Category Archives: teams

5 Reasons Scrum Helps Teams Become High-Performing Faster

Scrum masters and product owners know how hard it is to get their team to become high-performing. They can rest assured that they’re on the right track. Scrum helps teams become high-performing faster than other work methods. The reason is simple. Becoming high-performing is baked into the scrum recipe. In my experience coaching agile teams, I have observed over and over that teams that use scrum go from forming, storming, norming and ultimately to high-performing more quickly and reliably than teams that don’t. Here are five reasons why:
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Agile in California with QA in China?

After visiting a start-up that is adopting scrum, I received the following email from “B” and I’d like to share the answer here. As you will see, they are trying to be more agile, and wondering how to deal with their remote quality assurance team.

Hi, Chris,

Great agile session today. I learned a lot from you. Here are my two questions:
What is the impact of agile to the remote team? We have an outsourced QA team in China.
For the QA testing, how often should developers deliver a stable build to QA for testing?
Thanks,

B.

With part of the team in California and part in China, the biggest source of trouble will be communication. Of course, this is true even if you are not trying to work in an agile way.
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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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Performance Review Pain Relief – The Agile Way

Performance Review Pain ReliefTake a piece of yellow paper, a slice of pizza, and a couple of guys with clipboards – and what do you have?

Last week – it was the latest gathering of the North Bay Agile Meetup group. The topic was “Performance Review Pain Relief.” So what would you do with that piece of paper –- write a performance review –- or make an airplane? At this Meetup –- we did both.

Led by Chris Sims of Agile Learning Labs and Harold Shinsanto –- we formed agile teams of expert paper airplane manufacturers. And in the course of producing some of the most embarrassing paper airplanes in aeronautical history –- the group explored what works and doesn’t work with performance reviews.
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5 Agile Ways to Rock the Boat with Eric Ries

Eric Ries Interview by Lara Druyan at Hackers and Founders, July 2011According to Eric Ries, another way to say “agile” is “extreme troublemaker.” If you think you know what’s given, constant, and unchangeable — think again.

In an interview with Lara Druyan at a recent Silicon Valley gathering hosted by 106 Miles and Hackers & Founders — Eric poked holes in the foundation of entrepreneurial sense and sensibility we all “know” so well.

From his interview, my favorite five agile ways to rock the boat of status quo are:
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Totem Poles, !Kung bushmen, the Love Economy, and you

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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Does your office have a “living” room?

Our Conference Room

Agile Learning Labs started out as a home office, but as we’ve grown, I’d have to say that it has evolved into what I can only call an office home. Having started out with Chris and I occupying a two-desk office in what used to be a den, our workspace has now taken over the entire downstairs of the house, and we have several delightful people who join us here every day (some in person, some via web cam). I’m the resident interior designer, and when I first started laying out our expanded workspace, I envisioned a sea of desks and conference tables. But then during one of our company retrospectives, which we had been holding in our living room, I noticed how well everyone responded to getting to walk away from desks, phones and computers and sit in comfy armchairs while having a lively conversation in a humanistic setting, the way people do when they are just socializing. So I polled everyone, and it was unanimous: the sea of desks could take over the dining room, and any other available space, but the living room was a vital part of our office, the place for reflection and communication, and it would stay.
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What Does Your Team Need? Girl Power!

By Hillary Johnson

Last weekend, Chris and I attended a marvelous event called Dare 2B Digital, aimed at addressing the gender gap in computer science careers, and at which 7th through 10th grade girls got to play at writing code, crafting business plans, and other techie things.

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InfoQ: Estimating Business Value

Chris' lastest InfoQ article surveys several other writers' methods for bringing business value to bear on Agile Estimation. Pascal Van Cauwenberghe points out, usefully, that Agile estimation techniques that put the user story first may be putting the cart 10 or 15 degrees askew of the horse: "Pascal proposes that a better starting point is with the question: 'How do we find the User Stories that deliver the Business Values?'" My favorite, however, is Brandon Carlson’s application of Thin Slicing, a concept he discovered while reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Carlson writes:

The book cites an example of how doctors at Cook County Hospital improved patient care and throughput using the technique. I thought to myself, if doctors at Cook County Hospital can use a small subset of relevant attributes to effectively prioritize patients in life or death situations such as an ER, it could certainly be applied to even more important decisions such as the prioritization of features, right?

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What Makes Distributed Agile Teams Succeed – At Agile2008

Greetings from Agile2008 in Toronto! To say that I have been overwhelmed by the conference would be an understatement. With 1600+ agile folks here, I am constantly running into old friends, people that I met at previous conferences, and my agile heros. The sheer volume of knowledge and expertise that is being shared is beyond my ability to describe. Wow!

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