Comments for The Agile Forest

Comment on Purpose Driven Versus Opportunistic Agile Coaching by Ian G

Ian G — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 05:28:39 +0000

Why does it have to be Purpose or Opportunistic coaching, couldn’t you do both? Many people advocate a Contingent Leadership style based upon flexing the appraoch to meet the needs of the monent but doing that within an overall guiding framework or direction. Moss Beth Kanter, the organisational academic talks about Teachable Moments as a way keeping Leaders open to opportunities to develop their staff that occur randomly. Its not that far from the appraoch Andrew mentions.

Comment on Short cut for hiring the right type of leader? by Ian G

Ian G — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 04:22:03 +0000

I agree with Erwin, the question could have the opposite effect and attract someone who would enjoy the challenge of changing that organisation. Some organisations also work on the premises that interviews should be challenging and hard so that people who lack persistence don’t get through, McKinsey is one organisation like this that springs to mind.

Comment on Short cut for hiring the right type of leader? by Erwin van der Koogh (@evanderkoogh)

Erwin van der Koogh (@evanderkoogh) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:44:27 +0000

It also wouldn’t work as an interview question.
I was asked exactly this question for an IT manager position. A department of 30 lazy, unmotivated developers who did whatever they damn well pleased. They needed a strong leader to set the vision and get people to follow it. Someone that wasn’t afraid to make difficult choices and do whatever was necessary to get the IT department back on track.

I said yes immediately. Would have been a great challenge. It wasn’t of course about changing all the developers, but the mindset of management of the company.
Too bad in the end they did choose a ‘real’ hardliner

Comment on Short cut for hiring the right type of leader? by Renee Troughton

Renee Troughton — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 10:52:24 +0000

Good point Robert.

Comment on Short cut for hiring the right type of leader? by Robert Watkins

Robert Watkins — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 07:54:07 +0000

No. An Agile leader wouldn’t want to work for an organisation that played that sort of game in the interview process.

Comment on Sprint 0: The Goal, Activities and the Term by Vin D'Amico

Vin D'Amico — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:29:05 +0000

Excellent post! I’ve written about sprint zero too. I think it makes the most sense in enterprise environments. Large, complex problems need additional up-front analysis and definition. Diving in too soon results in lots of refactoring or worse, throw-away code.

It’s not just about delivering production software. The software we deliver needs to have staying power. It needs to survive until the final release. If you’re doing too much refactoring, you’re on the path to failure.

Comment on Sprint 0: The Goal, Activities and the Term by postagilist

postagilist — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:18:48 +0000

When I started out, software was an R&D process.

Research and Development.

A “sprint 0″ is research…. and there should be plenty of it.

Modern software development in general, and scrum in particular, is far too focussed on D, D, D and little to no R.

Doing the right R can help with the D quite a bit.

We need more research, prototyping, analysis, etc, up front — people who deny that are simply impulsive and not well rounded.

We really need to move to prototyping — not potentially shipping things. Once the requirements have been narrowed down then you can start worry about making the features that survive the prototyping process (eg are wanted) into production level code.

Making the prototype be potentially shippable from the onset is madness.

Comment on Sprint 0: The Goal, Activities and the Term by Tom Howlett

Tom Howlett — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:27:23 +0000

In my experience you don’t really find out what you need to enable delivery until you try to do it and the idea of a Sprint 0 by any name makes me very uncomfortable. Surely the purpose of your first sprint should be to deliver something, however small. Most of that first sprint might be spent removing the initial impediments to delivery and hopefully learning about each others needs on your cross functional team, but at least you start with the same purpose as every other sprint, to deliver some value to the customer, rather than guessing what you will need to enable that.

Comment on Purpose Driven Versus Opportunistic Agile Coaching by Andrew Rusling

Andrew Rusling — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 08:43:13 +0000

In my most recent role, I was able to achieve a good mix of the two approaches.

Working with the management team, we would identified a team or group or practice that needed my focused attention. This would receive most of my attention (Purpose Driven).

However I was never expected to put everything I had into the Purpose Driven item. This allowed me to observe other teams, people, etc and to spot issues that needed addressing. I could apply Opportunistic Coaching when the time was right.

Sometimes the items that I identified in an Opportunistic way, changed to be my main focus.

This approach, closely matches my preferred working style. Strong Focus in one area to deliver solid results. However keeping my eyes open to other opportunities. I suspect I would feel a bit constrained if I had to work purely in a Purpose Driven Approach.

Comment on A quick reflection on Agile Australia 2011 by Agile Australia June 2011 | The Agile Revolution

Agile Australia June 2011 | The Agile Revolution — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 01:02:44 +0000

[...] you can checkout Renee’s blog of the event and Craig’s at day 1 and day [...]