the mission these roles have:
Distinguish these roles and let team members think about their natural stance. It can be used a trigger to create awareness in the team about the need for innovations and the role each individual team member has in ensuring the continuity of the team’s output. I believe it will create ambassadors for continue improvements and a broader base for innovations.
I was really looking forward to visiting Luxembourg and contributing to the conference with my workshop. The XP days Benelux, is a two day conference made for, and by, the Agile Community. It focuses on practical knowledge, real-world experience, and active participation of everyone. But, not this year.
I received a sad message from the organisers in which they announce with deep regret in their heart, that the XP Days Benelux 2020 is cancelled due to the limitations and uncertainty related to the COVID-19 situation. Sad but wise I guess.
The good news is that the next XP Days Benelux conference is already planned: save the date 25-26th November 2021. More details to follow on the conference website.
In October Jan Jaap Cannegieter and I will join forces again and host our successful Testmanagement in Agile Tutorial again. Although we have given this tutorial several times now, we always get positive feedback and feel that it is highly appreciated. On STAREast that was held last may, I gave the tutorial as a full day online experience, and we are going to repeat it. With some improvements made and with Jan Jaap as co-trainer. I hope you’ll dive in the world of Agile Testmanagement and Built-in Quality with us on the STARWest virtual conference.
Today I received a nice surprise from the Agile Business Day Conference which will be held on the 11th of september. Even though this year the ABD is a virtual conference, we got goodies in the mail. Great!
Derk-Jan de Grood 