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by Levent Gorur

January meeting epilogue: Planning an Agile Project

January 17, 2012 in Event Summary, Monthly Meetings

We started our gathering and networking with pizza provided by Cohesion.

 Networking in January 2012  Networking3_January2012

We had Troy Bitter presented us “How to plan Agile Projects”.

Troy started his presentation by comparing the values derived by traditional and iterative approaches. As we all know agile methodologies can provide incremental benefits at the end of each sprint while waterfall techniques may only deliver at the end of the project.

 TroyBitter_Jan2012

Providing timely information is necessary to support accelerating the project approval process.

Troy suggested to plan with a simple spreadsheet to organize sprints and estimations around iterations and releases. He provided examples of estimations using T-shirt sizes and explained why it is preferred over points.
  • T-shirt Sizing
    • Uses actual hours, people think in hours
    • Definite, not relative
    • Pro: easy to understand, easy translation to $.
    • Con: Backlog grooming might require adjusting estimates
    • XS: 16 hours – sub week
    • S: 24 hours – one week
    • M: 48 hours – two weeks
    • L: 72 hours – four weeks
  • Points
    • Abstract.  Does not necessarily match to hours
    • Pro: Relative, granular
    • Con: Hard to translate to $.
    • 1 – Less than 4 hours
    • 2 – More than half day but less than a day
    • 4 – About a day
    • 8 – More than a day but less than 2
    • 16 – About half of a week
    • 32 – About a week

Troy finalized his presentation with Key Takeaways about planning and reporting;

  • Just Enough
    • Be as precise as necessary – likely talk in days, not hours
    • More precision requires time and cost trade off
  • Time-box
    • Provides sense of urgency
    • Promotes prioritization
  • Communicate with audience in mind
    • Bring the right people together
    • Datasheets are useful to collect and analyze data.  They are not necessarily the right medium to share information with Management
 

Katie Watson and Keith Callis were the winners of our raffle and they got the prizes provided by Pearson and Atlassian

   

 

This month we have added a new sponsor; Cohesion became our Silver Sponsor. Thanks for your contributions.

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Avatar of Levent Gorur

by Levent Gorur

November Epilogue: Understanding the PMI-ACP exam

November 12, 2011 in Event Summary, Monthly Meetings

We’re gathered on Thursday night (November 10, 2011) to review and understand the PMI’s new certification PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) with Sean Heuer and Alan Bustamante’s helps.

Sean Heuer Alan Bustamante at Agile Cincinnati 2011 November

We started interviewing each other to understand the impact of Agile on us and our interest in PMI-ACP. While we found that the interest in PMI-ACP was low, our willingness to practice Agile was high in our group.

Later with Sean’s leadership, we reviewed the books in PMI’s reading list for ACP exam. Each group came up with 3 top books from the list. Agile Retrospectives from  Derby, Larsen and Schwaber is the only book which is a common selection across all of the groups.

Sean and Alan provided feedback about contents of each book in the PMI’s list.

Sean explained the requirements for individuals to be able to enter to the ACP exam.

To apply for the PMI-ACP, register and log in to get started.

A printable PMI-ACP printable application form is available.

For more information see the detailed requirements in the PMI-ACP Handbook.

If you’re ready to take the exam, the PMI-ACP exam preparation can get you started.

PMI Agile Certification Eligibility Requirements
Requirement
Description
General Project Management Experience 2,000 hours working on project teams. These hours must be earned within the last 5 years.Note: for those holding a PMP® credential, PMI has already verified that the candidate has exceeded these requirements. Thus, a PMP will be accepted to fulfill these requirements.
Agile Project Management Experience 1,500 hours working on agile project teams. These hours are in addition to the 2,000 hours required in general project management experience. These hours must be earned within the last 2 years.
Agile Project Management Training 21 contact hours; hours must be earned in agile project management topics
Examination Tests knowledge of agile fundamentals

After the Q&A session we ended our meeting.

November’s food sponsor is Atlassian… Our sponsor for door prizes  is Pearson Education and Atlassian. Our November door prize winners are Robert Urbanski and Chris Boylan.

Robert Urbanski Chris Boylan

Thanks for all your support.

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Avatar of Levent Gorur

by Levent Gorur

October Epilogue: Influencing Agile teams through psychology

October 16, 2011 in Event Summary, Monthly Meetings

In October, we have record number of 36 attendees sailed with Dr. Suscheck into the waters of psychology.

Dr. Suscheck started his interactive presentation as follows;

“I am going to talk about how to sell your ideas using psychology when you really don’t have the authority. As a scrum master you don’t have a direct control; you can’t say you’re going to do “x, y, z”. You have to figure out a way to move your team, especially if you’re a coach.”

Why retrospectives are good? The groups came up with following items with Dr. Suscheck’s lead.

  • what’s right & wrong
  • learn from mistakes
  • forum for visibility
  • group voice/collaboration

Then, we tried to distinguish the differences between “influence” and “manipulation” and came up with the following list;

Influence

Manipulation
  • For good of target
  • Always there’s an out
  • Not selfish
  • Selfish
  • You don’t know that’s happening
    (no way out)

Dr. Suscheck provided a text  about retrospectives meetings; it’s important to read this text/announcement before and after reviewing the following enactments so you can distinguish the differences between influence and manipulation within the text.

Here’s Dr. Suscheck’s list of enactments to sell your idea;

  • Reciprocation
    People are more willing to comply with requests from those who have provided such things first.
  • Liking
    People prefer to say yes to those they know and like. Even being associated with groups or others that they like has an effect.
  • Commitment Consistency
    People are more willing to be moved in a particular direction if they see it as consistent with an existing or recent commitment.
  • Authority
    People are more willing to follow the directions or recommendations of a communicator to whom they attribute relevant authority or expertise.
  • Scarcity
    People find objects and opportunities more attractive to the degree that they are scarce, rare, or dwindling in availability. Even information that is scarce more effective.
  • Social Proof
    People are more willing to take a recommended action if they see evudebce that many others, especially similar others, are taking it.
   

 

He also gave us a suggested reading list on this subject as follows

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

by Robert B. Cialdini

Thinking from A to Z

by Nigel Warburton

How To Win Friends and Influence People

by Dale Carnegie

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Complete Works of Aristotle

by Aristotle

October’s food sponsor is Atlassian… Our sponsor for door prizes  is Pearson Education. Our October door prize winner is Kevin Zamora.

This month we have added a new sponsor; Seapine Software became our Gold Sponsor.

Thanks for all your support.

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Avatar of Levent Gorur

by Levent Gorur

September Meeting Epilogue: Cincinnati Children’s Agile Journey

September 10, 2011 in Event Summary, Monthly Meetings

This month, our guests were Marjorie Miller and Robin Felty from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. They presented their journey to implementing Agile practices in their organization… We again filled the biggest room completely, Max Training kindly provided for our meeting.

They have used Scrum and Kanban

  • Scrum for project work that has a definitive start and end date
  • Kanban for work that has a continuous queue such as production support

Here’s a list of benefits they realized

  • Transparency – we knew immediately when obstacles were getting in the way.
  • Communication improvements within the teams because of the daily stand ups.
  • Able to identify those stories (tasks) that could be worked simultaneously.
  • Visibility by all team members of upcoming tasks allowed each team member to feel actively involved in all aspects of the project.
  • Having the work prioritized helped us ensure we delivered the components that were most important to our customers
  • Open communication with our customers was greatly improved as everyone was going in the same direction.
  • Using Agile allowed our customers to be able to have visibility early in the project with our ability to complete the work.
  • Our product owners were able to identify areas they should back on scope based on feedback they received in the sprint review meetings.

Marjorie and Robin finalized their presentation with Keys for Successful Agile Implementation followed by a Q&A session.

  • Management Support and a Great Coach
  • Product Owner involvement to prioritize and review completed work.
  • Daily stand up meetings – to inspect and adapt quickly changing situations
  • Focus and commitment to the prioritized work
  • Team retrospectives for process improvement
  • Team is self sufficient & self managing
  • Discipline to keep the process going

This month our food sponsor was Atlassian. Thanks again for their support to our community.

Manish Gupta and Pat Newberry were the winners of our raffle and they got the prizes provided by Pearson and Atlassian

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Avatar of Levent Gorur

by Levent Gorur

August Meeting Epilogue: Applying Lean Principles to Marketing: An Overview

August 12, 2011 in Event Summary, Monthly Meetings

This is our second Lean presentation out of software/IS realm. We believe it’s important to open our eyes to other Agile/Lean practicing domains of other business functions. Mutually, we are all working for the same boss “Customer”

We started our night with pizza sponsored by Infotrust LLC.

Joe carried his presentation from manufacturing to marketing while he’s describing how marketing and sales organizations can utilize Lean principles and tools. Here are some highlights from his presentation.

Process is missing in Sales and Marketing.  No continuous improvement is possible without a methodology. You have to understand the metrics to understand the degree of improvement.

We’re not living in a supply driven world anymore, we’re now in a demand driven world. We really don’t have sales channel, we have touch points with customer.

We need to apply more Lean Thinking to our actions;

  • Appreciation of a system (embrace a system)
  • Theory of knowledge
  • The psychology of change
  • Knowledge about variation

Continuous Improvement is a necessity. Metrics are required to judge the rate and degree of improvement. There are also barriers to change; commission structures, understanding metrics and measurements.

Knowledge and Sales PDCA cycle is key part winning the customer.

You have to understand customer’s decision making process. Some of the tools that can be used in Sales and Marketing process are; Business Model Canvas, Customer Journey Canvas, Value co-creation canvas and A3.

Here are some of the links that Joe referred in his presentation, he also announced that he’s going to make his presentation available in Slideshare.

http://www.business901.com

http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com

Again, we’d like to thank Joe Dagger on behalf of Agile Cincinnati Community to share his knowledge and experience with us. You can reach him via email at jtdager using the first domain above.

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Avatar of Alexander Yastrebenetsky

by Alexander Yastrebenetsky

Agile Metrics Presentation

July 10, 2010 in Event Summary, slideshow

We had another great meeting on July 8th. The weather was beautiful which made it even more exciting to see 20+ people at the meeting.

Alec Finn from Centric Consulting presented on Agile Metrics. Alec is an agile veteran who has spent the last six years developing custom Agile practices for Fortune 500 organizations such as: Cintas, Fidelity, Nationwide and Great American Insurance. These practices have enabled these larger, more constrained, organizations to leverage the value of Agile and it’s 12 core principles within parameters such as distributed teams, bundled releases and established PMOs.

I would highly recommend Alec as a presenter to anybody. Not only he teaches real life things that he personally has implemented in agile teams, but he delivers the presentation at the agile management/PMO level which is exactly what larger organizations need.

Here are his slides:

Value of metrics
View more presentations from iastream.

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Avatar of Alexander Yastrebenetsky

by Alexander Yastrebenetsky

June Meeting Summary

June 19, 2010 in Event Summary

At this meeting we had the largest number of attendees so far. There were 28 people total. Here are some pictures from this event:

We asked for a show of hands about the topics. Here are the numbers:

  • Requirements – 3
  • Coaching – 6
  • Tools – 15
  • Agile portfolio management – 8
  • Distributed teams 13
  • Change management —-
  • Agile contracting – 4
  • Assessment – bump to 1 hour
  • Engineering Practices – 12

Alex asked attendees to leave a few comments about the meeting. Here are some dominant topics:

  • Room too small, we need bigger room. (We are honored and fortunate to have this problem. We will work with Max Training to make sure we have more space next time)
  • More interaction and facilitation during discussion. A few people dominated the discussion. We need to do a better job engaging everybody
  • Case studies/examples after each presentation
  • Do a better job introducing ourselves for new members. Let new members introduce themselves and meet other people.

If you attended this meeting, please leave comments on this post.

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