At Agile NYC I presented a pecha kucha. 20 slides. 20 seconds per slide. I’ll post in four parts.

A family tradition of care and craft

My mother is college educated but made her living through physical labor. She made valances on fancy drapery and upholstered fine furniture.

She took pride in her work matching the pattern at the seams no matter how complex. And she worked long hours.

She has arthritis from years handling heavy fabric.

My father is a retired engineer.

He’s always pursued hobbies with an engineer’s precision. Book binding, restoring tube amplifiers, annealing, reshaping and tempering fishing hooks into an authentic 19th century fly fishing hook shape.

If people offered to pay him for his hobby, he’d move on to something else. He did these things for pleasure.

My ten-year old daughter aspires to be an engineer or scientist. She been a member of a Lego FIRST Robotics team since she was seven.

When she first tried out, her teachers wrote:

“You were chosen based on your ability to work well with your team and how well you cooperated with others.

We also looked at your ability to problem solve, on your own and within the group, your endurance, enthusiasm, and your handle and care for the pieces.”

My girl is a born agilist…

Short link: http://jkat.me/eNvdXi

Tag(s): agile, AgileNYC, pecha kucha, values

Comments: none

In order to adopt agile practices in any meaningful way, you have to change your organization.

This includes the members of the team, the people who describe and prioritize work, and the executives who hold everyone accountable for the outcome.

In order to drive that kind of change, you need authority commensurate with your responsibilities.

But you also need influence with people over whom you have no authority. Who may, in fact, have authority over you.

The best path to this is integrity. Be the same person in all contexts. Accomplish things for people. Keep your word.

Never assume you’re entitled to trust. Earn it. Work toward a shared definition of success and continue to earn trust as you progress through your change program.

Short link: http://jkat.me/h6OQR4

Tag(s): agile adoption, impediments, Organizational culture, scrum

Comments: none

I can never know someone’s intentions.

I only know their actions and how I felt about them.

For the same reason, I should never be surprised by how different someone’s perception of my intentions are from my own.

Short link: http://jkat.me/f7WMHS

Tag(s): perception, retrospective, scrum

Comments: none

Every two weeks as part of our Scrum practice my team holds a retrospective to ask:

• what were our goals in the last two weeks,
• what did we do that helped us achieve those goals,
• what did we do that got in our way, and
• what essential set of things we should we keep doing or do differently.

Retrospection is a process focused way of doing more and more of the things that are important and a less and less of the things that are not important.

And our efforts at inspecting and adapting are themselves a work in progress.

We need to rely on each others’ strengths to work past our own weaknesses.

We need to expect more of each other and to demand more of ourselves for each others’ sake.

We thread this path to trust and loyalty, to collaboration and self-knowledge, to craft and achievement.

Short link: http://jkat.me/dUr3QB

Tag(s): agile, collaboration, retrospective, scrum, Team

Comments: none

I agree with the conclusion of israelgat’s post on Agile Manager, Persona of the Agile Team:

If the spread of Agile in your company has stalled, providing qualitative and quantitative data on the benefits of Agile might not be the best way to win over support for broader adoption. Instead of hard sell of Agile benefits, focus on cross-organizational dynamics, pathologies and development.

Short link: http://jkat.me/i5O5XB

Tag(s): agile, agile adoption, benefits, process

Comments: none