Author Archives: Hillary Louise Johnson

What if you were more like Steve Jobs?

My friend’s daughter took this picture of the front of the Apple store in Manhattan last night. What are you doing in your life that would make people remember you with this much passion? Something to ask yourself next time you realize you’re the person saying “That’ll never work because….” or starting every reply with “Yes, but…” Jobs made our world bigger, sleeker, cleaner, more beautiful. Life is not a zero-sum game, which means we’re all free to make our world bigger, and better. So if you catch yourself being the person saying, “Yes, but we can’t all be Steve Jobs….” I’d beg to differ. Yes, we can.

Speaking of yes we can, our Director of Business Development, Laura Powers, is walking her first marathon today. Go Laura!!!

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What’s An Agile Paycheck Look Like? A glimpse into Agile Learning Labs’ new compensation model

What kind of agile training company would we be if we didn’t try to build our company from the ground up using agile methods for everything from team decision making to hiring to how we pay ourselves? Here’s how we arrived at a radical new way of paying ourselves. (Hint: if you’ve seen the heist movie Ocean’s 11, our team compensation model is a lot like theirs.)
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Agile Learning Labs launches Dymaxicon with a pretty darn swanky party

Our thanks to everyone who turned out for Saturday’s Dymaxicon launch party at Internos Wine Cafe in the city. If you have been too busy building software to keep up with our hijinks here at Agile Learning Labs, we’ve launched a publishing company. We publish agile titles like The Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson (me) and we also publish controversial literary fiction, graphic novels and gardening books. Why? Because we’re just that agile.
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Agile Learning Labs is having a party

Come help us celebrate the launch of Dymaxicon –- a new kind of publishing house brought to you by Agile Learning Labs.

Saturday, August 20, 2011, 6 to 8 pm
Internos Wine Bar
3240 Geary Street, San Francisco

Raise a glass and toast a new, agile way of producing books, videos and media. Join Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson to celebrate the success of their book, The Elements of Scrum. Come meet some of our dynamic authors whose books and videos have recently gone to press:
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The Elements of Scrum: User Stories and Beyond

Chris is at Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City today, and part of prepping for his Tuesday session on Agile Requirements: User Stories and Beyond included reviewing the following chapter from The Elements of Scrum, by Chris Sims & Hillary Louise Johnson (c’est moi). Here is the text of that chapter in its entirety:
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Can agile games save the world?

One of the sessions I regret missing at Agile Open Northwest is one that was titled simply Agile Congress, the session notes for which begin with, “You have just been appointed the first scrum master of the United States House of Representatives…” Well, why not? As it turns out, the City of San Jose is all over that very idea.
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ScrumMaster vs scrum master: What do you think?

Chris and I just finished the first draft of our book, The Elements of Scrum, and will be publishing a “beta” paperback by February, just in time for Agile Open Northwest, of which we are a proud sponsor.

One of the biggest remaining debates we’re having is over capitalization. After great deliberation, we’ve chosen not to use agile as a noun in the book (e.g., “In Agile we do it this way…” or “Agile is about…”). In my humble writer’s opinion, when we “thingify” agile by hardening it into a proper noun, the term loses a little bit of it of its transformational power. We want help the word to remain an adjective, a powerful, dynamic descriptor, so we’ve chosen not to nounify it. We’ve also decided not to capitalize it.
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Lyssa Adkins, Agile Pop Star…

Lyssa AdkinsI was writing Lyssa Adkins the other day to update her on how briskly the seats in her upcoming class are selling, and I almost called her a “rock star”… But it just didn’t feel right. Lyssa has absolutely nothing in common with Keith Richards (which is a good thing, believe me!). She’s more of a Christina Aguilera type, which is kind of the opposite of the dark, moody troubled-but-oh-so-talented rock star: Lyssa is open, magnanimous, confident, snappy with a comeback, and very, very shiny–a classic pop star.
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A recap of our weekend CSM

This weekend Agile Learning Labs held a memorable Certified Scrum Master training. We capped admission at 28, and had a wait list–a first for us. The distinguished student body included people who flew in for the event from Tennessee, Michigan and Dubai, and a good mix of current agile team members, independent consultants, and job seekers–fewer job seekers than usual as the employment market improves, we’re happy to report!

The atmosphere was bubbly and energetic from the start. People showing up for “corporate training” on a Saturday morning aren’t always all that fired up, but this group arrived fully charged: when Chris called for order at 9:00am on Saturday morning, the buzz of conversation was so thick he felt as if he were interrupting an open bar cocktail party.
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Come see Alan Shalloway talk about Lean-Agile tonight

Tonight we’re hosting a “special edition” of the Agile Managers’ Support Group, featuring Net Objectives founder and CEO Alan Shalloway, author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design, Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams, and Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility.

The topic will be Lean-Agile for Managers: “Management has long seemed to be the forgotten aspect of Lean-Agile organizations. Many in the agile community even talk about protecting their teams from management. This seminar discusses how management is an essential aspect of any lean-agile transition that involves more than just a couple of teams.”

All this and free pizza! RSVP here.

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