We would appreciate any feedback you have.

To all local Colorado agile practitioners and colleagues, CU Boulder is sponsoring a talk by Lee Devin and Robert Austin, authors of "Artful Making". If you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it as a non-techie understanding of teamwork and agility. If you have, but have not had the pleasure of hearing them speak - you will not be disappointed. I have provided the details below...

The University of Colorado at Boulder

Here is a Linked In Event Link... http://events.linkedin.com/Free-Presentation-Theatre-Rehearsal/pub/159767

Trail Ridge Consulting is introducing a new service: The Leadership Agility 360™ Assessment. 

Leadership agility is now considered by many to be the “master competency” needed to make wise decisions and take effective action amid complex and rapidly changing conditions. The Leadership Agility 360™, developed in partnership with ChangeWise and Cambria Consulting, is the first extensively researched online feedback tool to assess a manager’s level of leadership agility.

Based on the award-winning book, Leadership Agility, by ChangeWise principals Bill Joiner and Steven Josephs, The Leadership Agility 360 evaluates a manager’s level of agility in leading organizational change, improving team performance, and engaging in productive business conversations. Their in-depth research has shown that, in today’s turbulent economy, increased agility is the key to sustained effectiveness in all three of these key leadership arenas.

Read more about the program or download a brochure.

August 2009, Ed Scanlan, CEO of Total Attorneys

What is culture? One of our clients - Total Attorneys CEO
Ed Scanlan doesn't bother defining it. And yet, he calls
culture "the bedrock" of his business. Whatever it is, it's
working; seven years after its founding, Total Attorneys
will crack $30 million in revenue. Take a close look at the
video - see Scrum as a core element of his high-performing
team culture.

Click the picture or play button to watch the video

Graebel (a Trail Ridge client) has started an Enterprise Agile IT Blog discussing their agile transition, approach, architecture, development practices and more. Multiple roles within their organization are contributing to the blog which keeps the content diverse and fresh. I encourage you to check out their postings and set up an RSS link.

http://enterpriseagile.wordpress.com/

Ants were once thought to be specialists - being born with DNA set up for a specific chore in the ant colony. Recently, however, researchers have discovered that ants are actually generalists and can perform any task in the colony. However, they typically perform one task at a time to increase efficiency through less task switching.

"A rainbow-hued experiment from the University of Arizona proves that ants aren’t the one-career workers we thought they were. Here, rock ants dedicate all their energy to caring for their limbless larvae. Scientists once believed this type of job specialization was hardwired into each ant—that is, individual ants were capable of doing only one job—and specialization was the key to their efficiency. Having certain individuals serve exclusively as nurses, nest builders or foragers earned ant colonies the title “superorganism.” But biologist Anna Dornhaus color-coded 1,200 ants using paint to identify individuals and set them on various tasks. “It turns out,” she says, “each individual ant seems to be equally good at every job.” Instead, colonies may increase efficiency by saving in “switching costs,” the time it takes a worker to physically move from one task to another." - from popsci.com

Working on a Scrum team we often discuss the benefits and tradeoffs of generalization vs. specialization. Scrum teams that have versatile members - those that are deep in some areas, but are flexible and capable to assist other areas less aligned with their specialty are more productive than teams of specialists.

The other benefit of Scrum is the reduction of task switching through more direct focus of the entire team within a Sprint. The costs of task switching have been well documented, but this provides yet another case of nature avoiding the practice.

Thanks to Stacia Broderick for identifying this article.

• Death by Scrum Meeting on Tuesday @ 11AM
• Agile Leadership on Wednesday @ 4PM

While conferences in general have been down in attendance this year due to the economy, this is still the most comprehensive agile conferences available and a must see for any new or old agile practitioners.

I have been presenting the Death by Scrum Meeting session in a number of settings this year and one thing sticks out - companies have a difficult time with Scrum meetings. Come find out some of the principles behind Scrum and some awesome facilitation techniques to achieve effective and efficient Scrum meetings at the same time improving your team ownership, commitment, accountability and discipline - sounds too good to be true.

4th Annual State of Agile Development Survey - August 2009 by VersionOne

VersionOne has launched the 4th Annual State of Agile Survey and would love your help to get the word out. Last year they had over 3,000 respondents from over 80 countries and want to blow those numbers out of the water this year. Below are links you can post on your website, blog, Twitter, newsletters, email, tattoo on your forehead…you get the picture.

And while you're at it, don't forget to take the survey yourself!

Survey Link: http://surveys.versionone.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1299357&ext_ref=420
Shortened URL: http://bit.ly/AgileSurvey

Henrick Kniberg does a good job in presenting the differences between Kanban vs Scrum in this presentation at Deep Lean in Stockholm earlier this year.

Key similarities - both are empirical processes, have few ceremonies, limit work in process.

Key differences - Scrum prescribes team roles and a sprint structure.

While it is nice to know the differences, it is better to know why they are different and how they get applied in organizations - here is what I see...

I read this comic last week and found it to be quite representative of what I see in most functional organizations.

While a functional organization reduces complexity to work on only a part of your pipeline, it sure does provide ample opportunities for skirting responsibility, blaming others and generally building trust voids within the organization.

One of the first, and often initially most skeptical, changes that I put in place within an organization is the concept of cross-functional team. But beyond that, a team that is responsible for as much of the pipeline as possible. 

Take for example a new company I provided some initial training and coaching for... They were relatively small with four teams:

1. Search
2. Reporting
3. Front End
4. Other

 Seams harmless. However, their product managers (soon to become product owners) were responsible for only two functions (simplified):

1. supply-side - those that produced content for their business
2. demand-side - those that consumed content from their business

Thus, their product managers were coordinating across four teams to get their work done. Teams had a number of dependencies they needed to manage. This all required project management to coordinate all of the interrelated communication lines.

My recommendation was simple - create supply-side and demand-side teams, align them with the product owners and give them responsibility over the pipeline. Well, after much skepticism, vocal "buts", and much discussion, the organization has decided to restructure around this premise. Many of the "buts" are real and will require some changes to the way people work on a team and the technology they work on at times. This is not easy to do, but once teams make this transition - it is amazing to see the teamwork evolve!

Now, this is a relatively simple example, but serves to underscore the fundamental problem - and that problem gets worse the larger the organization is. Yet, it is this very same change that has made larger case studies like Salesforce.com, JDA Software and others successful.

I am fortunate to have worked (and continue to work) with many excellent companies that have come to know, live and breath agility. This year, two of them are speaking at the Agile 2009 Conference in Chicago.

Salesforce.com has been well played on the public scene over the past two years, but this year we have a couple of new topics to explore from Catherine Connor and Eric Babinet. I highly recommend their talks from the experience they have had in growing their agility practice from just over 200 people in 2007 to well over 800 today! That includes agile transitions for IT and Technical Operations in addition to the growth in Research and Development.

• How Product Management Must Change to Enable the Agile Enterprise by Catherine Connor
• Improving the Quality of Your Dialogs - Eric Babinet

• The Amazing Team Race – A Team-Based Agile Adoption by Gabino Roche and Belkis Vasquez
• Scrum 911! Using Scrum to Overhaul a Support Organization by Bhaven Sheth

If you are back visiting the Trail Ridge Consulting Website, you may have noticed a difference. We recently converted the website from standard HTML to Joomla - a content management platform.

Joomla provides us much more ease in creating, displaying and updating content on our website - an important element for us. In essense, it allows us to be more agile. And while much of the content was ported over directly from the old website, you can find some new or updated content in the training and presentations areas. We will continue to migrate and update content as we go forward.

You can follow Pete on Twitter @petebehrens

Hope to see you there.

By Alan Ruth, Director of Technologies for Graebel (a Trail Ridge client)
Note: This is part of a Graebel blog series which is collected under the Agile Journey category.

 Prelude

In the last post Let there be light! I described how a past project failure and some of its circumstances served as fertile ground upon which the seeds of agile could be sown and nurtured. I examined how the 4 core elements of the Agile Manifesto were relevant to the circumstances experienced on that project. Yet it wasn’t until I joined Graebel in 2005 as the Director of Web Technologies that I was in a position to apply agile software development methodologies within a development context.

Note: We partnered with Pete Behrens of Trail Ridge Consulting to mentor us through our agile adoption and implementation. His expertise and efforts were invaluable throughout the fits & starts we experienced during our pilot project.

Pete will be presenting @ Agile Denver on April 27, 2009.
His topic will be: Death by Scrum Meeting

This is a new seminar series on Scrum exploring often challenging aspects of applying Scrum. Meetings are typically cited as one of the most wasteful activities in a business day - yet Scrum demands more meetings more frequently. Teams are finding themselves micro-managed with little time left to get "real" work done.

This session provides ScrumMasters (and other organizational leaders) four key techniques for leading focused, timeboxed, effective and highly-participatory Scrum meetings which drive a collaborative and a self-organizing culture.

Come trade your Scrum and Agile wisdom with other practitioners at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando this March 2009.

Pete will be presenting Death by Scrum Meeting - a happy topic - about the often found corporate wasteland of meetings, meetings, and more meetings brought on by Scrum. 

Of course, the Scrum Gathering is more than just Pete, there will be hundreds of your closest peers who are also challenged by the simple but difficult practice of Scrum. And this year we will have a special treat at the Gathering as we welcome the President of the PMI (that's the Project Management Institute for those that were unaware), and also joined by some new famous Certified Scrum Trainers - Ron Jeffries, Alistar Cockburn, and James Coplien. Each of them have a number of books under their belt and have decided to join forces with the Scrum Alliance.

By Sandra VanWyk-Fancher, Vice President of Operations at Geonetric

You’re a born Project Manager: you love lists, you live to organize and plan, and you enjoy evaluating risks and alternatives.  Even the family holiday dinner brings out assignments and due dates. 

So when the environment changes and there are new rules to being a successful Project Manager, how do you adapt?  The number of professionally trained PMs keeps growing, yet our project success rate remains the same. We need to rethink our approach.  If we can’t adapt to increasing complex projects, we will fail. 

The changing project landscape calls for alternatives beyond the traditional Waterfall approach. One promising alternative is Agile Project Management.  I recently attended a PMI class that taught us “old timers” how to adapt to innovative processes.

The most significant change is that Agile Project Management is just that: agile, non-rigid, flexible (does that scream scope creep?).  There is value in both the Waterfall and Agile methodologies, and knowing when to use which method is a key to success.