Pragmatic Agilist

Are you a trainer? Are you a facilitator of any kind? Are you a person who hates being shown slides? (If not, please check out this famous PowerPoint rendering of the Gettysburg Address ). I just attended a very amazing two-day training course given by Luke Hohmann of Innovation Games (R).  The games themselves provide wonderful techniques for doing " qualitative market research " (if you're a marketing person) or " requirements gathering " (if you're a software developer).  You must try them, you must!  Check out the web site, buy the book, license the online tools, and use these techniques.  They are fabulous. But as veteran qualitative researchers would tell you, the most interesting part of what I learned (and that's saying a lot) was from the medium, not the message.  The course was taught 100% PowerPoint free.  In fact, there was no projector.  It was the most devious and marvelously designed way to coax learning out of an group of adults...

I was startled to discover "story maps" a couple of months ago as an alternative to, or supporting documentation for, the "product backlog" or "master story list" (depending on whether you're Scrum flavored or XP flavored).  The maps should not have been a surprise to me:  it turns out a lot of the really cool agile teams are creating multi-dimensional "story maps" as part of their project inception.  In case some of you weren't aware of the story maps either, I just wanted to alert you before another day passes, and point you towards some help on the topic.   For the rest of you, why didn't you tell me??! Jeff Patton posted this excellent overview of story maps versus backlogs in 2008, and as he says, this technique had already been used on the ground by a number of agilists other than himself for several years before that.  And responders to his post identified the story map as something akin to an old fashioned functional breakd...

I read a really thought-provoking article from the Financial Post this week which was somewhat misleadingly titled " Innovation:  Group Dynamics Can Stifle a Great Idea ." I have to admit, I jumped right on this article, because in the Dark Days before I met Agile, I was one of those people (as perhaps you were) who always hated being forced to "work in teams."  Even today, I feel a slight twinge of fear when a speaker asks an assembly to "discuss [an idea] at your table," knowing this might be followed by a very awkward moment later on when some poor soul in each group will be forced to extemporaneously report on (or perhaps invent) it's "findings."  Perhaps some of you still fight off Fear of the Wisdom of Crowds sometimes too? Of course the article does not actually say that "Group Dynamics" stifle "Great Ideas."  Instead, it points to research at Wharton which found that a group was best empowered to develop a g...

When I introduce friends to agile software development, the concept which stops them dead in their tracks is not "value points," "test driven development," or even "continuous delivery."  The seriously challenging concept is...trust. Don't try this...ever. Agile lives and dies on trust, but trust is a commodity in short supply in many of our work places.  Why do we value contracts over collaboration?  Because we want to know who to blame when (not if) the project goes south, that's why, and we want to be able to sue them, fire them, or at least hold them up for public humiliation. So how do you turn on the trust spigot, the wellspring for all actual returns on your agile investment dollar?  I will confide a little known secret to you.  People do not owe you their trust.  That thing where you allow your lower lip to quiver when people don't immediately jump to support your far-fetched organizational transformation idea?  Or the thing wh...

It turns out the famous Francis Bacon phrase, "knowledge is power," doesn't actually appear in any Francis Bacon work.  According to our mutual best friend, Wikipedia , "The closest expression in Bacon's works is 'Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.'" Which just goes to show you that, once again, hearsay gets it a little bit wrong. Scalable communication is tricky, and not least because people are conservative about letting too many people have access to too many facts.  Witness the current controversies over " internet freedom, " spurred by the wikileaks events, or the Egyptian government's recent move to completely shut down the internet in that country.    But bringing this down to a level or two below that of national security, let's t...