Announcing Agile India 2012: Call for Submissions

Last month I blogged on Agile in Washington, DC, my hometown. Now, I'm pleased to announce another exciting conference, this one halfway around the world in distance, but very close in spirit: Agile India 2012.

I've been delivering training in India for the past two years and have presented at regional conferences and groups like Agile NCR and Agile Chennai. Now, it is quite exciting for me to be involved in a national conference in India next year. From the conference website, there are quite a few landmarks:

1. This is the first Agile Alliance conference held outside of North America.
2. This is slated to be the largest agile conference in Asia (okay, we'll make sure there are small teams/groups/sessions/meetings).
3. It represents a true collaboration between the Agile Software Community in India and the Agile Alliance.

Linda Cook from the Agile Alliance Board of Directors and I are co-producers of the Enterprise Agile stage at the conference.

Other cool things from a personal point of view:

1. The conference location is the global hotspot Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore), where I grew up.
2. I'm looking forward to working again with Naresh Jain, a Gordon Pask award winner and true pioneer in the agile world.
3. The co-producer of the Agile Product Development stage shares my last name. Her name is Annu Augustine, and she's doing a bang up job of organizing her stage, so please flood it with your submissions!
4. The conference stages incorporate key areas of personal interest, including Lean Startup, Leadership and Organizational Transformation.

From your perpective, I think this conference is a great opportunity:

1. If you live in India or other Asian countries, it will be an excellent opportunity to meet with other agile enthusiasts and spend quality time with them without long travel.
2. If you live further away, you have enough time between now and February to plan your travel to India and double up with some tourism as well. You can choose to head north to visit the Taj Mahal, or stay in the South visiting Mysore, Kerala and other closer destinations.
3. The agile movement in India is on the cusp of growth, and you can play a part in launching and growing it.

If you're interested in presenting, please note that October 3rd is the early bird deadline.

See you in Begaluru in February? Any questions or comments, do share!

ScrumMaster Standup for ExcellenceBy David Bulkin

New ScrumMasters often try to direct the daily standup until someone explains that they are a servant leader, and it is the team, not the ScrumMaster who owns the daily standup.

The confused ScrumMaster then retreats into the background, not providing much value at all, other than recording blockers and updating burndowns.

Can a ScrumMaster play an active role while being a servant leader?

Active Role for ScrumMaster in Standup

I think a ScrumMaster can provide context to start the standup in a way that helps the team self manage.

Prior to the standup the ScrumMaster should collect relevant data about scheduling, progress (burndowns), work in process (e.g. how much), release progress, etc.  Then, using 60 seconds or less, they can kickoff the standup, providing the context that helps the team understand how their efforts fit into the big picture, allowing them to make more effective decisions.

Example of ScrumMaster Providing Context

Here is example of one ScrumMaster providing context…

We have one more sprint prior to our release on October 28th and only five days left in this sprint.

Looking at our list of blockers, there are no open impediments, but looking at our stacked bar burndown and calendar, it appears that we have some trade-offs to make.

We have lots of work in progress, and, as we have noted (since Sprint Planning) both Bob and Carly are on vacation next week.  Bob is out all week, and Carly is out Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

I spoke to our PO Sue, who is offsite today, and she is fine with deferring either Story D or F, leaving it up to you, the team to decide.  Story D has two tasks for which Bob volunteered, so that may help us make a decision (note that the ScrumMaster is pointing out an important fact, not explicitly telling the team what to do).

As always, thank you for letting me kick off our standup, and remember to focus on tasks on the board when answering the three questions.

In Closing

As a servant leader, a ScrumMaster should provide an environment for the team to succeed.  One practical way to do this is to provide context that starts the standup.    

Can you see a ScrumMaster providing value like this using 30 to 90 seconds of the teams time at the start of each standup?

The Gemba Walk

As part of a recent engagement, Bob Payne and I went to assess and coach a group of Agile teams out in Iowa. Each morning, we would arrive before the daily stand-ups. Each morning we walked around, listened in on conversations and got updates from the teams. We quietly studied their large team boards and then how they interacted with the boards and one another. I would describe this daily stroll as our Gemba Walk. Gemba is a Japanese term meaning "the real place." In business, it refers to the place where value is created; in our case the gemba was the west side of the building on the 5th floor where the teams were located.

In lean manufacturing, the idea of gemba is that the problems are visible, and the best improvement ideas will come from going to the gemba. The gemba walk, much like Management By Walking Around (MBWA), is an activity that takes management to those doing the actual value delivery, to look for waste and opportunities to practice gemba kaizen, or practical shopfloor improvement. If you are in management and you want to make a real difference, get out of your office and go on a gemba walk.

If you are on a project team, do your managers go on a daily gemba walk?

HT: Wikipedia

Monumental Agile Adoption - Part 2

Some weeks ago, I blogged about Monumental Agile Adoption. That is, large scale adoptions involving several 1000s of people. Even though they don't represent the majority of agile adoptions, we are still excited and inspired to hear about them.

The adoptions I mentioned then were large scale rollouts of agile software development methods. I've also been on the watch for "monumental" efforts where the agile principles and practices with which we are so familiar can be applied in other domains or novel ways. Here's an interesting example from the airline industry.

How does one manage the complex merger of airline systems when one major airline is acquired by another? When Delta acquired Northwest, Delta's CIO chose a version of the beloved agile tracking wall with the humble but ever increasingly popular Post It note. From the New York Times:

Delta’s chief information officer, Theresa Wise, said the airline had to merge 1,199 computer systems down to about 600, including one — a component within the airline’s reservation system — dating from 1966.

The challenge, she said, was to switch the systems progressively so that passengers would not notice. Ms. Wise, who has a doctorate in applied mathematics, devised a low-tech solution: she set up a timeline of the steps that had to be performed by pinning colored Post-it notes on the wall of a conference room.

Now that looks like the mother of all tracking boards, doesn't it? One would think that a successful approach like this would be imitated quickly. Well, it's too bad the folks at United Airlines didn't take note. United's systems have failed as they attempt to merge with Continental Airlines.

Do you have examples of applying agile techniques at a monumental scale? Do share.