Introduction

I got into agile development during the late 90s when I read Kent Beck’s book about extreme programming (XP). It was mostly the technical aspects of XP that attracted me; I liked test driven development and continuous integration and I understood the benefit of continuously reviewing the code by doing pair programming. It took some time for me to turn my attention to what I mainly focus on today, and what I see is a cornerstone of agile, teamwork. Product development is in most cases a complex endeavor where you need a high level of collaboration and teamwork to reach required outcome. To succeed you have to make sure the participants build on each others strength and knowledge, and where they see differences as something valuable and important. But it is not certain that all working groups ends up as a true team. As a team coach you need to pay attention to building the team at the beginning. This post will describe a few tools that I have used in order to form teams.

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This is basically a 1 day product ownership course compressed into a 15 minute animated presentation.

Over a million views! Some call it “The best 15 minutes on the Internet” 🙂

There’s obviously more to product ownership than this, so see this is a high level summary.

• Here’s the complete drawing (.png format)
• Here’s a downloadable version of the video, in case you don’t want to stream (.mov format, 90 Mb)

Special thanks to Alistair Cockburn, Tom & Mary Poppendieck, Jeff Patton, Ron Jeffries, Jeff Sutherland, and Michael Dubakov for providing many of the models, metaphors, and ideas that I use in this presentation.

Translations: (see also the translation guide by Cédric Chevalerias)

• Chinese – simplified (subtitles)
• Chinese – traditional (subtitles)
• French(subtitles)
• French (voice)
• German (subtitles)
• German(voice)
• Italian (voice)
• Japanese (subtitles)
• Polish (voice)
• Portuguese – Portugal (voice)
• Portuguese – Brazil (voice)
• Russian (voice)
• Spanish (subtitles)

Below is a full transcript in english. But I recommend watching the video instead of reading the transcript. The video is 100% visual, the transcript is 0% visual…

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Building a well-functioning software delivery team is complicated. There are many factors to consider. Current team (if any), needed skills, available people, company politics etc.

There are some fundamentals that often (but not always) seem to work.

My fundamental principles for teams

• Static
• Cross-functional
• 5-9 people
• Co-located
• Dedicated team members (belong to only one team)

I find these principles to be a useful basis for discussion, when helping managers configure their teams.

The principles are goals, and one must realize that all cannot be achieved all of the time, nor instantly.

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For the past couple of years I’ve had to work with Jira. Really, it’s mostly been dreading working with Jira. At both projects I’ve had Greenhopper available, and that hasn’t really made things better. My frustrations have had to do with the complexity of setting up the right fields, to creating a new sprint to creating a new project, down to mundane things like problems with ranking. I don’t particularly enjoy spending hours just tidying up my data. I want to quickly organize so I have time to actually work. I also want to easily see how much work we’ve done, and how much we have to do. Cards and a physical board are great for this, but I end up with stacks of cards everywhere, and after several sprints I don’t know what to do with them anymore. Enter Trello!Continue reading

Lite i skymundan pågår något av en revolution inifrån i IT-branschen, och då särskilt i företag med många programmerare. På gräsrotskonferenser, i nätfora och i management-litteratur äger vår tids kanske mest avancerade och levande diskussion om hur man bäst organiserar arbete rum. Om det skriver jag i en längre essä om hur programmerarna visar vägen

Here are the slides for my third(!) keynote at Agile Eastern Europe. The guy who was supposed to do the afternoon keynote couldn’t make it, so I was invited to jump up and do another one (talked about Spotify, but I don’t yet have permission to publish those slides, sorry). And then that one finished early, so I filled in the last 20 minutes with this short talk about Agile @ Home. Three keynotes in one day must be some kind of record 🙂

Thanks for listening, and glad to see that so many of you were so excited about the idea of using Agile outside of work 🙂

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Here are the slides for my keynote “Lean from the Trenches” at Agile Eastern Europe, Kiev. And here is the book/ebook, in case you want more details. Thanks for attending!

In April this year we had Christopher Avery at Crisp giving his two days workshop Creating Result Based Teams. I read Christopher’s book about creating effective teams a few years ago which I found very inspiring and it was loaded with a lot of wisdom about working with teams. I was therefore very excited to

Septembernumret för tidskriften Personal och ledarskap har utvecklingssamtal som tema. Tidskriften är medlemstidning för Sveriges HR-förening och Sveriges ledande tidskrift inom personal och human resources. Inför numret blev jag intervjuad om den frågan eftersom jag som utvecklingschef på Atex Polopoly lade ner utvecklingssamtalen.

Artikeln finns här, men man måste man vara medlem för att komma åt den.

Eftersom texten är lite svår att komma åt bjuder jag på ett par citat från den, som inleds med ingressen:

Peter Antman, konsult på Crisp kallar utvecklingssamtal för ”Tjänstemännens tidsstudieman”. Som utvecklingschef tog han ett drastiskt grepp – och lade ner utvecklingssamtalet.

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On Tuesday Oct 2 Alistair Cockburn and I are hosting a free evening event at Crisp. I’ll be talking a bit about my current client Spotify, which has a cool scaling approach with “tribes”, “squads”, “guilds”, and “chapters”. Then Alistair will talk about whatever topic the participants choose. Then we’ll have discussions and finger food. Feel free to

Here’s an interview by InfoQ. I talked about my books, my travels, the agile manifesto translation project, coaching coaches, agile trends, and various other stuff. The interviewer (Craig Smith) had a great set of questions, and I’m pretty happy with my answers 🙂

I had recently a conversation with a business partner of mine, Erik Andrén at Macmann Berg. We were working on the material for the next workshop in a leadership program we have at a client. This time the workshop was about coaching, both in general terms but also from an agile perspective. Erik has a background as a therapist but is nowadays working as an organization and management consultant. At our meeting he described his view about coaching based on a therapy model he had used as a therapist, and we then had  a very interesting discussion about the model and the connection to continuous improvement of teams and organizations. This post discuss this connection since I believe we have a lot to learn from how therapists approaches patients when trying to help them create a better life for themselves.

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On Oct 1-2 Alistair Cockburn is in Stockholm teaching Advanced Agile together with me. He has been here twice before and course reviews have been great! Alistair has a very pragmatic down-to-earth style, while maintaining the theoretical depth needed for an advanced course. He’s not only a Fun Guy, he’s the guy who (literally) wrote

Here are the slides from my Ale2012 keynote: Everybody wants Change – but nobody likes to Be Changed.

Thanks for coming!

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Here’s my default approach to problem solving and organizational change. Basically a light-weight version of the A3 problem solving approach and Toyota Kata.

(BTW my keynote at ALE2012 next week is on a similar topic: “Everybody wants Change, but nobody likes to Be Changed”)

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Here are the slides for my talk “Lean from the Trenches” at Agile2012. And here is the book/ebook, in case you want more details (unfortunately sold out in the conference bookstore). Thanks for attending!

För ett halvt decennium sedan när jag skulle börja som utvecklingschef på Polopoly kände jag att jag behövde ett verktyg som hjälpte mig att sammanfatta andemeningen och de praktiska konsekvenserna av Agile, Scrum, XP och Lean. Var och en av dessa innehåller en rad – i viss mån överlappande – begrep, som är tydliga och om man kan dem inte så svåra att förklara – om man har många timmar på sig. Men hur minns man hela denna komplexa väv? Hur kan man uttrycka den enkelt, snabbt och koncist?

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Sunshine. Over 35 adults and 15 kids milling about, playing and socializing. Some down by the beach eating snacks and windsurfing. Work going on in the background: Pototoes being boiled, tables being set, drinks brought out, BBQ lit. Nobody is giving orders, things are just happening. Looks rather chaotic. But then at 16:30, precisely on

Here are annotated slides from my lighting talk Agile@Home at Agila Sverige 2012. Have you tried a BBQ board? Or a travel spike? Or a homework burnup chart? How about Limiting WIP in the kitchen, or the closet? How about agile party planning? There are plenty of ways that Agile and Lean practices and ideas

Today at Crisp, we had a short discussion about effective meetings where I described what I think are needed in order to have successful meetings. Meetings, like work meetings, are used to produce some kind of result, achieve a agreed on decision or solve a problem. The discussion got me thinking about how often we are overloaded with meetings where many of them give little value back to the project and organization.

Paul Graham describes two different schedules, the manager and the makers schedule, where the former is run by managers working through the day participating in a lot of different meetings, and the latter is run by the workers, the developers and project participants, working through the day developing new versions of the product they are accountable for producing. These two schedules have their place in an organization, but we may get in trouble when the two schedules meet each other, which they do now and then during a normal working day.

Meetings cost quite a lot, and it is often not obvious for the managers working under the manager schedule how big that cost really is. I believe we need some kind of structure, an agreement between the meeting participants and the organizer of what they need to prepare and do before the meeting, in order to guarantee that it will be as efficient as possible. This to ensure that the organization get some kind of ROI from having the meeting.

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I am currently working as a Scrum Master for multiple teams at Projectplace in Stockholm, Sweden. One of those teams is the Mobile Team. They are developing Action Boards for both iOS (iPad) and Android platforms. These Action Boards are also available in the Customer Preview of the Projectplace web service. Both Web Team and Mobile Team share the same API’s. The iPad app is planned to be released in 2-3 Sprints from now.
This case study can be written from many perspectives, but in this article I am going to focus on how we are working with the challenges of having a distributed Scrum team.

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Great retrospectives are amazing, they have a way of really getting a team to work together and to energize them ahead of a new challenge. But even a great retrospective becomes boring and routine after a while. Luckily, there are a lot of us at Crisp working with different teams, so we got together this evening for a peer to peer exchange about retrospectives. We each got to pitch retrospective exercises and games that we’d like to try, or that we wanted to share. We ended up discussing and trying out 9 of them. Here’s a summary  in case you’d like to try some of them out at your next retrospective!

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Most companies today uses differentiated salaries for their employees. This is something that is in general considered to be the way it must be; the companies needs the system in order to attract and keep talent employees to secure future profits for the business. This was also my belief until a few years ago; I thought that companies should pay more to the ones that produce more value to the business. Even if I saw cases where I thought people got too big salary increases and others too low at the annual salary review, I believed that in the long run the salaries would reflect the true values of each employee.

But during the last few years I have started to think differently. I do not believe in differentiated salaries any more, at least not for knowledge work like product development. There is too much evidence that the system you need to have in order to enable salary reviews each year, is impeding the progress of the business and lowers its result and profit. Knowledge work is based around motivated employees that have the support and environment they need to be creative during their daily work. Appraisals system, which is needed to implement differentiated salaries, is demotivating for the employees instead, and is therefore working against the high performance of the organization. Also, differentiated salaries is created under the belief that it is external motivations that drive people to be high performers, but as Pink describes in his book, Drive, it is autonomy, mastery and purpose that motivates people, i.e. intrinsic aspects instead.

This is also like Dr. Deming says in his book Out of the Crisis:

Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review… The idea of a merit rating is alluring. the sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise

My own experiencealign to this as well, both as an employee and as a manager, where I personally have witnessed the negative effect the system has had on its people and the company.

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I am first and foremost an agile guy. I try to be as agile as possible at my assignments, and I coach and teach agile ways. But I know that there still are several companies that use RUP, and this is written for them.
As I argued in my previous blog post, you can do RUP and be agile. In this blog post, I will give you my top 3 RUP anti-patterns that I have experienced at various projects, and often enough the solution to them is to work in a more iterative way as the creators of RUP intended (more agile if you like). If you want to know what you can do about them, read on. If you can top them, please share your experiences with me 🙂

Here are my Kanban Intro slides from my Leaders of Agile webinar together with Kent Beck and Aslam Khan on Oct 27. Thanks for participating!

BTW when I did this presentation I was sitting in a small hotel room in Tokyo with 4 sleeping kids. Due to timezone differences it was the middle of the night. Fortunately nobody woke up 🙂

Sample slides:

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Here are the slides for my Tokyo Scrum Gathering keynote “Everybody wants Change, but nobody likes to be changed“. Thanks for attending! Sample slides:

I had a conversation with some of my colleagues about what makes a good daily stand-up, here are some properties: Time-boxed (15 minutes) Everyone is engaged Synchronization is taking place Attention to problems People ask for help The conversation is about stuff that matters to most people, individual issues are postponed Anyone can lead the

Having mentioned the acronym “RUP” at Crisp a couple of times, I am starting to get a better understanding of how Harry Potter felt when he mentioned the name “Voldemort” (if you don’t know who Harry Potter is, just borrow the book from the nearest 13-year old and read it). What is it about RUP that has made agilistas scream in terror whenever mentioned? Is RUP a hideous beast that no one can work with, or is it actually a trainable pet that can be useful when treated right?

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It is important to have members with excellent technical skills in most agile projects to succeed deliver desired customer value. But even more important is that the members have great collaborative and communication skills. Without the ability to collaborate efficiently the team will have a tough time to succeed with the project. The soft part of product development includes both how the members act against each other, but also how good they all are in introspectiveness and adaptability. They need this to be able to mature as a team compared to just being a bunch of individuals acting under a common project hat.

There are many ways you can improve your ability to inspect your own behavior and adapt and change it accordingly. Working together with others and asking them to give you feedback is one great way of improving yourselves. Last year I found, a bit surprisingly, another way of improving my skills in collaboration and team work; I took on a personal sport challenge with the goal to perform a race one year ahead. This challenge has learned me a lot about myself and has also improved my collaboration skills.

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I’m doing a free webinar tomorrow together with Kent Beck & Aslam Khan. The topic is Lean software development, with some real-life examples and interesting discussions. I will be sharing some experiences with scaling kanban to larger projects. Join us! Here is the registration link. Wednesday July 20 at 1pm EDT, 10am PDT, 7pm Stockholm