Agile

Learn as you go

Mar 2024, by Ulf Schneider

Start with play

The ball point game

Play as a team with a bucket of balls

  • Count the number of balls touched by everyone in the team within a single iteration (1 min)
  • You cannot pass the ball to your left-hand or right-hand neighbour
  • A ball dropped to the floor cannot be counted anymore
  • Play five iterations (each: 2 min planning, 1 min play)

How was it for you?

Did you feel save in the group?

Would you have expected the outcome?

If you had the planning time of all iterations combined …

… would you have achieved the same outcome?

Agile is at home where

more is unknown than known

The Stacey matrix

Uncertainty requires learning

Transparency

↓

Inspection

↓

Adaptation

What process model will

help us best in that situation?

Waterfall process

Going through all stages might take a year

In the waterfall process

the redo of a previous step is an accident

The waterfall process

makes learning expensive

Iterative process

A cycle takes 2 to 6 weeks.

The iterative process

is a learning machine

The iterative process

is a vehicle to limit work in progress

The iterative process

makes planning more simple

The iterative process

is a container for self-organization

The iterative process

is a safety net

Within your iteration

give room to understand the problem you are trying to solve

The double diamond

In real life, the double diamond might look like this

Whatever you do,

use short cycles and complete something meaningful in each cycle

Self-organization

Self-organization is a force of life

We want to make use of self-organization by

giving it a direction, and not micro-manage it

Plan

Have an overarching objective and break it down into key results to be achieved within 2 or 3 months

Do

Deliver towards the key results with limited work in progress

Check

Verify your results

Act

Adapt to incorporate your learnings

Then, repeat

PDCA in practice

  • Inspect and adapt your product and your process regularly
  • In the simplest form, talk to each other as a team and decide about one improvement at a time
  • You might want to give retromat.org a try
  • Then cut through the noise by taking action

Limit work in progress (WIP)

The WIP game

Write down line by line and measure time

→

multitask

abcdefghi

123456789

Write down column by column and measure time

↓

multitask

abcdefghi

123456789

Which approach is faster?

Which approach reduces errors?

Limiting work in progress will

increase quality and speed up your work

Sprints in Scrum and limits in Kanban are a way of limiting work in progress

In Agile, the process is servant, not leader

Agile is about you – define your world!

The Taylor tub

Work is for humans like what a net is for a spider

—Otl Aicher

Be an artist and challenge the status quo

—Seth Godin

Team

Diversity?

The team decides how much work can be accomplished

Google tech talk with Ken Schwaber: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyNPeTn8fpo

Keep the team size below 10

Because communication lines grow exponentially:

n(n−1)/2n(n-1)/2

Use feature self-selection in your team

www.trademe.co.nz

What if you need more than one team to deliver a thing?

Scaling Agile

Conway´s law

Your system architecture will mirror your organization´s communication structure

Conway´s law in practice

Small and distributes teams lead to a modular service architecture.

Large co-located teams lead to a monolithic architecture.

Seek for loosely coupled teams

Agile will scale itself

You do not need a scaling framework

Teams will spread word about useful practices and listening teams will adapt

Take this with you

Agile means completing meaningful things in short intervals – to foster learning – while collaborating as a team

Enjoy!

Materials

Image sources