Scrumban including #NoEstimates and #NoSprints presented at the EDGE conference hosted by Netlight. What a great experience joining Netlight's awesome EDGE conference .
Networking, high communicative engagement and a joyful environment. Congratulations to Netlight for hosting a great event and making it a highlight for the presenters too. It was inspiring and challenging to prepare it and present in front you smart Netlighters. Great questions and conversations included. Let's continue the journey applying Scrumban. In addition to the recorded presentation presented at the Berlin Scrum Meetup earlier this year next you can access the slides for the presentation held at the 11.10.2015 at the conference (having additional slides for #NoEstimates and GetScrumban ;-) Release planning using a great extension of Little's Law (found during reading the Scrumban Revolution) I'm currently reading the advanced ScrumBan book Scrumban [R]Evolution - Getting the most out of Agile, Scrum and Lean, Kanban by Ajay Reddy and found a nice extension of Little's Law that I would like to share with this post.
A short recap on Little's Law Formula 1 The average inventory of work is the average number of user stories between the starting and end points for a given period of time (WIP). The average lead time is the average amount of time it takes for a work item to move from the first stage of a production process to the end of that process. And the extension for release planning with Little's Law Based on Project Planning Using Little's Law by dimitar.bakardzhiev the formula can be extend to: Formula 2 Formula 3 test Let's consider the following example...
And we search for the optimal staffing to complete the project within 26 weeks - by applying Formula 2: This means you'll need 24/2 (average WIP of every team member) = 12 team members to accomplish the project within 26 weeks. Dark matter, failure demand and S-Curve - project planning with Little's Law and adding a project buffer to anticipate risks. Based on my previous post where I explained how you can apply Little's Law for Release Planning this post describes how to add a necessary buffer to consider that project delivery rates follow a fairly predictable S-Curve and that Little's law can just be applied to the middle section of this curve (if at all).
The following description is based on the book Scrumban [R]Evolution - Getting the most out of Agile, Scrum and Lean, Kanban by Ajay Reddy (I highly recommend reading this book to get a wide range overview about Scrumban!) As a short recap from the previous post lets shortly have a look on the basic formulas explained: Now lets consider an example S-Curve for project delivery rates: Source: Scrumban [R]Evolution - Getting the most out of Agile, Scrum and Lean, Kanban by Ajay Reddy It shows that work flows more slowly during the early stages of new projects as understandings are refined and basic infrastructure set up takes place.
How to use the buffer Disclaimer. 5 must read books for agile coaches + 7 next books on my reading list. Scrumban - Get the highscore in GetScrumBan - a great Scrumban simulation. Some days ago I discovered the awesome Scrumban Simulation Game GetScrumban and got infected playing it.
With this post I share some learnings and hints how I reached the highscore leading position for both categories (full mode play and quick play). Learnings During the game I reconsidered and newly discovered a lot of topics necessary to succeed in an agile environment. I really like the gaming approach for showing the effects of different artifacts like sprints, estimations, WIP, cost of delay, etc. It makes it handy and one can gain a high level and fast overview.
Focus on the highest value items. How to amplify learning by creating your own workshop format (an experience from a workshop about facilitation and retrospectives) During the last weeks we were preparing a workshop for effective meeting facilitation and having great retrospectives.
We ... because preparation was done in a team of 3. A great experience I would like to share with you with this post. It started with the idea, to enable more team members to facilitate meetings and especially the retrospective format. Read the brilliant #NoEstimates book by Vasco Duarte - a must for being up to date regarding agility. This week I read Vasco Duarte's brilliant new book about #NoEstimates and I just have to write a post advertising it.
Finally there is a ground setting summary about the #NoEstimates movement and I can highly recommend reading it. For me the combination of a business novel style (like done in the Phoenix Project, The goal or Five Dysfunctions of a team) - the story about Carmen the project manager - and the explaining fact based surrounding that support Carmens development throughout the book is a great way to tell the story about #NoEstimates. Complexity and methods to succeed - Thanks for the books Organize for complexity and Komplexithoden. What a reading week, I finished Nils Pfläging's Organize for complexity and Komplexithoden (written together with Silke Hermann) and I'm on the way reading Führen mit flexiblen Zielen (Leading using flexible goals).
Both books helped my to further understand complexity and why our todays working environment needs new approaches to survive. Nils Pfläging did a great job in explaining and creating standards for terms to be used when talking about complexity. The collection of Komplexithoden (see a short summary of the first 9 ones below) is a really helpful list of possible alternatives to often blindly applied blue methods, that are not helpful to be used in complex environments.
Discipline and Professionalism - Are you a Software Craftsman? This week I attended the great Software Craftsmanship Berlin Meetup to listen to Daniel Irvine's great talk about Discipline and Professionalism in Software Development.
I was deeply impressed by the high value attitude and with this post I share my notes and insights from the talk. A short summary: Read on to get some more details about discipline, professionalism and the Craftsmanship Test. Discipline The following highlights some important aspects of discipline as a software developer. WE PROCESS - a disruptive agile retrospective exercise. With this post I share with you my experience with an extraordinary retrospective format I tried the first time this week - the Major aspects used in this process are - In opposition to many existing less or more similar retrospective exercises this one is a real changer and creates completely new experiences in a team.
It works this way. Scrumban as an Evolution of Scrum - Presentation at the Berlin Scrum Meetup. This week I had the opportunity to join the great Berlin Scrum Meetup as a speaker and evening facilitator.
I selected Scrumban as an Evolution of Scrum as the topic for the evening and it was an interesting experience with a though provoking presentation and challenging questions and discussions. Presentation as download from Google Drive. Huddle - a claim for more efficient group discussions among Agile Coaches/ScrumMasters. During the last years I attended several ScrumMaster/Agile Coaches teams and we experimented with various formats for efficient synching in our group (among the ScrumMasters).
I can highly recommend syncing regularly as it shows common topics to discuss and allows an overview and input on organizational level. In this post I summarize a format - our Huddle - that works highly efficient. Great games for learning lean and connecting people - Lean Penny and BINGO. Recently we arranged a kick off for our department consisting of 4 teams. Aiming to connect people we applied a gamification approach using 4 cool games and exercises that I share with you through this post (this time 2, maybe later on 2 more ;-).
Overall goal - have fun, connect people by sharing insight, get to know another even better and create something that stays in memory connected with our cool environment. #1 Bingo, BINGO, BiNgO. Advanced Moving Motivators sessions - don't miss these 6 expert hints. With this post I describe some advanced topics to consider for your next Moving Motivator session. #1 - Leave enough space for reflection and thinking I highly recommend to provide enough time for everyone to bring the motivators in order and for ranking their current motivation. For both phases I provide 15 minutes. How I use Personal Kanban to gain high motivation and productivity ... a practical guide. In this blog post I describe my approach to organize my daily work using Personal Kanban. Starting with answering: Why Personal Kanban? Unleash predictability by using Actionable Agile Metrics (6 Key Learnings from Daniel S. Vacanti's awesome book)
Efficient group decisions using the 7 levels of decision making - an agile coach must have. Are you still estimating, apply #NoEstimates and simplify your process - a practical guide. Coaching and its importance for agile environments - an interview with the awesome agile coach Stefan Nowaczynski. The waste of scaling. Scrum and ScrumBan as it's next evolutionary step ... and is it worth starting with Scrum at all. Agility to replace the diluted term Agile.
The double-sided sword.. future-oriented loyalty incentives. 48 books in one month + 14 free book summaries. Foster innovation. Whiteboard animation ... Agile Coach/ScrumMaster.
Pimp your Daily Standup. Refreshed Agile. Visualize sprint progress. Avoid technical debt. Delegation Poker and Delegation Board. To commit or not commit - that's the questions here. Evolving retrospectives - energize it. SketchNotes. 3 key benefits of writing a blog. Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban - comparison. Play Moving Motivators with Scrum Teams.