Every time we run an Agile Project Management class we tweak it slightly, based on what we've learned in the last one. Inspect and adapt, as they say… err, I mean, as we say.
“Embrace change to add more value!” and other “aha!”s
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Author Archives: Hillary Louise Johnson
Are you coming to Agile Open California?
Last year, Chris was on the coordinating committee for Agile Open California, a grassroots Open Space conference for and by the local agile development community. This year, the privilege falls on me. I was bit by the Open Space bug last year, and have now been to several. The format lends itself to surfacing all kinds of ideas and expertise, and fostering the kind of feverish engagement that leads people to revolutions in their thinking. If you're a die-hard agilista, or just curious, please do join us this year on October 15 & 16 at Fort Mason, in San Francisco (there's a SoCal sister conference in September). If you register early (as in now), it's a mere $150, which is a pretty good price for guaranteed transcendental enlightenment.
Here's a blog post by David Carlton about a session called I hate Pair Programming that should give you a fair idea of the kind of content to expect. And below are some images to whet your appetite:
Fun & Games: Some upcoming events in SF & the North Bay
Children learn best by playing games, and guess what? Adults do too. No reason your agile practice should be a plodding, dreary affair with all the elan of a queue at the parking violations bureau. Lighten up and have some fun–it'll make you smarter.
Dogs learn agility with tennis balls; so do we
The very first exercise of our two day Agile Project Management class on Monday taught me a few things about optimization. It's a ball passing game, where the group is tasked with devising a system for passing balls around such that every ball is touched by each person, and has "air time" in between–ie, it's tossed, not passed.
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Ruby on Rails for Beginning Brain Surgeons
I've been teaching myself Ruby on Rails of late, and as such am getting a good dose, right here in the Learning Lab, of what it's like to learn something new at the ripe old age of 45. I'd say half our clientele is my age, so this is especially useful data.
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Yes you are comprehensively documenting your agile project–just not in English
If I were re-writing the Agile Manifesto and I wanted to express agile values in terms that spoke positively to the project manager's realm, rather than defining agile in opposition to it, I'd state the third value ("Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation") like this: The best documentation is the product itself.
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If I’m doing Scrumbut, does that make me a Scrumass?
By Hillary Johnson
… or, enough already! Is Agile dead, alive, stagnant, the future, the past, the ultimate, the end, the Will of God? Am I doing it right, wrong, backwards, sideways, on a boat, with a goat? Should I get certified by the Scrum Alliance, or the Scrum Horde? And should I even care?
Agile Games Par-tay! Yes siree…
Think we don't know how to have fun here at Technical Management Institute Agile Learning Labs? Oh yes, we do! We're throwing a wild party on Wednesday, April 29th at Ristretto Roasters in Portland, OR with our pal and test obsessed training partner Elisabeth Hendrickson of Quality Tree Software. It's a warm-up for our day-long class May 1st for Agile coaches and consultants on how to create agile games, but it's also a stand-alone event. There will be coffee, pastries, and the opportunity to have some geeky fun playing Agile learning games with your compatriots. It's free, so come on down!
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Do talentless hacks make the best leaders?
Journalism is a lot like software development (or anything else for that matter) in that it's common practice for top performers to eventually move into management, in large part because that also happens to be the path to financial well-being. The worst editors I've ever worked for, and I've worked for a lot in a 20 year freelance career, were genius writers turned editor. The best editors where those who had experience working as writers, but never felt that role was a good fit. Sometimes they had even failed as writers. As editors, these people appreciated and respected their writers precisely because: 1) they knew how challenging the job was, 2) they were never inclined to think they could do a task better themselves, 3) they didn't perceive themselves as having risen "above" those they managed, but as having taken a different path.
What I learned at Startup Weekend SF: Agility is the state of nature
What's a good mother/son spring break activity? Why, going to Startup Weekend and spending 50 hours building a company with ten total strangers. Perfect because my 17 year-old vastly prefers the company of adults to that of other teenagers, and because he's been on the high school treadmill for so long that I thought it would be nice for him to see what the light at the end of the tunnel might look like–that the world of work can be a rather thrilling place.
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