Hard Work & Natural Talent Mean Nothing without Leadership Support

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For the final article in this series, I’m going to expand on the athlete metaphor to illustrate the vital importance that leadership support plays to ensure optimal athlete and team performance over long, arduous initiatives.

There are few things tougher than the Comrades ultra marathon. The Comrades Marathon is by far the largest and most prestigious ultra marathon in the world. Every year, approximately 20,000 aspirant runners aim to complete 90 very hilly kilometres (56 miles) between Durban and Pietermaritzburg in under 12 hours. If you achieve a Top 10 finish at Comrades, you earn a coveted Gold medal.

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Written Documentation is a Terrible Way to Communicate

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I recently presented a talk called “Back to the Feature” at the South African Scrum User Group (SUGSA) conference. The talk playfully references aspects of the Back to the Future trilogy to illustrate how business analysis can be done effectively in an agile environment. This article focusses on one specific topic I covered during the presentation – that written documentation is one of the worst ways to communicate with other humans*.

* And no, the irony of writing a detailed blog post about how poor written documentation is at communicating information is not lost on me!

The first Back to the Future movie concludes with Doc telling Marty, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!” I paraphrase this iconic movie quote as, “Written documentation? With what we’re building, we don’t need (much) written documentation!”

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A weekend in New York explains PI Objectives

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As a first-time visitor to New York, I was faced with limitless tourist opportunities but had a finite period of time – just 48 hours – in which to accomplish everything. With an infinite backlog of exciting experiences and countless possibilities, demand far exceeded supply. Sound familiar? This is a challenge faced by all agile teams.

I had just attended the Scaled Agile (SAFe) Summit in Denver and was making the most of my carbon footprint by facilitating some workshops with our New York team the following week. I decided to practice what I preach as an agile coach (and applied some of what I learned at the SAFe Summit) by setting myself some TI (Tourist Increment) objectives for my weekend in New York.

It’s a sad day when a bald eagle has more hair than you. I enjoyed the SAFe Summit and got to apply some of what I’d learned during my first weekend in New York.

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A Behavioural Science Experiment to get Leaders to Complete an Agile Maturity Assessment

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When it comes to behavioural science, I am an enthusiastic amateur. I guess the same could be said for my marathon running infatuation which, although prolific with over 250 completed, is still firmly footed in the ‘recreational amateur’ category. My payslip reads ‘Agile Coach’ so I’d like to think that I’ve managed to breach the amateur category in my chosen career (but you might need to check with my colleagues to confirm whether I do indeed qualify as a professional). It’s not often that running, behavioural science and agile coaching intersect but recently they did, so I decided to use the opportunity to run an experiment and this is what happened. Continue reading “A Behavioural Science Experiment to get Leaders to Complete an Agile Maturity Assessment”

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The immediate impact of Scrum Masters (and how reducing committed work leads to more delivery)

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  1. How important is a Scrum Master to a team?
  2. Can an experienced Scrum Master with no domain knowledge have an immediate impact on a team?
  3. How important are realistic sprint commitments?

Here’s a quick article answering all the above questions. Spoiler alert: The short answers are (1) Very, (2) Yes and (3) Very. Continue reading “The immediate impact of Scrum Masters (and how reducing committed work leads to more delivery)”

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The Power of Decentralised Decision-Making (and how this helps create high performing teams)

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This article uses a department’s entertainment budget as a simple way to explain how the principle of decentralised decision-making should be applied at the team level. What’s more, you can expect teams to communicate and function better when it’s applied correctly.

Traditional “Project Cost Accounting” Scenario

Each department is allocated an ‘Entertainment Budget’, usually this is calculated as a Rand amount per staff member, e.g. R1,000 per staff member for a 200 person team which equals R200,000 to spend on entertainment for the year. Continue reading “The Power of Decentralised Decision-Making (and how this helps create high performing teams)”

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Every Feature Needs a Hypothesis

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In this article, I’ll use a simple, easily accessible example feature to show how a feature hypothesis should evolve and how monitoring results can impact our plan and backlog priorities.

I am going to stick with the “Password Reset” example from the previous article in this “Outcomes versus Outputs” series since resetting one’s own password can be applied to almost any website and application. Continue reading “Every Feature Needs a Hypothesis”

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Outcomes: The Forgotten Test Case

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Outcome versus Output

My very simple definition of the difference between output and outcome is:

  • Output is delivering volume
  • Outcome is delivering value

Theoretically, they could be the same but in practice this is seldom the case.

I can create a lot of ‘stuff’ (i.e. output) but realise very little, or even negative, value for all the time and effort spent producing said ‘stuff’. This article provides two practical examples of what normally happens (we focus only the output), why this is a terrible practice and the problems associated with ignoring the outcomes. Continue reading “Outcomes: The Forgotten Test Case”

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Kohavi’s Law & Harry Potter explain why your experience and intuition suck

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Ron Kohavi was the Technical Fellow and VP of the Analysis & Experimentation team at Microsoft. He had a team of brilliant engineers, data scientists and program managers working under him. Kohavi’s team built Microsoft’s “Experimentation Platform.”  Before the Experimentation Platform was in use, Microsoft teams were delivering well-thought out features, some small, others larger multi-month projects. Output was great – and Microsoft products like Bing, Edge, Exchange, Office, Skype, Windows, and Xbox were benefitting from the exceptional work produced.

Or were they?

Continue reading “Kohavi’s Law & Harry Potter explain why your experience and intuition suck”

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