Book review – braving the wilderness by Brene Brown.

A story about belonging and the freedom of not belonging.

She talked about how you respond to pain in one of three ways.

1 feel the pain and inflict pain on others.

2 deny your pain staying quiet

3 own the pain and develop empathy

I found this a heart wrenching book. It really calls to all the pain that each of us has felt. I could relate with so many of Brenes stories. She talks about the freedom in not belonging as described in following quote by Maya Angelou

And how she had trouble understanding it to begin with, and her journey to understanding.

I really enjoyed the idea of Permission slips that she talks about, it’s something I would like to try. Giving yourself permission to be in the moment to be authentic.in fact I did that this morning, instead of just ticking off all my morning tasks I spent some fun play time with my daughter.

Belonging to ourselves is being authentic and being true to ourselves.

Brene has a wonderful definition of true belonging at the end of chapter two:

“True belonging is the spiritual practise of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are, it requires you to be who you are.”

Another key message for me was about how we sort ourselves and each other, stereotyping which dehumanizes. We divide ourselves into like groups.

We are a social species and loneliness and not being connected can mean you are sorted into the loner and weird group.

The book talks about how to build a strong back so you can have a soft front. I liked this. I have huge walls that don’t allow for proper connection. I am authentic to me but I also fiercely protect me. I want to be able to be me and have those strong connections, be so comfortable and secure in me that I don’t take on others labels and views. I don’t need their validation and acceptance. I don’t care who sorts me where and I don’t sort myself.

It’s a work in progress journey for sure.

Book review – the life changing magic of not giving a f#@k

This is a nice short book to read. Book on Amazon here.

I found it amusing and got a few good giggles. I found that the author is correct that in your 40s you do get this naturally. It has been over the last year or so that I have decided to not give a f@#k about things that annoy me or don’t bring me joy.

The book helps step you through determining what you want to give a f@#k about and what you don’t and also how do manage those you don’t want anymore in a polite way. We don’t want to be an a$$hole.

Book review – Grit

Audible book.Grit the power of grit the power or passion and perseverance by Angela Duckworth

Grit is about 50% perseverance and 50% passion. You need to have the perseverance and the goal for what you want to do the desire to want to get better and improve. This isn’t for everything you do. It’s for the things you have passion for.

To grow your grit you need:

• Deliberate practise with continuous improvement and adjusting based on feedback is what you need to do.

After lots of deliberate practice you can experience Being in flow. Flow is that awesome feeling when everything just works. I know it’s what I aim for.

The author talks through the research she has done, and lots of stories from gritty people. She also talks through deliberate practise and flow and determining your passion.

This book made me think of how I can best help my daughter with her learning. It’s a good listen and made me realise that I have managed to learn quite a bit throughout my life about practise and grit. It’s not what I thought it was. I thought it was related to resilience, which I suppose is true as you keep going even with the setbacks and the effort you have to put in.

I especially liked the hard thing rule

1. Everyone must do daily deliberate practise on one hard thing.

2. You can’t quit on a bad day. You can quit at the natural end e.g end of term.

3. You get to choose your hard thing.

4. Once you reach high school you must do a hard thing for at least 2 years

Now to get my family to buy into that rule as well.

Book review – Awesome Agile Ceremonies by Ethann G Castell

Get the book here

Spicing up agile ceremonies.  This had some good ideas, the ones I pulled out to try in my teams are as follows:

General

• Try answering on behalf of another team member after collaboration at the daily stand up
• Food.
• Having meetings in another location preferably involving food.
• Group Selfie.
• Start the meeting in another language for hello and goodbuy or some other words throughout.
• fun fact of the day – or present a new learning.
• late penalty.
• micro meeting timebox – try doing that task in a smaller timebox.
• technology free meetings
• pair facilitation of a meeting.
• special guest.
• Have people express their feeling on an issue or topic by adopting a pose.
• time switch, = change the meeting time either by 15 min or to different time of the day.

Planning.

• buy a feature.
• change the sizing mechanism ( t-shirt, coffee sizes, countries, etc)
• empathy mapping.  (go through the 5 senses for the user in regards to using the product)
• Future tweets. – what would you say about this project at a future date.
• My worst nightmare – what is the teams worst nightmare in relation to the project
• name the sprint.
• pre mortem – imagine you have traveled ahead in time and the project has failed spectacularly. Work backward to determine what lead to the failure.
• Risky business – looking at risks, contingencies and mitigation. against probability and severity.
• themeing the planning session on something like quality, value, completion.

Daily stand up

• ask additional questions. – how can we work better, how do we get this high value task out today.
• last arrives speaks first.
• introduce a break word into the meeting much like ELMO
• (Love this one) – introduce the rule of 3 – if conversation goes back and forth more than 3 times take it offline.
• give the sprint a Fist of five – rating how you are feeling or knowledge of a subject etc.
• story focused standup – Walk the wall.
• change the order of standup speakers by using a ball
• Random questions to learn more about your teammates
• What do you plan for tomorrow (TGIF)

Reviews

• Have the customer demonstrate the product.

There were other ideas but this one I pulled out.

Retrospectives

• Introduce more team building exercises.
• Regularly reflect on the Agile values and principles
• Appreciation notes.
• 5 dysfunctions of a team – discuss ways they could or do affect the team. ( absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to results – focusing on personal success)
• 5 whys to help determine root cause of a problem.
• keep / drop / add or loved / learned/ longed for or same of, more or, less of
• Genie in a bottle – one wish for yourself and one wish for the team.
• showcase email – selling the team, how we work together, what we achieve and how we add value.
• story oscars – give awards (choose your own) to the stories in the sprint. e.g best written story.

This is a really great book.  It’s quick to read and has some really great ideas.  As you can see I have pulled out lots out of the 104 to try with my teams next year.

Who is my audience?

I am constantly surprised that when I am having a problem of don’t yet know the way to address a situation there will be a link in my email subscriptions with something I can try.

For Example. My tech Lead has been writing stories that are too big. 1 story takes the whole 2 week sprint and maybe more to complete.  There are so many tasks off this story for the developers.  I started off by talking with him about his latest story and asking if it could be completed in a day or two as the previous stories didn’t allow for the team to show and share their progress well.

It didn’t work.

Then I got this link in my email from Kevin Eikenberry and how you need to focus on your audience and what you want from them.  He says it a lot better than me.  it’s only a 4min video.

This video made me think more about what I need from my Tech Lead.  I need him to create smaller stories, I need him to decide that the current stories need to be broken down.  I need him to understand that the team will benefit from the smaller stories.

It’s a good way to deal with frustrating communication and reminds me of my word to remember for Agile “Curiosity”  By being Curious you can always be looking for a better way, or a better understanding and you stay out of the blame game.

Estimating & Planning projects for the new year.

We had a meeting yesterday, the techleads, Development manager and Me.  We looked at the brief one sentence requests from people in the business for work that they want done and from that we are meant to give an estimate of cost to deliver the work and what people will be needed and how long it will take.

I don’t even know what to say really there is so much wrong with that situation.

Thankfully we sent those ones back for more information.  Others we had enough situational knowledge as they were extensions of work we had been doing this year.  Those were the easy ones, they already had a prioritised backlog, we already had some idea of how long it would take the teams to get through the stories based on our empirical data.

Even still I had to raise several times that even though an experienced Dev could do it in that time, we now only have our junior dev left.  I was concerned that they were trying to provide a standard rate when it totally depends on the people in the team.  Some people are more experienced and work faster than others.  I felt we needed to take the people into the estimating equation.  I just don’t know how to articulate that to others yet in a way that enables a conversation to ally my fears.  It feels like we are setting ourselves up for failure.

I know the quotes are going to be padded out to allow for some of these variances but that seems like the wrong way to do things.  I guess this is just another of our pain points because of the funding model. It’s on our list of things to improve next year.

Agile values refocus

It’s the end of the year, the end of our first year in our Agile journey and I feel the need to reflect on the manifesto and values to reset our goal statement and measures.

Remembering that the manifesto is ultimately about people, communications, the product and flexibility.

That the values are about

• Customer satisfaction – include all the right people and the product owner, prioritise work and work on highest value first, review and get feedback regularly
• Quality – empower the development team, define what done means at beginning, test aggressively,build only what is needed, refactor code, have multiple feedback points.
• Teamwork – colocated, psychological safety, face to face where possible, get clarification as needed and empower the team.
• Project management – support the team, just enough documentation, minimizing non dev tasks including reporting

I have to come up with the roadmap for next year. I have engaged with my mentor and product owner and my manager and feel much if it has been left up to me. So I workshopped with my mentor and we came up with the following key themes.

1 – Improved collaboration between teams. Effectiveness of teams and team trust.
Earlier engagement of support and ops teams within projects.
Breaking down silos. – softening boundaries. – becoming more communities of practise and expertise and capability building
Highlight dependencies between teams and managing dependencies. e.g dependencies board and weekly meeting.

2 – Improve shared understanding of governance (roles and responsibilities and expectations) – Roles and responsibilities activity within kickoff. – who decides priorities of what to work on, who writes user stories,

3 – Increase the knowledge in the team around User story’s and story mapping. – User story workshop with Jim.
Ensuring the devs develop from the customers viewpoint.
Providing the detail at the last possible moment.
Focus on the problem we are trying to solve, not the solution we are implementing.
Improve developers and testing product fit and understanding.

4 – Increase transparency of projects and their value – Identify value stream to highlight where we can remove waste and increase flow. Visibility of projects on kanban. Improving backlog creation.

It would appear agile is most definitely working as we have a lot of problems being highlighted. I was lost as to where to start and what to focus on. I was chipping away at all of them which wasn’t the best use of my time.

So we worked out an action plan

First off is clarifying roles and responsibilities

Then visibility of the projects and ensuring backlogs are created

We can work on user story training and story mapping and also visually showing the dependencies between the teams.

Feeding out of a lot of the above work will be the structure and how we can soften the silo boundaries along with improving the time it takes to get code into production.

It’s going to be a big year. Looking forward to it.

Playing multiple roles.

It’s the crazy season.  The time of the year when we are all busy trying to get all the work we have out the door before Christmas.  Last week I had two of my teams come to the end of their projects.  Which meant that I wasn’t just having to manage their current sprint events and everything that comes from that, but also prep for their next sprint work.  Make sure the user stories were ready, that the product owner was ready and had the necessary understanding of how we were going to work,  scheduling kickoffs and facilitating them and also working through release to production tasks.  It was during this whole process that I realised that I am doing way more than the standard Scrum Master role says and not much of what the standard Agile coach role says.  I am being both with project manager and release / change manager thrown in as well.  Oh and I did a bit of BA work also.

Now I don’t mind doing this work, I am very much a get it done sort of person which means I will do what needs to be done to get it done.  Cross functional teams also talks about people doing what needs to be done.  My issue is around that fact that I was being the hero, I was being the person that ran around and got it all done in a totally unsustainable way and I didn’t highlight that fact that we don’t have enough people to get this work done, we don’t have enough people with the skills and time to get this work done.    I believe our Agile journey is proceeding exactly as it should,  it is working by bringing up all sorts of problems, at least now the problems are visible and we can do something about them, one at a time making small incremental improvements to the way we work.

Making sure we start the new year right.

Had a meeting with my boss today. About one of the things that is bothering me. We currently have two sticky teams but come the end of the year we lose half our contract staff and therefore will have only 1 team left, not an existing team just the permanent staff from both teams.

I would prefer to have a kick off with them again. Get that common understanding of the way they work together. I also need to setup the Sprint events and the teams backlog.

I don’t have visibility though of when everyone is back, or the priorities of work. It’s a complete work in progress . So next week my goal is to get some more clarity around this ready for when we are all back in the office.

Don’t want people slipping back into old habits, especially since we have come so far.

Book Review – leadership and Self Deception

I recently read Leadership and Self Deception and am finding it a very interesting book.

 

The Book talks about How we need to see and treat others as people and not objects, realize that the other person has needs, hopes, and worries as real and legitimate as our own.   We need to be aware of when we are in a box because when we are in the box, we need the other people to keep being useless or a jerk  so we remain justified in blaming them.  We need problems when we are in the box when really we need to get out of the box and realize our goal is to help each other and the organisation to achieve results.

The book is told in a great narrative style.  I listened to it on Audible and found it very easy to listen to while doing my big weekly walk.   Would be great if everyone was more aware of when they are in the box.