Scripture-based Agile Coaching – Working Enthusiastically

I believe in God. I believe in the gift of salvation given to me through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe God has a purpose for me in my work. He has equipped me with the abilities and skills to do well in my role as an Agile Coach. Still, I find myself struggling daily to keep on working enthusiastically.

Being an Agile Coach is a thankless job. You will not do well as a coach if what you seek is recognition. Our work is the background to the success and accomplishments of the team which is the foreground on spotlight. It is a challenge to quantify and qualify the work being done by a coach. Most of the time the work of the coach is “hidden”.

I have the same struggle with writing on this blog. I can only guess at the impact I am having by sharing my thoughts here on my blog.

The Bible offers numerous verses for motivation so you can keep on working enthusiastically. Here’s one of them:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.

Colossians 3:23 (NIV)

I take heart that at the end of it all, as long as I do my best to use the talents, skills and gifts that God has given me, I will receive the greatest recognition of all time. I will hear God say: “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

What the heck happened to Remote Agility in 2020?

So 2020 has come and gone, the year the Covid-19 pandemic started. And I did not write a single blog post, not even one! Guess I got some explaining to do. 😅

Well, after my last post in 2019 I was feeling a bit tired of writing. I was dragging my feet (or maybe my hands – for writing 😁) and I was just out of ideas. I planned to pick it up on the next year. 2020 had other plans though. It was a very challenging year. Everyone had to cope with a lot of changes. There were things and activities I had to drop, to focus on what I needed to do. So I did not find myself writing any posts on this blog for the year 2020. I lost sight of my purpose for writing on this blog, which is to share my learnings and insights as a way to contribute to the Agile community. And to help people like me striving to be Agile while doing remote work.

You lose some…

The last year brought significant changes to my lifestyle. My family bunkered down and mostly stayed at home. I can count, using just one hand, the number of times we (all of us, together) went out, and these were just to do drive-bys and drop-offs to houses of relatives and church. I get to go out more because I am the one getting the essentials we need: groceries, water, medicine, supplies from school, and the occasional take-out from restaurants 😄. All of this trips though was planned and executed so that it was fast, efficient (that it minimized the times I had to go out), and safe (done very carefully to lower the risk of exposure as much as possible). I had to be fast, I wasn’t comfortable with wearing face masks and face shields for a long time. This 2020, we have said goodbye (for now) to going to malls, taking trips to beaches and resorts, seeing family, relatives and friends, and enjoying nice meals at our favorite restaurants. It is sad, but we are still fortunate and blessed by God because we could have lost more. I did not lose my job. We did not lose our health. We still have the things we need daily.

Another big change for me is, I had to put in more time and effort in supporting my kids as they do school at home. It felt like I have gone back to school myself! 😅 You’d think that with just staying at home you’ll have more time on your hands, but it turned out for me, I had to do more than I have the time for.

You win some…

Letting go of some things in your life gives space to new things. Last year I increased my effort and time for studying the Bible and meditating on God’s Word. I also grabbed the opportunity to serve in our church, Saddleback. My wife and I volunteered to help in church activities that are done virtually. It was a wonderful chance to apply what I have learned in being Agile and working remotely to serving God and our church.

I have improved my skill in playing the piano! 🥳 We used the SimplyPiano app for self-learning. It was great how one subscription can be used by the whole family, so my kids also learned something new!

My wife gave me a round studio light for my birthday last year and this allowed me to level up my toy photography. 😁 I also borrowed her more powerful camera (more powerful then my phone camera) for better shots. The picture at the start of this post, the picture of Iron Man, that is one of my favorite shots.

That’s life!

If there is one thing that I take seriously in being Agile, it is the ability to adapt to changes. That’s life, change is inevitable. 2020 was a hard year. I think it would have been harder for me if I did not have the experience of working at home and being Agile. Last year, remote work strongly said…

And I was like…

Coming back to the blog

And now I am writing again on this blog. I have learned that “it’s ok not to be ok” (from a Netflix series 🤣). However, I do still want to share my insights and learnings and help anyone who would care to read my blog. So here I am, ready to pick it up again. I’m sorry for being absent. I am grateful for your time in reading what I have to share. I hope it helps you in anyway it can.

Working with Agile Teams Remotely: Meetings

What is it like to be Agile while working remotely? I am an Agile Coach working at home and I work with teams having members who also work from their homes.  I have been working on this kind of environment and working setup for 8 years. In my current job, I am on my fourth year of being an Agile Coach. I have also worked as a Scrum Master for co-located teams so I have some experience working in an office setting.  In the early years of my professional career, I have worked as a software engineer, as part of a development team in an office setting.

When you are used to applying Agile principles and following Agile frameworks, I think that gives you the versatility to work in any environment and be successful. I would like to share my perspective on what it is like to be Agile while working with remote teams.  On this first blog for this series, I’ll talk about meetings in general.

Meetings

For me, scheduling a meeting involves creating a Google calendar event and inviting people to that event.  Google Calendar has nice features which helps you pick a good time for the meeting you are creating.  You can see the appointments people have on their calendars and you can even ask the app to find a good time slot for a meeting by telling it who you want to invite.  The app allows you to schedule recurring meetings and this is what I do for standups, retrospectives, and planning meetings.  I also make sure to set the correct timezone as I work with people in different countries.

We use Zoom for our online meetings.  Instead of reserving a meeting room, I would just create a Zoom meeting instance.  Going in the meeting room is done by clicking on a Zoom meeting URL.  I would usually post the link on the Skype group chat of the team two minutes before the start of the meeting.  I also post the Zoom URL on the Google Calendar event for the meeting so the attendees can access the link from there as well.

I am impressed with Zoom’s implementation on streaming video, voice and screen share during meetings.  Internet speed is not great here in the Philippines but somehow on Zoom meetings we get great quality for voice.  Greater still is that with Zoom, we can share video and do screen sharing without lags and problems with audio. This really helps in overcoming the challenges of communicating with your colleagues. It brings you closer to how the meeting would be if you are all in a room together. We would share video so that we can see each other rather than just hearing the voices of people we work with. Screen sharing is used to enhance discussions.  In Zoom you can view a gallery of the video of participants and see the screen share at the same time, it’s like being in a room and having something presented via a projector.

Daily Standups

When we have the daily standups, we are actually just sitting down in our own home offices. Hahaha! We use Zoom for the meeting. Instead of looking at a physical board, we have our virtual Kanban board on our LeanKit instance. LeanKit allows us to coordinate our work and represent it on a Kanban board that we can all access and use.

What’s Next?

On my next blog post for this series, I’ll share more about retrospectives and how we do it remotely.