Thursday, June 20, 2019

Burnout

Infographic and content - Lindsay Braman.

The voice of burnout is not YOUR voice. Burnout will say you aren’t cut out for it, that you don’t enjoy it, that you aren’t good at it. Don’t make career decisions while you are burned out. Switch employers, cut down hours, get a side gig selling slotted spoons on eBay, do what you gotta do to equal out your stress and your support resources.

Burnout is:

  • NOT a simple response to Stress
  • NOT Weakness
  • NOT incompatibility with field
  • Burnout happens when we are exposed to more stress than we can cope with. 


Agile requires a "sustainable pace." You should be coming into work every day fully rested and able to do your best work. Burn out is very real, but if you see it, the org isn't Agile. If work is so stressful that you burn out even working "normal" hours, you're also not Agile. - Allen Holub

Use this link to check burnout of your team

http://www.uapd.com/wp-content/uploads/Maslach-Burnout-Inventory-MBI.pdf


Monday, June 10, 2019

Value Stream


This is for my own reference:
  1. You are able to tell all the product / services your unit / vertical produces / offers.
  2. You are able to map the products / services back to the teams (A 1-1 mapping or multiple teams that deliver a particular product / service. Efficiency decreases / time to market increases if there are multiple teams mapped to a product / service).

Saturday, June 08, 2019

Scrum Master Role & Responsibilities (Courtesy Roman Usov)

Use the following as a checklist when transitioning to a new team

Start by asking the Team -- "What do you expect from me?" (This is basically setting the expectations and ensuring both are on the same page)

Team
- Be the mirror
- Ask a lot of questions
- Observe (events,  relationships, processes, people, check team's profiles on social networks)
- Observe team dynamics during Scrum events
- Learn about team values, conventions and agreements
- Ask what I can help the team with (maybe, as an activity at a retro, what, why)
- Find small things to help the team with
- Suggest a couple of get-to-know activities for a retro ('get to know you' quiz, journey map, team canvas), learn about team expectations, find an opportunity to tell the team about how I view my role
- Go to lunches with the team
- Provide welcome treats
- Seek opportunities for one-on-ones (at coffee, at lunch)
- Have a trip to meet guys working from another office
- Learn about interactions and dependencies outside the team
- Learn about team's improvement backlog
- Notice deviations from the Scrum Guide
- Notice problems that can be helped with Scrum
- Ask questions about what I see, offer observations for issues and draw team's attention to them where appropriate, ask to ponder ideas
- Notice what team is struggling with, suggest observations, stories from experience
- Review available team artifacts and metrics

Processes & Tools
- Learn about team's development process
- Learn about CI and deployment process
- Learn about tools used by the team

Product
- Learn about product
- Review product backlog
- Learn about current PBR process

Organization, culture (what's important and why, how we do things here and why), environment
- Learn about mission, vision, strategy
- Learn about values, observe if they are really lived by
- Learn about structure, key components and interactions
- Notice problems that can be helped with Scrum
- Attend community of practice meetings

Stakeholders
- Learn about key stakeholders
- Find opportunities to meet with key stakeholders
- Learn about stakeholder needs and expectations

From Chandan Lal Patary
===================
- Enables the team to eliminate impediments
- Coaches team in scrum practices
- Protects team from external intervention
- Has continuous improvement mindset and practices it
- Is an outstanding facilitator
- Is a servant leader
- Has good influencing skill
- Knows the domain and technology
- Has substantial organisational skills
- Is an outstanding communicator
- Is an excellent conflict manager
- Capable of building self-organised team
- Has good collaboration skills
- Builds transparency into the team

Thursday, June 06, 2019

Production defects, velocity and adaptation

  1. Through estimation in Agile, we are not trying to predict. Predictability isn't the end goal of Agile. 
  2. Predictability is helpful in knowing when a certain release will be shipped and to know how soon a team can deliver.
  3. Don't stress too much on Predicting. Don't predict harder instead adapt better.
  4. Instead of planning ahead, focus on adapting when dealing with unpredictability.

If we already have automation, what's the need for Agents?

“Automation” and “agent” sound similar — but they solve very different classes of problems. Automation = Fixed Instruction → Fixed Outcome ...