As a scrum product owner, you are a visionary, representative, editor, and investment manager.
As the team’s visionary, you are the person who knows more than anyone else what this product can, and will be. Just as Michelangelo could see the statue in the stone, you can see your end product in the needs of your users. You know who will use this product, who will buy it, and why.
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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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An extraordinary agilist and friend, Harold Shinsato, captured this video at the release party for our new book “The Elements of Scrum.” My favorite moment is when Hillary explains why they chose not to capitalize scrum and how agile is not a noun. Enjoy!
Agile Open Northwest kicked off this morning, and the whole Agile Learning Labs crew is here. Chris hosted a session called “An Experiential Intro to Agile” in the first time slot. Sixteen folks new to agile gathered and we quickly discovered a common theme: participants were about to join agile teams, but didn’t know what to expect. Out came the rubber balls and we dove into the Self-Organizing Ball game.
The topics that this surfaced included:
It was a lot of fun, and a good start to one of my favorite conferences.
Cheers,
Great leaders motivate people. How? If the people you are trying to motivate are knowledge workers, then the traditional carrot & stick approach isn’t going to be very effective. The research shows that the three big motivators are: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Daniel Pink lays out the science in this entertaining video.
Scrum supports autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy: The team is self organizing, deciding for themselves the best way to get the work done. Mastery: Working iteratively enables continuous improvement. Purpose: meaningful product goals and sprint goals make the work meaningful.
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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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.
Chris, with the Raven-Whale-Eagle team
Chris tweeted a picture of a totem pole this weekend, pointing out (via a link to Wikipedia) that the term “Low person on the totem pole” is a bit misguided–the figures on a totem pole are not, in fact, arranged hierarchically. Wikipedia also points out that the figures aren’t “idols” either. Both concepts, that of hierarchy and that of idol-worship, are but assumptions we bring to what we see.
This got me thinking: if we naturally assume that anything arranged vertically is a hierarchy, and that any figure is an “idol,” what other assumptions are we bringing to the teams we work in?
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These “Aha! Moments” were posted by participants at the recent Creative Edge series workshop “Coaching Agile Teams” with Lyssa Adkins in Foster City, California. Imagine the insights you yourself would have if you joined Lyssa’s next class on Dec 20 & 21 in Boulder, Colorado.
Consensus = convergence
Risk being wrong
Lego’s / bionic intensity value’s tree
Practice being non-judgmental
Anonymous team voting on team values and where we are
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Last night we held a free 2 hour workshop led by David Parker, executive director of the OpenAgile Institute, in which he explained the essence of OpenAgile, one of the newer agile methodologies. I’ll try to summarize what I took away from the evening.
OpenAgile is an open source methodology, meaning that anyone can participate in the process of creating and evolving it. This itself strikes me as a particularly “agile” way of building a methodology, one that embraces the very notion of continuous improvement based on the actual experiences of the people using it.
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