Passionate Product Leadership

Last July I attended Jeff Patton’s Passionate Product Leadership Workshop. It was a live online training course which ran for 4 days and each session was 4 hours long. Zoom and Mural were used for the workshop. It as an amazing, superb learning experience! Jeff is an excellent teacher. You can read more about him here: from this page.

I was presented with the opportunity to take this course and at first I was hesitant to take it. I was thinking how this will help me become a better Agile Coach. Fortunately, I have a great mentor, Daniel my boss, who reminded me of my aspiration to be an “enterprise level” coach. And so I took the course and I learned how to help my company be better in the area of Product Leadership. I engaged more with the Product Managers and shared what I have learned to everyone in the company: from Development Teams to our Marketing Team and to the Customer Success department as well

Key Takeaways from the Workshop

There are three important questions that everyone involved in product development should be asking at every step of the process:

• Is it valuable?
• Is it feasible?
• Is it usable?

Anytime you do not have a satisfactory answer to any of these questions, you should be thinking and discussing a change in your plans. Anytime your team spends significant time arguing about any of these questions, you should pause and rethink your strategy.

The answers to these questions come from different perspectives on the product. This leads to the next key takeaway, it is good to have a triad of leaders in product development. The triad consists of: a leader on the business side of product management, a technology leader, and a user experience leader. Actually it doesn’t have to be a trio of leaders, this could take form as a “core product team” consisting of people who collaborate to make decisions.

To make smart decisions, the Core Product Team needs all the valuable inputs it can use. Another key takeaway is, everyone contributes what they can to the product development process. Silos should be broken down and collaboration among people from different departments should be encouraged. Product Managers should not lock themselves in a room while they “design the product and write specifications”. Development teams should not just wait to be handed requirements before they contribute to the product.

More to come…

I have more learnings to share and I will do so in other posts. I am grateful to have attended Jeff Patton’s workshop and I am eagerly sharing and applying what I have learned. Without a doubt, the knowledge and wisdom I have gained is helping me become a better Agile Coach.

Random Agile Thoughts – Weekly Commitment Meetings

At the start of every week, our team comes together to have what we call, “Monday Commitment Meetings“. We look at our Kanban board and have a discussion on what we think we can get done for the week. From this discussion we come up with a list of cards that we commit to finishing by the end of the week. We have the understanding that the commitment we make is that we will do our best to get these cards done. At the end of the week, we review what we have accomplished.

It’s quite natural for individuals to have hesitations and concerns in making commitments, especially at work, where not being able to fulfill commitments can get you in trouble. Here are two concerns I often hear from team members:

1. There are two many variables and unknowns, how can we confidently commit to getting things done? We don’t want to make commitments if we don’t know what will happen during the week.
2. I don’t like this pressure of having a list to get done, even if I know I’m the only one putting pressure on myself.

The following insights are what I usually share to respond to these concerns:

• The goal for discussing about commitments is to have a target which the team will try to achieve. A unifying goal guiding the team’s activities during the week.
• A basketball team still aims to win every game even though there are many variables at play and many uncertainties.
• It is natural to feel pressure. The pressure is good if it motivates you to do your best.
• It is ok to fail, to make a mistake. In fact, we learn more when we make a mistake.

I hope this random thought helps you to be more Agile. 😊

Working with Remote Agile Teams: Retrospectives

Facilitating retrospectives is a tough challenge.  Facilitating retrospectives while working remotely is, most of the time, an even tougher challenge.  In Retrospective Meetings, the body language and non-verbal cues from participants is an important factor in the quality of the discussions and outcome of the meeting.  Not being able to see this, makes it really hard to do retrospectives while working remotely.  If you can have everyone on video in the online meeting for the retrospective, that is great, but even then you still have other challenges to face.

In this post, I share some learnings I have gained from facilitating retrospectives for remote teams.

Setting the stage

A big part of the effort in preparing for a retrospective meeting is understanding the context of the meeting. When you are co-located with the team in an office, it is easy to make observations, have quick chats with team members, and be “in-tune” with what is happening with the team. When working remotely you have to make an extra effort in connecting with the team. In doing so before the retrospective, you can make sure you have a good understanding about concerns the team would want to discuss in the meeting.

Flow of the meeting

When you are in an online meeting, it is easy to get distracted and lose track of what is happening in the meeting. As the facilitator of the retrospective, you need to guide the team through phases of the meeting. This is the flow of the meeting that I use:

1. Review action items and previous discussion items
2. Generate new discussion items
3. Select items to discuss
4. Agree on new action items and improvements to do
5. Closing of the meeting

During the meeting, I make sure to state clearly the phase or step we are in.  Groupmap also helps in directing the flow of the meeting.  In the tool there are visual indicators and UI interactions which helps remind participants about the phases of the meeting.

Facing Challenges

Encouraging active participation, dealing with periods of silence, and good engagement of participants in the meeting are common challenges encountered during retrospective meetings.

I think that in meetings with remote teams it is hard to avoid calling out names of individuals to have them speak. I usually want to avoid doing this, because I think participants should speak up whenever they want to say something and that they can choose to stay silent if they really have nothing to add to the discussion. However, calling out names can help participants take turns talking, like when two or more people start answering a question at the same time during the meeting. Calling out names can also be, sometimes, the only way to encourage participation especially if the team is newly formed and is just starting to get to know one another.

In online meetings without video, long periods of silence can be more uncomfortable as participants can’t see each other. I learned that as a facilitator, you should allow this period of silence to go on without speaking up. This gives the team the space they need so they can push themselves to be more engaged in the meeting. Eventually someone will speak up. Having video and being able to see one another makes dealing with this challenge easier. Everyone can see the body language of one another and the facilitator can also use the non-verbal cues for better handling of the period of silence.

Sometimes the team may not be in the mood for doing a retrospective.  Sometimes they are too busy with their current workload and would want to just focus on that.  In these instances, it may be more helpful to the team to cancel the retrospective.  I have also ended retrospective meetings early when I have observed that the team’s energy is quite low or they are not interested in doing the retrospective.  This does not mean that you would not be having retrospectives anymore, rather the team just needs space and time to overcome the current challenge they are facing.

Same old, same old

Overall having a retrospective meeting with remote teams is almost the same as having it with a co-located team. As a facilitator, you make sure that the team is engaged and actively participating as they discover improvements that they want to make to become a better team.

Working with Agile Teams Remotely: Planning and Backlog Grooming

The team I am currently coaching follows Lean Software Development and uses Kanban. For us the weekly planning meeting involves discussing the Product Backlog Items (PBIs) we have ready for implementation, and agreeing on what we think we can get done for the week. We hold backlog grooming meetings as needed, when there are PBIs to be estimated by the team. At the least we have a grooming meeting once per week. On this second blog for the “Working with Agile Teams Remotely” series I am writing, I will share what it is like for us to do planning and grooming meetings.

The Tools

We use Zoom for our online meeting. Sharing your video is encouraged but not required. Screen sharing is done as needed, usually it is the Product Owner who is sharing his screen as he explains details of PBIs. As I said in my previous post, we do not experience any issues in audio quality while we are doing screen sharing so it really helps in having a good understanding of what is being discussed in the meeting. Sometimes we would record the meeting so that team members can review it when they need to refresh their memory on what has been discussed. Zoom has a nice feature which allows you to record the meeting on the cloud. This way it is readily available to the team to view it and you don’t have to bother with uploading / downloading a video file.

Our Kanban board is on our instance of LeanKit. It is expected that everyone in the planning meeting is looking at the board on LeanKit as needed. Information about the PBI is stored on the card representing it on our Kanban board. This substitutes for being able to stand in front of a physical board, discussing the plan for the week.

For estimating PBIs we play Planning Poker.  We do this on planningpoker.com which is easy to use and easy to customize according to your needs. You only need an account for the moderator of the game and the rest of the players just have to click on a link to join a game. The tool has all the features you need to play a proper Planning Poker game with a team.

Challenges

One of the main challenges in doing planning and grooming meetings with a remote team is maintaining the focus of the members. It is easy to get distracted and get disengaged from the meeting, especially if you are not sharing video. Ideally when you meet in person, the attendees of the meeting would not bring their laptops to the meeting and you can easily see if they are paying attention to what is being discussed. If you are in an online meeting, the attendees may be viewing something else on their own screens or maybe getting distracted and spacing out because of other distractions in their home offices.

You may also get challenged by looping discussions. Sometimes expressing ideas in online meetings can be more difficult compared to in-person meetings. You lack the visual cues which can help you in explaining. There is also no easy way of breaking up a conversation. When you are in the same room, a simple gesture like raising your hand can signal the need to break the discussion. In an online meeting you have no choice but to speak up and break up the conversation as politely and as nicely as you can.

These challenges do get easier as you gain more experience in holding this kind of meetings with remote teams. It’s part of the growth of the team, the more meetings you do with them, the better the next ones will be.

 

Challenge of Retrospectives: Preparing for the Meeting

To prepare for a retrospective meeting is no easy feat for the facilitator. It’s the first challenge you face in facilitating a retrospective. My mentor once shared that if the retrospective meeting is the tip of the iceberg, the preparation for it is the huge chunk of ice below the water.  I think it’s the perfect analogy.  If you do not prepare enough then the tip of the iceberg will sink and your retrospective meeting will be a bust.

For facilitating a retrospective meeting for a team you are coaching and observing, the effort of preparation may be easy since you have a good understanding of the context for the meeting, and you can easily prepare the materials you need for the meeting.  You also have the meeting at a regular cadence so preparing for it becomes a routine activity.  It is different when you are preparing to facilitate a retrospective for a group which you don’t regularly observe and interact with.  You would need to put in extra effort to understand the context for the meeting.  You might also need to spend more time in gathering data for materials you may want to use during the retrospective.

There are different activities you will find yourself doing as you get ready for the meeting.

Understand the Context

As the facilitator, you should be able to guide the participants in achieving their goal for the retrospective meeting which in general, is coming up with ideas and action items for improvements they can make in how they do their work.  You won’t be able to do this if you don’t have a good understanding of the context for the retrospective.

What happened during the time period being reviewed in the retrospective?  What challenges did the team face?  What mistakes were made?  What did the team learn? What went wrong? What could have gone better? If you were interacting with the team regularly, you have your memory and observation notes to refer to when answering these questions. If you are facilitating for a group which you do not closely work with, you need to do more to gain an understanding of the context.

Talking with people is a great way to know more about the context for the meeting. You can hear stories from different perspectives, learn about concerns, and you can ask questions about the experiences of the team.

With a good understanding of the context you are better equipped to guide the discussions in the meeting so that the team can achieve their goal.

Prepare Materials

Once you have a good understanding of the context, you are ready to gather and prepare the materials you will use for the retrospective.  The usual items you would make ready are:

• graphs for the metrics you track
• observation notes
• list of action items from the previous retrospective
• summary of discussions from last retrospective

This can all be compiled in a retrospective document which you would then share with the team before the meeting.

You would also want to spend time thinking about the initial set of powerful questions you can ask the team to help them reflect and think about what they could do better. Here is a link to my post about powerful questions.

You should also think about the technique or format you are going to use for the two main activities in the retrospective:

1. generating insights and ideas
2. converging to agreed improvements to be made by the team

For generating insights the usual formats would be asking the team to answer some guide questions. Some examples are

• Start-Stop-Continue
• What went well? + What could have gone better? + What do we want to try?
• the 4 Ls – Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For

Once you have generated discussion items, it is a good idea to prioritize talking about the most important ones first.  One technique you can use is called “Dot voting”, let the participants vote on the items they want to discuss.  When calling for a consensus, you can use the “Fist of five” technique to see who agrees or disagrees with a proposed idea.  Participants would hold up one hand and the number of fingers they have raised shows how much they agree.  There are other techniques you can use and it would help to know about them so you have wide variety you can use.

Meeting Setup

This part of the preparation is probably the easiest.  Make sure to have an invite to the meeting.  For the team I am coaching, we have a recurring Goggle Calendar event for the retrospective meeting which is held once in every 2 weeks. We use Zoom for our meetings so I also have a Zoom meeting instance which we use for every retrospective. The unique link for the Zoom meeting is of course included on the description of the Google Calendar event.

If you are working with a co-located team, then part of this step is making sure a meeting room is reserved and would be ready for the retrospective. You may also want to prepare refreshments for the participants. One thing I miss about having retrospectives in the office is the chance to bring snacks for everyone to enjoy while having the retrospective.

As I am working remotely, I also prepare the GroupMap which will be used and sometimes we would try other online tools which can help us in our retrospective.

Be Neutral

For me, the final part of my preparation for the retrospective is preparing myself for the meeting. As the facilitator of a retrospective, you should be neutral. You could serve the team better by not bringing in your biases and judgement into the discussions. I think this is an important part of getting ready for the retrospective because it sets you up to be a facilitator who can guide the team well in identifying improvements they want to make.  There is much to be said about the facilitator being neutral, enough that it warrants another blog post which I will write soon.

Are you ready?

Since the retrospective meeting is a very important activity for Agile teams, it should not be a surprise that a great deal of effort goes into preparing for the meeting.  While the steps for preparing get repetitive and may get easier, it still helps to be mindful of the things you do to get ready for the retrospective. It is an important part of your responsibility as an Agile Coach, Scrum Master, or facilitator.

 

 

 

 

The Daily Grind Of A Work From Home Agile Team Coach

I am an Agile Team Coach working from home and this is how my day at work usually goes.  We follow the US Eastern Time and that means that here in the Philippines, I work from 8 pm to 3 am then I fill-up the 8 hours of work at 10 am to 12 noon.

8 – 9

• Check email
• Check BambooHR for HR announcements and see who is on leave for the day (also checks to see who has work anniversaries and birthdays so I can greet them)
• Look at the Kanban boards on our instance of LeanKit, make observation and notes which I bring up during the standup meetings or saved for a retrospective meeting.
• Read blogs about Agile, Software Development, Scrum, Kanban, Testing, and any topics which I think might help me become a better coach or might be useful for the teams I serve. I usually read blogs from Mike Cohn and Dzone.
• On some days I would look at the team metrics we are observing.  These are usually flow metrics: team throughput along with cycle time, cumulative flow diagram, distribution of Kanban card types (new feature, defect, tech debt, etc.)
• On weeks when there is a retrospective meeting, I would spend time preparing for that meeting: reviewing notes, reviewing action items, preparing retro docs we use, compiling metrics we observe.

9 – 10

• Facilitate standup meetings.  I have two standup meetings during this time slot.
• In between meetings I would prepare my cup of coffee for the day, chat with teammates – have virtual watercooler conversations, continue reading some blogs, and watch short YouTube clips.

10 – 12

• This is when most of the team meetings happen.
• During this time I am usually busy facilitating various meetings : Planning / Commitment, Retrospective, Backlog Grooming, Demo, Knowledge Sharing, Brainstorming
• On some days, when there are no team meetings, I would schedule 1-1 meetings with team members during this time. These conversations allow me to provide coaching and mentoring as needed.

12 – 1

• Lunch break!  Technically it is time for a midnight snack because it is 12 am, but I do eat lunch at this time. Can’t work well with an empty stomach!
• I usually watch something on Netflix while eating. And after eating I would watch some more, build a Lego set, play video games.
• On some days I would spend lunch time chatting with people from work. Some days we would have group discussions, on chat or on a call. This takes the place of conversations you usually have with people while eating lunch.

1 – 3

• Prepare for meetings I facilitate. Includes: understanding the goal of the meeting, understanding the context, preparing docs needed, preparing questions to ask, talking with participants to learn more about the context and their expectations and concerns
• Attend webinars. It’s great that the usual webinars I watch are held at 1 pm US EST.  Most of the webinars I attend are organized by the Scrum Alliance.
• Do online training courses.  I take courses offered at Front Row Agile and Pluralsight.
• Read a book about being Agile.  I am currently reading “Real World Agility: A Practical Guide for Agile Practitioners” by Daniel James Gullo.

Other Activities

For my other work hours I do continuous improvement activities such as online trainings, reading articles or blogs, or reading books.  One of the perks of working at home is that it gives you more flexibility in how you manage the use of your time.

Sometimes I get to attend local conferences and trainings.  For these events I would have to adjust to following Philippine time.  It would be like having jet lag without getting on a plane.  Haha!

Once a month I would attend the Agile Philippines monthly meet-up.  It’s a great learning experience and a good break from the daily routine.

It takes a great deal of self-management and discipline to be able to work effectively while at home.  Being Agile adds to the challenge and while it may seem like a futile effort, you can be Agile and your team can be Agile while working remotely.

 

 

ICAgile Certified Agile Coach Training

Last August 1 – 2, I attended an ICAgile accredited Agile Certified Coach Training class.  The training was facilitated by Elizabeth Thakkar from Agility4All.

The learnings from the training course equips the attendees with a good understanding of the roles and responsibilities of an Agile Coach.  The content of the course was really interesting and I liked how it covered the essential things one needs to learn to become a good Agile Coach.

Knowledge Gained

The learnings I got from the training helped me gain a better understanding of the answers to two big questions I had about being an Agile Coach:

• What is an Agile Coach?  What does an Agile Coach do?
• How does an Agile Coach fulfill his / her responsibilities?

Included in the course material is a great introduction to Agile Coaching.  I like how it was said that it was mostly about forming good relationships with the people you coach so that you are able to help them achieve their goals.  For an Agile Coach, as the name implies, it is all about helping people be successful in projects by applying Agile principles and values.

I learned how Agile Coaches can wear different hats depending on the situation.  The Agile Coach can be a teacher, a mentor, a facilitator.  And sometimes the coach digs in and shows people how to do the work.  I think the last one is generally avoided by coaches and often saved as a last resort in the effort of teaching something to the coachee.

During the training, we did exercises to practice some techniques and methods used by Agile Coaches.  I learned how to form coaching agreements between coach and coachee to set the correct expectations.  We practiced active listening and giving feedback.  We also discussed different kinds of conflicts and how to handle them.

The Experience

I felt very lucky to have taken the training with a group of very talented people who were very generous in sharing their insights and knowledge.  During the two days, the participants actively engaged in discussions and sharing about the course content.  It was good for me to hear stories of scenarios which happened in companies and organizations that have a different settings and environments than the companies I have worked for.  I really liked the sharing about the challenges which Agile Coaches encounter: getting support from leadership / management team, dealing with unreasonable expectations about being Agile, coaching difficult team members, making sure everyone has a good understanding of Agile principles and values.

Here are some comments I have about how the training was facilitated:

• I think time management could have gone better.  I felt we rushed through some parts of the course and activities.  We lost time mostly by going on tangent discussions during some of the sharing.  If discussions were more focused and contained, then I think we could have made a better use of the time in the training.
• While it was good that the trainer brought out a lot of sharing from the participants, I was expecting to hear more from the trainer; sharing anecdotes, analogies and insights about the various topics discussed during the training.  The training would have been better for me if I have learned more from the trainer, from experiences and anecdotes I could relate to.
• In my opinion, I could have gotten more learnings from the activities done during the training if the trainer gave more feedback.  The participants were able to share their thoughts about the activities but I felt we lacked feedback from the trainer.  I expected that the trainer would be a mentor in this part of the training and provide actionable feedback for the participants.

Moving Forward

I have learned a lot from the training and gained a better understanding about the role of an Agile Coach.  I would like to continue growing as an Agile Coach and I am very interested in completing the Agile Coaching Track of ICAgile.  The next step on that journey is to take an Agile Team Facilitation class.  It is my hope that having these certifications would open up for me opportunities which will allow me to gain more experience as an Agile Coach and expose me to different settings and environments.

Challenge of Retrospectives: The Sound of Silence

As a facilitator of retrospective meetings, one of the challenges you have to face is being comfortable with silence.  Usually when there is silence in the meeting, it is because people are thinking.  Sometimes it may also mean people are not paying attention to what is being discussed in the meeting, they are not engaged. But that is a topic for another blog post.  Here let us just assume that silence means people are in deep thought.

Moments of Silence

Here are some scenarios in retrospective meetings when there can be a period of silence:

• The facilitator asks a question which makes the team think hard before answering.  These are commonly powerful questions.  Some may be difficult to answer because the questions may make the team feel vulnerable or it may show them a reflection of themselves doing something which they think is wrong.  Questions which address the “elephants in the room” will also likely cause silence in the meeting.
• A team member shares an idea, insight or a recommendation and the team reflects upon it.
• The facilitator asks for a volunteer, usually to be responsible for an action item.  It is uncommon for the period of silence which follows this scenario to be very long, but there is a period of silence usually.  Documentation tasks are the usual suspects in causing this scenario to happen.

There are other events which makes the team go silent in retrospective meetings.  In my experience the three scenarios described above are the most common.

How to be Comfortable with Silence

Silence creates space for the team to think and reflect.  As the facilitator, you must provide the team the space that they will use to come up with their own solutions.  And so, there will be moments of silence and you just have to be comfortable with them, otherwise you will feel the pressure of always breaking the silence and doing most of the talking in the meeting.

Be Neutral and Remain Neutral

In order to effectively facilitate a meeting, you must not have a vested interest in the outcome of the meeting.  You are in the meeting just to help the attendees achieve their goal for the meeting.  You, as the facilitator of the meeting, is neutral and should remain neutral.  You do not express your opinions or let your biases be expressed in the meeting. When you remain neutral, you would find it easier to deal with moments of silence in the meeting.  You will not feel the pressure of speaking up to fill the silence because you understand there is no need for you to do that.

Let the Team Own the Discussion

The team should do most of the talking in the retrospectives.  The facilitator is just the guide: initiating conversations, asking questions to help the team think more, helping the team come to agreements, and summarizing discussions.  The team comes up with the topics, raises the problems, forms the solutions.  The facilitator should not feel the need to fill in the silence in the meeting, the team itself should feel that pressure of making sure they are taking advantage of this opportunity to discover how to be better.

Be Creative in Forming Questions

When you are confident that you asked the right question, you can be more comfortable to the silence which follows. Asking the right question, or asking it in the correct, clear way, makes you confident that the team understands the question and there is silence because they are thinking about the question carefully. This allows you to avoid second guessing yourself if whether the team is confused with the question and did not understand it.

Be Patient

Learn how to wait for the team to speak up.  I find that counting silently, in my head, helps me wait patiently while at the same time keeps me aware of how many seconds have passed.

Dealing with Silence

Silence can dampen the energy in the meeting. Be careful with dealing with it while you are also managing the energy in the meeting.  You must be able to assess if  it is needed by the team so they can think carefully or if it is just killing the energy in the meeting.

Dealing with silence in the meeting can be very hard.  For teams with members working remotely apart from each other, the difficulty is compounded by other factors.  Some teams may not be able to have video during online meetings and so they do not have the ability to read non-verbal cues.  You would not see people nodding their heads in agreement or furrowing their eyebrows while in deep contemplation.

Being comfortable with silence is one thing that a facilitator can learn; helping the team have more effective retrospectives.

Agile Deep Dive Conference Manila 2018

I was invited by KnowledgeHut to speak at the Agile Deep Dive Conference which was held last Friday, May 25, 2018.  It was a day filled with great presentations and discussions.  It was an excellent learning experience for me.  Not only was I able to share some of my experience as an Agile practitioner, I was also able to learn a lot from colleagues who have a variety of experiences and perspectives.

There was a good lineup of speakers and topics.  Here’s the list of topics:

• Why Agile Works?
• Agile User Stories / Business Case Writing
• Mastering the Product Owner Challenges and Dealing with the Common Product Owner Anti-Patterns
• Servant Leadership Redefined – Role of a Project Manager in Agile Teams
• Agile Game
• Self-Organization
• Agile and Big Teams
• Application Security in an Agile Environment
• Agile Methods – Transitioning from Scrum to Kanban

For the brief summary of each topic, you can visit the conference page here.

Some of the key takeaways I got from the conference are:

• If you want to be more successful in adopting Agile, you really need to get an Agile Coach to help your company/organization.
• Agile adoption should really start top-down. Support from management is critical. The company/organization leadership should have a good understanding of what it means to be Agile.
• You can use various games to learn and practice being Agile. This makes the learning more fun and engaging.
• Self-organization is essential in being Agile.
• When adopting Agile, it’s not that we are taking power away from Project Managers, rather we are empowering teams to make their own best decisions while giving Project Managers more time for tasks which supports the team to be more successful.

I was the last speaker for the day.  I talked about how our company, eComEngine, has transitioned from following Scrum to using Kanban and following Lean Product Development.  I wanted to share why me made the change and also offer tips on how to do the transition. My hope was that the lessons I have shared can be applied by others when they also go through a big change in their companies/organizations.  Here are the lessons I have shared at the conference.  These lessons were gained from doing the transition from Scrum to Kanban but in general they are lessons you can learn from going through any big change:

• Just do it.
• Change is easy when you have a good understanding of why you are doing it.
• Solid appreciation and understanding of Agile principles is key to success.
• Adapting to changes takes time.

It was a bit stressful to be the last speaker of the day.  I can’t seem to fully focus on the sessions before my session because I was anxious.  I really liked the topics and how the other speakers presented them and this made me even more anxious that I have a lot of tough acts to follow. I was also worried that the participants will be too tired during my presentation and that everyone would just glaze over my session. I was pleasantly surprised that the audience was still actively listening.  There were really good questions which brought forth lively discussions, during and after my presentation.

photo from Christian Cochran

It felt great to be appreciated for what I have shared. A couple of participants came up to me to say I did a good presentation.  One of the speakers gave me the same compliment, and this pleased me very much, hearing this from someone who has more experience and wisdom.  Some connected with me thru LinkedIn.  I value these connections made during conferences as great learning opportunities, plus I get to make new friends from the Agile community.

I would very much like to do this again, speaking at a conference.  In retrospect, I could have done a better presentation.  For one thing, I was fumbling around with my speaker notes too much.  I will do better next time.  I am very glad to have taken this opportunity.

Global Scrum Gathering Singapore 2017

A Global Scrum Gathering was held at Singapore last July 17 – 19. It was my first time to attend a gathering and visit Singapore. I had a wonderful time learning and having discussions with people who share my passion in being Agile. Global Scrum Gatherings are events organized by the Scrum Alliance (not to be confused with the Rebel Alliance) held at various cities around the world throughout the year.

Key Takeaways

The gathering started with a great Opening Keynote by David Lim, leader of a Singapore expedition to Mount Everest. One of the key takeaways he shared is: “Teamwork is an individual skill.” I have been thinking about this since I heard it from the keynote. I usually say “great teamwork” to the whole team, maybe I should also commend team members individually. It is the skill of individuals (communication, establishing good working relationships) which brings about great teamwork. Each one of us must be passionate about working with others to make teams succeed.

The last slide on David Lim’s Opening Keynote

It was nice to make new friends from the Agile Community at the event. I have been able to share my experiences of being Agile while working mostly with remote teams. People were interested, I think they were like: “Is this guy for real?” Hahaha! This made me eager to get this blog going. I have also heard about various challenges met by Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches: a team member doesn’t want to follow Scrum, people are not engaged, getting support from management, pushing for changes in the company, dealing with culture, etc.

I attended the Coach’s Clinic to ask the question: “How can we have engaging retrospective meetings while working remotely from one another?” Dave Bales, from AgileMe, pointed me back to the Agile Manifesto. “People and interactions over processes and tools.” There is no substitute to having good personal relationships with teammates. It all comes down to how well you know the people you are working with.

Some of the key takeaways which I got from the sessions:

 

• The framework should provide guidance but the organization should evolve beyond the guidance.
• The best way to engage people is to invite them. Deciding is very engaging. Give people the choice.
• Because of Neuroplasticity it takes 6-12 months to get the habit as a structural part of our brain, stored in long term memory.
• Communities of Practice helps develop individuals to be cross-functional.
• “Improve evolutionary” – we aim to evolve, we don’t know the end state, constantly changing
• In Kanban, there is no end goal, there is only continuous improvement
• Kanban: When determining how fast the team can get a PBI done, look at the histogram of cycle times of PBIs and go with the desired percentage of confidence to get the estimated cycle time.  Do not go with averages.

Open Space

On the second day of the conference we had Open Space. This was my first time to experience it and I was surprised by the value I got from it. There were two sessions which I really enjoyed attending.  One session was about retrospective meetings and the other was about what to do when things don’t go well. I learned how to better facilitate retrospective meetings and how to ask powerful questions.  I will write another blog post to share lessons learned from these sessions.

 

Conclusion

Attending the gathering let me experience a lot of great firsts. I am very thankful for the support of the company for letting me attend the event. I was very tired! When you are working at home you are not used to interacting with a lot of people so it got very exhausting for me. No pain, no gain! It was all good, and I can not wait to attend my next Global Scrum Gathering!