Goldtaking Notes - Sustainable Pace, Agile India 2012

Here are the audience notes from the GoldTaking Exercise done at Agile India 2012 during the session on "Slowing down to speed up: Encouraging sustainable pace in teams" on 19-Feb-2012.

Final slides are here.

Video from the session:

Group 1: How to motivate team to deliver at sustainable pace

1. Acknowledge the achievements
2. Environment, open culture, celebrate success
3. When things go wrong, personal attacks should be avoided. Learn to internalize and change
4. Celebrate with connection to purpose of work
5. Try adn figure out why team is demoralized and plug the issues
6. Understand the mindset of individuals to understand their de-motivators or motivators. It is possible that coaching will vary from person to person
7. Make team members feel safe and secure to out of demotivation
8. It is good to make mistakes but learn from them. Difference between personal and professional.
9. Over-pampering should be avoided. Put up facts, and be straight-forward
10. Like volleyball, coach should ask for timeouts if required
11.  Practice and preach respect between team members, gain trust
12. Challenge team on collective ownership
13. Team building

Group 2: Tackling Management Interference at Sprint Planning

1. Do not over-commit
2. Rely on velocity and capacity for committing work
3. Scrum Master should facilitate planning and protect team
4. There can be client interference causing pressure on management
5. There is need to adopt new work culture of Agile
6. Lack of clear acceptance criteria upfront during planning
7. Make sure all the stakeholders attend the sprint planning meeting
8. Re-prioritizing of Product backlog by PMs causes disruptions
9. Lack of trust: PM should not commit on behalf of the team at/outside Sprint Planning
10. Development overflows beyond one sprint
1. Plan in a way that this does not happen
2. Estimate for less, specially when team members are shared
11. (Only as much as possible) Accurately estimate/predict the team velocity to know the number of points to take this current sprint
12. Under-commit but over-achieve
13. What should happen if more points need to be delivered to client than what the team can deliver?
1. If the team cannot deliver the points, then team should say "no"

Group 3: Motivation

1. Leaders have to trust. Sustainable pace is a good way of building trust
2. Dan Pink -> Motivation
3. Do you buy into the company objective -> Helps motivate people
4. Behavior that is appreciated, gets respected
5. Stretch goals can help people grow fast
6. Individuals knowing how they are contributing to the bigger picture
7. Exposure to customers: Know about Customer's needs and vision
8. If team values opinion you feel you matter, need to be noticed
9. Appreciation of individuals from external sources over appreciation of teams may demotivate others on the team
1. If the recipient appreciates the team that may help
10. Team finds ways to appreciate/motivate high performers so perhaps no external appreciations needed!?
11. Transparency at all levels is a pre-requisite for motivation
12. Recognize team contribution

Group 4: Ad-Hoc to sustainable pace

1. Experience: Last minute checkins, Slack and work inflow reduction after release
2. Burned down before release, then next sprint gets off to slow-start
3. Why this big-effort before the release? May be things were not really done!
4. Expectations to go faster than you really can go, causes the problem
5. Management push
1. Educate Manager? No, that addresses just one problem
2. You are actually not done if that happens
3. Provide dates to managers that shows the real pace and use that as a basis for planning
6. Improve effectiveness
1. Non-value added requirements, for example paperwork. Have someone else do it - hire a clerk!
2. Identify activities that are taking time and see if they can be reduced to save time
3. Use CI and increased automation to release more often
7. Use scrum prioritization to make hard and real prioritization
8. Avoid "Goldplating" - over-engineering
9. Zero defects to make sure it is really done
10. Piling up work to test at the end of sprint is risky
11. Argument about ability to swarm around stories. Some have seen it happen, some have not
12. Positive experience with testers collaborating with developers (pair) from start. Done=> All test cases targeted => Done
13. How much time to finish a story? 3 days on average, some have minimum 3 days of dev. effort.
14. Tester writes test cases. Developers start developing at the same time they get the test cases

Agile India 2012: Slowing down to Speed up: Encouraging sustainable pace in teams

Will be presenting at Agile India 2012 on Slowing down to Speed up: Encouraging sustainable pace in teams


Find the draft presentation here and feel free to send me your comments!

Here is the description:

We would like solutions delivered fast without compromising quality, user experience, implicit requirements and non-functional aspects such as scalability and performance. This would have been easier, if we had all the time in the universe. Doing this in a sustainable manner becomes a huge challenge for teams as there are multiple competing forces at play and because software development is very complex.
Coaches & Practitioners, participate in this workshop and leave with thoughts that will help your teams adopt and practice sustainable pace, and delight your customers over and over again.

Process/Mechanics

Introduction to the topic, understanding participant expectations - 10 minutes
Achieving sustainable pace - 20 minutes
Workshop briefing and topic selection - 10 minutes : Participants will propose and select topics for deeper discussions Workshop - 30 minutes : Goldtaking (The “Goldtaking” format was introduced by Jan-Erik Sandberg and Lars Skaar at Agile2008 and is a variation of the open space format)
Workshop debrief and discussion - 20 minutes

Learning outcomes

In a highly competitive world, delighting customers is no longer optional. Steve Denning, in his book “The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management”), mentions that the goal of an organization is “Customer Delight”, as opposed to making money for its shareholders. Going by this goal in mind, we will examine how we can use Agile as a means to make our teams and organizations successful.

During this workshop, we will explore:

• Sustainable pace - Importance and challenges:
• How does it result in customer delight?
• How agile values are challenged without sustainable pace?
• What prevents us in delivering at a sustainable pace? (such as competitive surroundings, culture, organization structure, conflicting priorities, old habits, antiquated tools, technical debt)
• How can we coach teams towards sustainable pace?:
• Self realization
• Importance of contextual information
• Understanding and responding to Force fields
• Challenging status quo: Stakeholder alignment and participation
• Building your team into Agile craftsmen, and not Agile mechanics
• Using Data as a vehicle for change
• Inspecting and adapting
• Continued engagement

Agile Coaching and Mentoring: Agile India 2012

Submissions to the stage can be made by creating an account at:
http://submit2012india.agilealliance.org/

“As Agile becomes main-stream, the values laid down by the Agile Manifesto are continuously challenged in different ways during its adoption in different situations. Great coaches help teams and organizations in facing and overcoming these challenges through various learning techniques, so that the issues can be handled effectively. Coaches help teams and organizations embrace agile in its true spirit in order to maximize value that is delivered to the customer.

The Coaching stage presents sessions for people who want to help teams become better at agile software development. We are seeking interactive sessions that explore practical techniques a coach can use with teams. We also want to hear stories from experienced coaches that sharing insights into what works and what to avoid.

As an agile coach and mentor, you will learn about skills and techniques needed to improve team effectiveness so that you can guide your teams towards unleashing their true potential. As an agile team member, you will get a better understanding of different perspectives and techniques for improving team dynamics and create a better work environment. This stage will have multiple sessions, potentially including experience reports, tutorials, talks, workshops and research papers. Through these sessions Coaches, Mentors, Leaders and Team members will enhance their existing toolset and return with real life examples and thought leadership in this area. With these insights, they will be in a better position to apply this knowledge and get great results for their situation.

This stage will cover the following:
• Coaching and Mentoring skills and techniques
• Coaching challenges with people and technology
• Helping teams discover and deal with team dysfunctions
• Coaching in different situations (product development, IT services, consulting, distributed teams, new and mature teams, large and small teams etc.)
• Coaching for the enterprise

Come and learn techniques, listen to the experience of other coaches, and see how you can better support teams in their Agile journey.”
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Coaches Corner
A space for conference participants to freely interact and mingle with Coaches. We will invite Coaches to sign up for this before and at the conference and coordinate with the Open Jam stage.
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Opportunities to contribute:
- Contributing to Coaches Corner (sign up to be a coach on call or when convenient during the event)
- Help the stage evolve (by signing up to update your ideas on the Titan Pad created for the stage: http://agile2012india.titanpad.com/2 )
- Submitting for the stage (http://submit2012india.agilealliance.org/)
- If you would like to be a reviewer, let me know