Be the Minority: Increase Engagement and Have Fun Doing It

“Seventy-one percent of American workers are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ in their work,” according to a recent Gallup poll. This is certainly a dismal message for those interested in an Agile revolution, since the heart of agility is based around intelligent adaptation, and those who don’t care are unlikely to expend energy adapting.

Methods like Scrum and Kanban focus on creating environments where team members can get into flow, but they by no means assure that workers will be imbued with the drive necessary to be truly outstanding. Much of the coaching work we’ve done over the years at LitheSpeed has shown that simply getting people interested in improving can be quite the challenge.

While there are no pat solutions for this complex issue, we’ve been working hard to discern effective approaches. From fun exercises that engage the mind in learning to facilitation tricks that make work seem a bit more like play to team building exercises that leverage emotional connections, the “engagement tools” in coaches’ toolboxes are often even more useful than the process and technical expertise that are so often focal points.

One somewhat unusual tack that we’ve lately adopted is approaching things from the tooling angle; while this might seem strange as a solution to something so arcane as engagement, it turns out that many people turn to pursuits like games for this very reason. The fields of game design, psychology and marketing offer myriad insights into ways to excite people, and it is to these that we’ve turned in the development of Sensei, our first tool. In a nutshell, it focuses on continuous improvement, sidestepping the usual focus on backlogs and burndowns and attacking the problem of focusing, tracking and visualizing individual, team and organizational improvement activities.

Velocity, the most commonly touted metric used to measure agility, is unfortunately a poor indicator for engagement and team satisfaction, product quality, customer satisfaction, and even process quality. What Sensei does is gather observations about these elements, and show where they’re improving.

Our initial incarnation, focused on running retrospectives for local and remote teams, should be out within a month or so, and you can then see what the fuss is about. Until then, sign up to be notified of our first release, and let us know what you’d like to see in a continuous improvement tool, or ways you’ve found to drive engagement in your own teams.

Thanks for Agile DC: A Mountaintop Experience

After Agile DC 2011 ended, we quickly turned our attention to the Agile Development Practices East conference in Orlando, where we launched a skeleton of our new product, Sensei.

But before the moment passes into history, I'd like to share a few reflections with our community. For me, Agile DC turned out to be what is termed in some religious circles as a mountaintop experience. I'd put some very special effort into the keynote talk, and it all seemed to come together effortlessly in the end. It was definitely Csikszentmihalyi's flow at work. (For those who weren't there, you can learn more by downloading my presentation here.) But the real strength of the experience lay in being able to connect with so many from the agile community here and leave with a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude.

In that compressed period of time, so many folks were part of the experience, that the names are almost too many to list:

• The organizers and volunteers, lead by George Dinwiddie, Manoj Vadakkan, Jolly Rajan and our very own Bob Payne;
• The generous sponsors, including our partners VersionOne and LeanKit Kanban;
• The amazing speakers including Ken Schwaber, Jon Terry, Siraj Sirajuddin, David Bland, Sudhir Frederick and Montra Ellis, Paul Boos, Ahmed Sidky, Jay Flowers, Peter Saddington and our own David Bulkin and Derek Huether;
• The fantastic Twitter conversation on #agiledc, with my new friends @Sprezzatura, @donmullens, @livlab and @daverooneyca;
• Our old friend and colleague Roland Cuellar who happened to be at the conference; and
• Our faithful LitheSpeed team, including Karen Falk, Colin Agnew, CJ Huether and Lindsay Hicks who got a thousand things together to set up our table and man it for the duration of the conference.

The special sense of auspiciousness was captured by a lady who won both an iPad 2 and a book in the raffle. She said, and though I paraphrase from a leaky memory, it truly captured the moment for me, "It's diwali, and today is certainly my lucky day."

In parting, all of us here at LitheSpeed would like to leave you with a big thank you for Agile DC, and share some gifts of our own with you. You can download all the presentations below here.

1. Derek Huether's, When PMI Introduced the Elephant in the Room
2. David Bulkin's, Agile Teams - From Good to Great
3. Sanjiv Augustine's, The Promise of Agile Methods

If you're interested in hearing more about our new PMI Agile Certified Professional (ACP) class, check it out here. Also, if you're interested in learning more about our new continuous improvement tool, Sensei, check it out here: http://www.senseitool.com.

Happy weekend to everyone!

My PMI-ACP Exam Experience

Because I wanted to ensure people taking my class were learning things that are actually on the PMI-ACP exam, I thought it necessary to actually take the test. Sure, I was an independent reviewer of the PMI-ACP content but I was not part of the team who wrote the exam. Let me just say, I think those who wrote the exam did us all proud. I know it sounds sick but I really enjoyed taking this exam. It wasn't too hard or easy. For a v1.0 exam, it's pretty darn good. If you've been leveraging Agile for several years, I think you could pass it (in its current form). Let me caveat that by saying you'd have to be properly leveraging Lean, XP, and Scrum for several years. In all seriousness, there are people who still think cowboy coding or having no formal process or documentation makes them "agile". This exam pays its respects to the values and principles of agile practices and to those who wrote the Agile Manifesto just 10 years ago.

Now, considering every exam will be different, you can't take my testing experience as gospel to prepare. But, you can focus your attention in certain areas. I'm pretty certain I won't upset anyone with this blog post. I'm not exposing any super-secret strategy to game the exam. I remember taking the PMP and getting frustrated because I felt like their goal was to trick me, not test me. Thankfully, the PMI-ACP is not crafted like the PMP. It's written in a tone an everyday Agilist will understand.

Here is my bullet list for public consumption. The rest I will reserve for my PMI-ACP classes. (shameless plug)

Know the Agile Manifesto Values and Principles. Understand them. Don't just memorize them.

Have an end-to-end understanding of Scrum.

Know and understand the key roles of Scrum.

Know and understand the artifacts of Scrum.

Understand what are and why we use big visible charts or information radiators.

Be able to read a burndown chart and offer a few scenarios that would explain its appearance.

Understand all of the Scrum meetings. Who is there? Why? What happens and when?

Understand Scrum from a ScrumMaster perspective.

Understand Scrum from a Product Owner perspective.

Understand Scrum from an empowered Team perspective.

Know and understand the XP (eXtreme Programming) roles and who does what.

Understand Test Driven Development. Know how it works and why it's valuable.

Understand Continuous Integration. Know how it works and why it's valuable.

Understand the Lean Software Development Principles

Know what Lean Portfolio Management is and how your organization could benefit from it.

Understand what Value Stream Mapping is and how to do it

Understand the basics of Kanban

Understand what WIP is and why it works.

Know what Osmotic Communications is.

Understand what makes a Servant-Leader and what they do.

Understand Velocity and it's usefulness.

Understand Risk Burn Down Charts

Know about Risk Audit Meetings

Know Agile Estimation techniques

Understand the Definition of "Done"

Know how to write and identify good User Stories.

Know what Personas are and how to use them.

Understand why and when you would use AgileEVM (don't worry about how!)

Remember, you have 3 hours to answer 120 questions.

Good luck!