Steve Neiderhauser

Safe Lean Center of Excellence

This blog post goes into detail about how to start a Lean-Agile Center of excellence.

One of the key tips is that the Center of Excellence should be a pull system just like Agile is a pull system.

Agile is Different From Most Company Cultures

Michael Sahota created a nice visual of Agile culture compared to most company cultures.

The visual makes clear that the #1 barrier to Agile is the organization’s culture. Most company cultures are based on control and competence while Agile is based on collaboration and cultivation.

Excellent visual summary with reference material at the end of the post. 

How UX Design Works With Agile

Jeff Gothelf has designed an elegant model for integrating UX Design with Scrum.

Forget about velocity and the feature factory, instead include a designer on the Scrum team as a full-time team member. This is the best model I’ve seen; it tosses aside some of the strange anti-patterns I’ve discovered on Scrum teams.

The tactical Design work includes various techniques. Here are three of them.

• Prototyping
• Visual Design
• Experiments

Jeff Sutherland Keynote Agile Camp 2015

I was reviewing my notes on Jeff Sutherland’s keynote at Agile Camp 2015 in Dallas. After his keynote I told a friend that it was a tour de force; that if people followed the patterns for greatness that Jeff described your team could be truly great.

I also told my friend that most people didn’t grasp the greatness of the presentation. 

I listened to the presentation to distill the key patterns and have included the patterns in this diagram. 

What I Learned in My Short Film Class

About three years ago I took a short film class. I learned a lot in this class because the short film format challenges some of the concepts of features.

Here are my notes from the class:

1. The short showcases your skills as a writer. 
2. Write to entertain your audience.
3. Your short film can be a brief snippet of a feature and gives you a way to market your feature film.
4. In the short film, use only a couple characters.
5. Write a one page treatment for the short, then check the story beats.
6. Always dream about your story and make it better.

The key is to get audiences buzzing about the character and the story premise; you can then run with and expand upon your story in the feature.

How to Increase Team Velocity

Here’s another gem from J.J. Sutherland’s book, The Scrum Fieldbook.

Companies typically are run so poorly that by implementing some simple patterns you can drastically improve team velocity. The book includes eleven patterns. Here are a couple patterns that I have used and I guarantee they work.

• Stable teams. Bring the work to people, don’t drag people to the work.
• Small teams. The optimal team size is 5 people.
• T-shaped people. 
• Daily clean code.
• Ready backlog so the team can immediately act on a story.
• Yesterday’s Weather.

Agile Performance Review

I’ve been reading The Scrum Fieldbook by J.J. Sutherland and have found it to be an excellent read.

One section of the book talks about performance reviews and provides questions for product owners, teams, leaders, and scrum masters.

Here are some questions for scrum masters:

Are they doing Scrum: three roles, five events, three artifacts, five values?

Is there a team working agreement?

Is velocity being measured?

Are they continuously learning?