Author: Zuzi Sochova

Top 10 Agile conferences to attend in 2018

I travel & speak at many conferences each year. Here is my list of TOP 10 conferences for 2018:

  • #1: Big Apple Scrum Day (New York, NY, USA) – May 11, 2018. Enthusiastic community, great space.
  • #2: Agile Prague Conference (Prague, Czech Republic) – September 10-11, 2018. An awesome program, collaborative atmosphere of open space format, good value for money.
  • #3: Business Agility 2018 Conference (New York, USA) March 14-15 2018. This conference has the most innovative format of all Agile conferences – three short industry experts’ talks are followed by facilitated conversation around tables.
  • #4: ACE! (Krakow, Poland) – May 17-18, 2018. Innovative form & great atmosphere.
  • #5: Agile Austria Conference 2018 (Graz, Austria) – May 17-18, 2018. Great place to meet & join Scrum Alliance DACH chapter – one of the most active Scrum communities.
  • #6: AgileEE (Kiev, Ukraine) – April 27-28, 2018. Interesting speakers and nice audience.
  • #7: SGLON – Global Scrum Gathering London 2018 (London, UK) – October 8-10, 2018. Talk to Scrum practitioners, join coaches clinic, get hands-on experience.
  • #8: Agile Testing Days (Potsdam, Germany) – November 12-16, 2018. Interesting keynote speakers, deep insights in testing.
  • #9: Agile 2018 (San Diego, CA, USA) – August 6-10, 2018. Top Agile conference for the size and speaker selection. It’s a huge event which is unfortunately very expensive.
  • #10: Lean and Agile ME Summit (Dubai, UAE) – March 10, 2018. Get warm in the middle of winter and enjoy the great list of speakers.

The selection is based on my personal preference and experiences from those events.

Other conferences to consider this year:

(Please share your suggestions with us and we add them to the following list.)

Update: See my Top Agile conferences list for 2019.

Latest State of Scrum Survey

The new State of Scrum Survey is out today. Together with some expected statistics, it brought also few interesting points and surprisingly also short success-stories from different industries for example application of Agile at psychological medicine center, Singapore’s Government Technology Agency, and Target.

Let’s have a look at Scrum from an executive perspective – executives value the most delivering value to the customer, flexibility, responsiveness, quality, transparency, schedule deadlines, visibility, and team engagement and satisfaction. Data shows that 85% people believe that Scrum improves the quality of life.

What do you need to consider adopting Scrum? Active senior management and support, alignment with strategic and financial goals of the company, participation of experienced trainers and coaches, and a clear set of business goals to be achieved. Not anything surprising for Agilists, but could be quite eye-opening to companies who see Scrum as only set of practices, roles, and meetings. But Scrum is more than that, right. It changes the whole organizations so it’s not surprising that over 50% of people identified that the biggest obstacle to adopt and scale Scrum is the organizational design and culture.

Finally, 81% respondents agree that certification improves practice, and 91% of organizations offer their employees some form of training. Certified ScrumMaster CSM is the most popular certification, selected by 84% of respondents, Certified Scrum Product Owner CSPO is the second most popular one, selected by 33% of respondents. Unfortunately, the Certified Agile Leadership CAL is not that known yet, but it’s growing 🙂 . So, don’t spend much time to find other certifications. Go for the real value 🙂

Give Christmas present to your ScrumMaster and leverage his/her knowledge

When I go around the Old Town in Prague I can feel the Christmas atmosphere – Huge Christmas tree is already decorated, a small market with gifts. The holiday season is here 🙂

#ScrumMasterWayIt’s a lot of tips everywhere what to buy as perfect Christmas gift to your husband, friends, children, parents. But I wasn’t able to find any tips for ScrumMaster gifts. So I decided to write some to make even ScrumMaster happier and leverage their knowledge.

There’s never enough knowledge and experiences. The first tip is to read a good book. I want to recommend my book The Great ScrumMaster: #ScrumMasterWay which is practically oriented, full of tips. It’s a field guide for every ScrumMaster, it got great feedbacks so I believe this book is a great gift. But let’s share more book tips – you can start with Essential Scrum from Kenneth Rubin which is the good starting point to understand the Scrum. If you want to move forward the next step is to get some coaching experiences. The Coaching Agile Teams from Lissa Adkins is the book you have to read. It’s great with a lot of knowledge from one of the best coaches I know. Another direction is scaling and a large project in huge organizations. The answer for scaling is LeSS – Large-Scale Scrum which is greatly described in the book Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS. If you are serious about scaling, this book is a must. Both authors Craig and Bas are excellent Scrum and LeSS trainers so it is worth to learn from them.

Prague - Old Town Square at Christmas timeIf you prefer a more entertaining way to get the knowledge you can join some training. It’s my second tip. Have you ever been in Prague? It’s one of the nicest cities in the world with charming Old Town, historical streets, Franz Kafka atmosphere, and a lot of good and cheap beer. So it’s a combo historical Prague & great party & awesome training. Take my Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) training explaining the #ScrumMasterWay concept and the way how to become the Great ScrumMaster. It will move your ScrumMaster knowledge to the next level! We also organize Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) class as well and the newest and most demanding CAL1 – Certified Agile Leadership class. Don’t wait and make this holiday & learning happen. Prague - Charles Bridge In addition to my already mentioned classes, you can join Certified LeSS Practitioner training with Jurgen De Smet who is regularly coming to Prague to enjoy the city and to deliver this great workshop. Check dates and availability here. Of course, you can join me at any place worldwide just check my Scrum Alliance profile or book private training for group of your ScrumMasters – team Christmas gift 🙂

Prague - Prague CastleMy last tip for ScrumMaster’s git is to attend the great conference. There’s a lot of great events I just want to mention two: Global Scrum Gatherings (in Minneapolis, USA in spring or London, UK in fall) or my favorite Agile Prague Conference 2018 (September 10-11, 2018) which is one of the best from Agile in Europe 🙂

What Certified Scrum Trainers (CST) need to learn

One of the things you have to know as a trainer is how to design a content for your class. The traditional teaching methods which were mostly about listening and reading, are very inefficient. Even if you tell a lot of stories, most of the content never survive in people brains until next week. The modern teaching methods are about experience. When you think about it, the things which you remember the most are those you experienced, things you have to figure out yourself. Therefore, the modern teaching is much more about team discussion, simulations, and facilitation of the class instead of teaching. After all, no matter what you say, people are only able to keep focus for about 5min. Then they start their own thinking process in their mind of side thoughts initiated by any associations with what they heard and simply they stop following what’s happening. Don’t believe me? Say them something important in the middle of 15min block. Do it the best you can. Work with your voice. And then, one hour later ask them the question about it. Surprised? And it’s even worse. The more different is the message you are saying to their current reality, the smaller the chance is they remember it and even hear it. It can work for mathematics, but not in a class which has only one goal – change the mindset.

The most popular book which describes a different approach to teaching and learning is Training from the Back of the Room. Get a copy and try it. The hardest is to accept that your students are creative and smart enough so they can figure it. You don’t have to tell them the answers; instead, you shall design a class in a way so they can answer their questions by themselves. They will figure it out.

Interestingly, one requirement which every CST – Certified Scrum Trainer has to do, is to design the class content. The candidates including me were always asking why is that. But it’s actually quite important. Firstly, it proves that you understand the topic enough so you can put it together in a meaningful way – and yes, during co-training with many CST candidates, I’ve seen people teaching Scrum in quite a random way – you know, cooking a soup from great ingredients, doesn’t necessarily ends up as a great soup. Teaching somebody else’s material is like using great chef’s recipe. And again, we are not teaching simple stuff, Agile and Scrum are about changing mindset. So it’s not a cupcake recipe, it’s more like baking macarons. Secondly, considering modern learning trends, where you shall facilitate (not teach) a class, and coach the entire system there to highest learning – there is no way you can copy someone else’s content. It must be authentic. It’s like an art 🙂

Once you got that, one of the skills you need to develop is to design a game. It’s not that hard, but still, it’s great to have a framework. If you like to know more, I can more than recommend Luke Hohmann’s Game Design Master Class, which shows the “secret ingredients” of serious, collaborative game design. Cooking had never been easier :). I joined game design class this summer and I very much enjoyed it, so here is my recommendation. We talked about game theory, game structure, and design strategies, all in very collaborative and fun environment.

So here is my current recommendation summary, if you want to be successful in teaching Agile and Scrum, changing people’s mindset and eventually becoming CST – Certified Scrum Trainer which is the highest quality bar of teaching Agile and Scrum, you need the following mix of ingredients:

  • Class facilitation (i.e. Training from the Back of the Room.)
  • System coaching (i.e. ORCS – Organizational System Relationship Coaching)
  • Game design (i.e. Game Design Master Class)

Be aware that this is not official advice; I’m just one CST (Certified Scrum Tariner) sharing my personal experiences on how to be a great Agile and Scrum Trainer.

You can get inspired by a story from Anderson Diniz Hummel about what it was like to go through the process of becoming a CST. http://drunkenpm.blogspot.com/2018/01/becoming-certified-scrum-trainer-w.html

Scrum Guide Update

A few days back there was a new update to the Scrum Guide – the definition of Scrum. So what’s new? Not much, which is a good think. Most of the changes were minor, correcting, clarifying and updating the text so it’s clearer. Few interesting updates:

The trend of using Agile and Scrum out of IT was addressed explicitly:

“Scrum has been used to develop software, hardware, embedded software, networks of interacting function, autonomous vehicles, schools, government, marketing, managing the operation of organizations and almost everything we use in our daily lives, as individuals and societies.”

Nothing new, for us, but it can make a difference to the people new to Scrum.

I specifically like the update in the Daily Scrum section where the three questions were only made as one option. Finally, right.

“The structure of the meeting is set by the Development Team and can be conducted in different ways if it focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal. Some Development Teams will use questions, some will be more discussion based.”

So there is a chance people stop using it as individual status meeting and use it to inspect and adapt their plan ow they are going to achieve the Sprint Goal.

The only change I don’t understand as it is to my opinion going against the philosophy of Scrum as a framework, not a process is the Sprint Backlog section:

“To ensure continuous improvement, it (Sprint Backlog) includes at least one high priority way in which the team works, identified in the previous Retrospective meeting.”

So here we are, pushing one practice which may be good for the teams who are at the beginning of their Agile journey and don’t improve as part of their DNA to everyone. I can imagine many other ways how to improve then making it part of Sprint Backlog and soften the line between delivering value and “other important tasks which need to be done”.

I like Scrum as it is not much prescriptive and I hope such weird changes will not increase as they will eventually be the end of Scrum as a flexible framework…

Make product as wide as possible

Some time ago, when I first heard the definition of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) product, I found it a bit unrealistic. Large-Scale Scrum is one of the Agile Scaling methods and I happen to like it as it’s very close to what I had experienced to be successful in various environments before. But the definition of the product is quite wide. Specifically – the product shall be as wide as possible, but still practical. If the customer feels it’s the same product or if it’s similar from technical perspective, it is the same product. When you start to apply this rule, in general it means that most of the companies have one product only.

Let me give you a few examples… Amazon and all its services shall be one product because that is how customers see it, the service company delivering internet solutions and mobile apps for variety of the customers is one product despite of the diversity of the customers and technology, the maintenance and the new development is one product as it is same from the technical perspective. Your projects are just Epics in your Product Backlog. When you think about it for a while it makes sense, as you need consistency in your delivered functionalities, flexibility to be business driven and ability to prioritize your business only by business value not by technical skills or domains. This is the real crossfunctionality we aim for. It’s not that difficult despite of the complexity of your product. The people who create our software are usually having university degree which shows they can learn. They are smart and creative software engineers. They can make it. If you do it this way it makes everything so much easier as dependencies at code level are much simpler than dependencies at business level.

Definition of Done

Definition of Done (DoD) is a simple thing, although people are often struggling with it. It only defines what “done” means. It brings consistency into the product delivery. It sets the bar of quality we all keep the same. People often mix it with the acceptance criteria and are confused. So let me summarize it. Definition of Done shall be the same for all Product Backlog Items, as we need consistency, we need to know which quality standards are kept.  Definition of Done is created as an agreement between Product Owner and Development Team, so it contains both technical and business quality requirements. It shall be stable for the product and not change Sprint to Sprint. Eventually, we can improve it, but we aim for consistency so we keep it stable. Definition of Done is the same for all teams who work on the Product Backlog to keep that consistency.

So how can such Definition of done look?

  • Coded
  • Tested
  • Reviewed
  • Documented
  • Running on test server
  • Accepted by Product Owner

You can make it more specific:

  • Coded according to Product Backlog Item (User Story) definition
  • Automated tests (unit, functional)
  • Reviewed (by different team member)
  • Documented (internal)
  • Running on test server
  • Accepted by Product Owner

Eventually, in some time we may improve it for example as follows:

  • Coded
  • Tested
  • Reviewed
  • Documented
  • User documentation
  • Translated to Chinese, French and German
  • Running on production
  • Contains business measures how users used it
  • Accepted by Product Owner

In this case, we achieved continuous delivery within our Sprint. We release each Backlog item to our users directly whenever it’s done. We need to translate it as a part of that otherwise we can’t be able to release. And we have to add some business measures to know if we are getting the expected impact or not and get fast feedback. As you might see, the more the organization is Agile and teams cross-functional, the wider is their Definition of Done.

Definition of Done shall be visible so everybody can see it. Never compromise. The User Story is either done or not. Any other state only brings chaos and makes any release completely unpredictable.

Are we Agile… ?

Are we already Agile? How do we know we are Agile? What level of Agility have we? It’s hard to say. On one hand, you never touch Agile as Agile is like a star on the horizon. On the other hand, you can feel it after the first 15 min you enter the organization from the energy, level of the positivity, interactions from people, and company space setup. A bit later you might search for more tangible proofs of Agility / non-Agility. But the initial sense if usually right.

It’s so hard to measure as once some authority publish the assessment questions, companies make those things happen and fake it. It will most likely not even be conscious, as people are starving for simple recipes. So such assessment can only work once in life. Here are the first seven ideas which come to my mind. If you like to answer, be honest and use the whole scale <0 .. 10>.  No organization is ideal, and so there is low chance you will be the ideal one.

I can continue, but firstly people can only answer few questions, I hope 7 is not too much and secondly, it’s just a short test which is only valid for the first time you do it, next time when we meet during my Agile coaching, I will ask a different set of random questions :). It’s not any complete assessment, just a fun test which can possibly make you think about yourself and your way of work.

If I got enough replies, I will publish them in some of the future posts.

Undone Organization

Agile and Scrum transformation is not any easy and it takes time. For a big organization, such time can easily be counted in years. During those years you would be dealing with so-called undone organization. Scrum itself only knows three roles – ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Development Team. That’s all we need to deliver value to the customer. The other roles are ultimately not needed.

However, at the beginning of our journey, the undone organization might be bigger than the Scrum part of our organization. As our Definition of Done is extending, the teams are getting more and more cross-functional, we are able to embrace those people and make them part of the team. The more the team extends its cross-functionality, the closer we get to the production quality and real-time feedback.

For example Architect and UX people are often at the beginning of the Scrum journey outside of the team but as the team is getting better and learn, teams are able to take it over and make it part of the Definition of Done and separate Architect and UX roles disappear and people move into teams. At first, it sounds unrealistic but in some time this is exactly what needs to happen in order to optimize for fast value delivery and feedback.

Agile Leader Competence Map

The more Agile Leadership is popular, people are asking for more description. Who is the Agile Leader, what makes him different from a traditional manager, and which competencies and skills they have to have. So I created this Agile Leader Wheel so you can map the competencies and skills.

Great Agile Leaders have four core competencies in which they can create a vision, enhance motivation, get feedback, and implement change. Vision is the driving engine. It’s not necessarily related to the product and business but the organization itself. The second segment is motivation. Agile Leaders understand the nature of motivation, are familiar with the power of intrinsic motivation of autonomy and purpose. The third one from the top section of the Agile Leader Wheel is feedback. For Agile Organizations feedback is crucial, it makes the team and product feedback part of their DNA, it becomes an integral part of their culture. The same for Agile Leaders, the regular feedback from the system is the key to their success. The last piece is the ability to implement change. For Agile Leaders, the change is happening at three levels. Firstly there is a change in myself, my own beliefs, reactions, the way I work. Secondly, there is the ability to influence others. Make them part of my team, get supports who will help me to lead the change. Finally, the third element of change is a change at the system level, the whole organization level.

Agile Leader Wheel

In addition to the mentioned competencies, Agile leaders will need to balance the time when they need to make a decision and when it’s better to collaborate and empower others to take a responsibility for that. Finally, on the right side, Agile Leaders are facilitators and coaches. We are not speaking here about one-one coaching. Great Agile Leaders use coaching as a spice to address the complexity at the system level and coach the organization as a whole. Great Agile Leaders are not born this way but constantly develop those competencies and skills. This concept is part of my Agile Leadership program where I help leaders to understand the complexity of nowadays organizations and be successful in their roles. Looking forward to seeing you at some of my Agile Leadership workshops.