Agility is misunderstood and miss misinterpret many times. In order to undersand whats behind agility you need some Agile Reading Glasses :-)

The Agile Reading Glasses are assembled by 4 main parts:

• Empirical Process Control (Part1)
• Pull Principle (Part 2)
• Lean Thinking (Part 3)
• Interative & Incremental (Part 4) 

This video is the last part of the Agile Reading Glasses.

Agile Reading Glasses - Iterative & Incremental

For more information please contact us.

Agility is misunderstood and miss misinterpret many times. In order to undersand whats behind agility you need some Agile Reading Glasses :-)

The Agile Reading Glasses are assembled by 4 main parts:

• Empirical Process Control (Part1)
• Pull Principle (Part 2)
• Lean Thinking (Part 3)
• Interative & Incremental (Part 4) 

This video is the third part of the Agile Reading Glasses.

Agile Reading Glasses - Lean Thinking 

For more information please contact us.

Agility is misunderstood and miss misinterpret many times. In order to undersand whats behind agility you need some Agile Reading Glasses :-)

The Agile Reading Glasses are assembled by 4 main parts:

• Empirical Process Control (Part1)
• Pull Principle (Part 2)
• Lean Thinking (Part 3)
• Interative & Incremental (Part 4) 

This video is the second part of the Agile Reading Glasses.

Agile Reading Glasses - Pull Principle 

For more information please contact us.

Agility is misunderstood and misinterpreted many times. In order to understand what's behind agility you need some Agile Reading Glasses :-)

The Agile Reading Glasses are assembled by 4 main parts:

• Empirical Process Control (Part1)
• Pull Principle (Part 2)
• Lean Thinking (Part 3)
• Interative & Incremental (Part 4) 

This video is the first part of the Agile Reading Glasses.

Agile Reading Glasses - Empirical Process Control 

For more information please contact us.

In April 2012 Andrea Tomasini had a Keynote at the Lifecycle Conference in Munich. He started his presentation with some information about Customer Capitalism and what are the changes in the business world over the past years?

A large number of economists, sociologists and even historians are dealing with this
question. And certainly they have the proper qualification to analyze the various farreaching dimensions of the changes. Our point of view is far more pragmatic. We describe the changes from the perspectives of Managers and Entrepreneurs, trying to give a holistic picture of the “What” and “Why”.
Let’s dig deeper into the topic and find answers to the following questions: 

• Why are established companies currently struggling so much to keep up their position in the market?
• Which change of old ways and rules makes it difficult for companies to persist?
• Is there a recipe for staying competitive?

At the beginning of the 20th century new products and services were introduced at a very low rate with rather controlled and simple marketing methods and messages via print, radio and later on television. Only a few decades later there were hundreds of private channels advertising new and changing products at any time. This resulted in a larger distribution of products and raised the demand for new products, causing many companies to enter new markets, both for production and the fast generation of new ideas and products. The main objective at that time was “merely” raising the cashflow and profit in a fast growing business environment. The only thing necessary for selling more was producing more.

Quality was a minor issue, or putting it more precisely, unsatisfied customers didn’t have a platform for their complaints and could not ask for improvements in quality. In order to stay competitive it was more important to provide product novelties instead of establishing longterm customer relationships based on a certain product or production line.

• Products were controlling the market.

Today we are facing a completely new situation. The speed with which society and economy develops has constantly grown within the last few decades and brought us to the point, where previous markets and organizational structures, which worked well in the past, are put under new pressures. What is the reason for this?
It’s simple. Thanks to the internet, Google and social networks, communication has become more independent. Customers can get free and vendor-independent information. Reviews from other customers, competitive comparisons, quick and easy feedback to vendors and the power to publish negative product reviews, have changed the role of the customer. A facebook analysis showed that 73% of facebook users trust their friends’ recommendations without trying the product themselves (http://www.getelastic.com/facebook-like/). All the changes show:

• Today customers are controlling the market.

If you have questions, please contact us.

Hello all,

I am happy to tell you, that Dave Snowden (Cynefin Framework) followed my invitation to speak at the Scrumtisch in June. We expect quite a lot of people, and therefor I am also happy, that Hypoport is hosting this Scrumtisch.

• Date: 27th June
• Time: 18:30
• Place: Klosterstraße 71, 10179 Berlin

You can register at the Xing Group

If you have questions please write us!

Cheers and see you soon

Marion

Hello All,

I wish everybody nice and sunny Easter :-)

The next Scrumisch will be about Kanban. We will play the Kanban Pizza Game. So if you are interested in Kanban and you like to see how it works...

• Date: 03. Mai 2012
• Time: 18:30 
• Place: Cafe Restaurant Hundertwasser, Simon Dach / Ecke Krossener Strasse

I am looking forward to see you there, and please send as usual an email to scrumtisch@agile42.com when you like to attend :-)

Marion

Last week, I facilitated a StrategicPlay session at Scan-Agile titled “Agile Community Building – Using StrategicPlay with Lego”. Participants co-created a vision of the perfect agile community. We captured the teams presenting their models on video. Enjoy the inspiration!

The Agile Elephant

The first presentation shows “Agile” on the back of an elephant (the similarity to Discworld was intentional, I heard later) confronting the established mindset... Note the reference to Brian Marick.

Ivory Tower of Knowledge

Valuable ideas are created and brought to the customer. Flowers, a disco ball, and a flag, of course.

People Connecting their Thoughts

Cosy space, where anybody can come and enjoy themselves. Couches. And a journey from waterfall... Breaking down barriers.

A Safety Net for Trust

People can rely on others, can feel safe to jump. An open door, transparent space. And a treasure chest of ideas!

Thanks to all participants for joining their minds to create these visions! It's been a pleasure to facilitate this session. If you want to use this approach to co-create visions or solutions for wicked problems—contact us!

Following is the list of topics proposed for discussion and the number of votes for each.

• Alignment between sprint goal and the Stories that are pulled into a sprint. What to do if the Product Owner is not providing stories that align with the goal (17 Votes)
• Testers - Which problems they face when placed on a Scrum Team. What the problems are and how they contribute to the sprint and integrate with the Team (8 Votes)
• How long can you survive with Scrum without a Product Owner (13 Votes)
• What is the effect and balance of communication and coordination within the Scrum Team in comparison to the expectation for productive hours (5 Votes)
• What are the main differences between a Product Owner and a tester? (2 Votes)
• Continuous improvement - How do you instill a sense of continuous improvement and when do you stop doing so? What is the balance of improvement versus cost? (10 Votes)
• How can I pimp my retrospective? Make it more interesting as we go forward (7 Votes)
• One team but two customers, how to juggle the team? (4 Votes) 

As usual we discussed the 3 most voted topics. Here we go.

Topic #1: Alignment between sprint goal and Stories 

Situation:
- No vision, goal and commitment not aligned 
- No vision and so the Team is not motivated

The statements and questions discussed with regard to this first topic were the following:
- Product Owner tries to make every stakeholder happy
- Four Product Owners with 3 Teams, one is the leading Product Owner, who works on 3 separate channels (themes), communicating with 3 POs, who have no connection with one another. Does it make sense to share a common backlog?
- No clear vision, main topic is driven by systematic change (law changes)
- All teams have a common backlog
- There is a pre-selected set of stories with no lookahead. Push system?
- Why are there four Product Owners who select what the Teams are doing?
- Why isn't there a real single and ordered product backlog?
- No backlog longer than a single sprint?
- The product backlog is how you execute on a product vision?

 
Topic #2: Survive Scrum without a Product Owner 

Situation:
- Five Teams starting out with different agile methods
- Product Owner left, taking his backlog with him
- Trying to cope with workarounds and no Product Owner 
- How can you work in this situation?

 The following issues and questions were discussed:
- Who writes stories? Story owners are writing their own stories
- No cross functional teams. Nobody drives development 
- CEO is off site with issues
- Bunch of people meet and prioritize the Stories with the stakeholders 
- The ScrumMaster is having to take the role of Product Owner, possibly degrading into project management 
- Skip the ScrumMaster in favor of a Product Owner job
- Big features are not getting through, small release plans for 3 sprints

 
Topic #3: Continuous improvement

Situation:
- They didn't transition into Scrum and retrospectives
- The team believes that individual self improvement is enough
- Improvement could be a function of automation? 

The following issues and questions were discussed:
- How do you define improvement? No similar impediments happening, and so we are improving 
- Dealing with individual improvement versus team improvement 
- There is no number or method for measuring improvement
- Impediments - Are they defined in a binary manner? Blocking means you can't work anymore 
- Does it mean that when you have no impediments that there is no opportunity for improvement? 
- How do you compare improvement? Against what baseline? Waterfall
- Do you calculate ROI on your improvement?
- Avoid self referencing targets 

Hello All,

here we go again. :-)

• Date: 28. February 2012
• Time: 18:30 
• Place: Cafe Restaurant Hundertwasser, Simon Dach / Ecke Krossener Strasse

I am looking forward to see you there

Marion

During his 3-month stay in South Corea in 2011 Daniel Berger, a member of the Berlin Scrum Community, had the opportunity to get in touch with the local Scrum Community. If you want to learn more about his experiences, go to 
http://agileinberlin.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/how-i-met-the-scrum-community-in-korea/.

At today’s ScrumTisch, the first chosen topic by the crowd was how to do Agile with non-software teams. We started the discussion with a short list of questions:

• What to show at the end of the timebox?
• How to set the length of the timebox?

Interestingly, these questions, although raised by the audience, apparently were not hot enough to actually get discussed... (the topic Agile Beyond Software is much broader than this post, I’m just covering what was discussed tonight—a touch on the surface...)

Hardware

It turned out, that the person suggesting the topic actually had a challenge integrating hardware and software teams... Which then lead to a heated discussion about how quickly hardware can be developed, manufactured, and integrated with a new version of the software—which, in the case of these Scrum teams, happens to be potentially shippable every two weeks.

As in many similar discussions I have observed in recent years, it is quite interesting to note how little most software developers know about hardware development. Many of us take it for granted that hardware development cannot match the pace of software. While this might be true for the case of the best software teams, able to update a software system every few minutes using continuous integration, for the common pace of biweekly software delivery this is nothing more than a false assumption. My colleague Ralf Kruse suggested to compare this with software teams new to agile development, who also tend to be sceptical about the possibility to ship working software every two weeks. With software systems, we now have quite a large number of examples which are publicly available on the web that show this is actually possible, even for large-scale enterprise systems.

Examples of hardware development integrating new versions every two weeks might be harder to find, yet they are available if look for them. WIKISPEED is a fine example of a 100 miles per gallon car developed using Scrum, iterating the entire car every seven days.

We know many more examples from our personal work experience, like ECUs for cars, satellite communication and other complex systems including hardware using a frequent integration pace.

Challenge Your Assumptions

How does that work? Or, to get at the underlying assumptions, why do we think this is difficult? In my experience, it usually burns down to organisational issues: contracts with hardware suppliers who “can’t” deliver more often than every 2 months, hardware departments who need “for ever” to develop a new prototype... This is the status quo for most organisations. But does it need to be that way? Toyota has proven in the automotive industry how long-term partnerships with trusted parties avoid long contract negotiations for every single piece you need. Instead, the partnership enables a learning environment for both sides to challenge the status quo and find new ways that might work better. This might even be easier inside an organisation where the parties involved actually would not need a contract at all to work together...

We need to challenge our assumptions and identify our real options. How can we prove we are moving in the right direction at the pace that our competitive situation demands today if we don’t challenge the organisational dysfunctions that we developed in another century? Agile has a purpose. We need to make this world a better place, so we should stop increasing busyness in business, and start thinking about Betterness instead. 

This article, published in the Financial Times Germany in December 2012, is about Landau Media, one of agile42s long time customer.

Unfortunately the article is only available in German, but maybe google translate will help :-)

Marion

“Happy New Year! 2012 won't know what's hit it”.

                      Dave Sharrock after the agile42 Internal Coach Camp

We want to make Dave’s prediction a reality with the Agile with a Purpose blast (projects don’t hit, right?). We want you to know why we’re doing it.

Prepare to be astonished!

Some Background

Stephen Parry (@leanvoices) said at the ALE2011 conference that he would like to see agile/lean practitioners joining forces, using their distributed open social network to amplify their knowledge of how Agile works and how it should not be used ("to do the wrong things righter" was his lovely phrase).

Last week, we discovered @thinkers50 (the world’s top 50 business thinkers). What struck us was:

1. Why don't more of us know more of them?
2. Maybe we should start talking to them?
3. We should raise the awareness of the agile business thinking.

Agile might still be a small niche which apparently is not yet recognised by the “serious” business thinkers’ community. There seem to be people out there who are rethinking management and business for the 21st century, and we are not connected to them although collaboration between us could produce great results.

We think that by focusing on our community we are missing some of the right people. 

Let’s send the right message!

Our Goal

• Create something that can't be overheard and will be remembered
  and
• Prove that the Anarchy with a Purpose model of organisation works again (ALE2011). 

How we do it

We co-create in our distributed team and humbly let greatness emerge.

We want to be nimble, quick, and effective. 

2012 will not know what's hit it. Thanks Dave!

We already gathered over a dozen people by private invite. In order of commitment:

Can You Join?

Sure! Ping us on Twitter and we’ll add you to a list of volunteers. Team members can pull you in to pair on some work. The first (and currently the only planned) iteration will last two weeks and will start soon, so you might want to be quick.

How to Follow

The Twitter hashtag is #AWAP. What outcome do you expect from this crowd joining their passion for two weeks?

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