Craig and Renee, sitting in a shoe-box sized hotel room in Sydney eating peanut M&Ms, decided to rustle through the mailbag and answer a bunch of outstanding questions.

Note: this episode is not sponsored or endorsed by M&Ms but we certainly enjoy their product!

Crossing The Chasm

• more and more organisations seem to be crossing the chasm to Agile, but too many are still just doing and not being Agile
• inimal viable product (MVP) is still the trend word, the next stage is Minimal Viable Experience and then Minimal Viable Robustness to Minimal Marketable Product and finally Continuously Evolving Product
• Enterprise Transformation Meta Model
• Agile is a true north concept, not sure that you will ever get there

Suggested reading list on where to start with Agile:

• General Books: Scrum Guide, Extreme Programming Explained
• Developers: The Pragmatic Programmer
• Scrum Master: The Human Side of Agile
• Kanban: Personal Kanban, Kanban In Action
• Portfolio: Essential Scrum
• Product Owner: Agile Product Management with Scrum, User Story Mapping
• Business Analysis: User Stories Applied, Writing Effective Use Cases, Specification By Example, UML Distilled, Agile Extension to the BABOK Guide
• Testing: Agile Testing, More Agile Testing
• see the Top 100 Agile Books list, unfortunately the world is still too complex

What certification should a new Scrum Master get:

• passing through the corporate filter, you probably need some key certification to get a look in
• CSM / PSM is valuable if you have a good quality trainer
• Kanban resources include the Kanban Yahoo! Group, Kanban and Kanban and Scrum: Making The Most of Both
• Craig’s 2010 talk “Kaizen with GreenHopper: Visualising Agile & Kanban Storywalls“
• one of the various scaled certifications (versus building your own)
• ICAgile pathway is good as it is allows you to be skillset specific
• Agile Coaching Institute (starts at ICAgile skill set)
• learning is 70:20:10
• just get your hands dirty!
• leadership needs to support as Agile well: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, Creating Great Teams, Management 3.0
• community events like meetups and conferences
• get a mentor!

Building your own scaled framework

• Holacracy and Reinventing Organizations
• need to answer questions around ensuring quality, growing capability, benefits realisation, etc…
• at what level do the questions need to be answered
• Minimal Viable Organisations
• scale on the operational cadence of the problems of the organisation, not following a framework
• how often do we check that our approach is meeting our needs

Visualising business analysis in a Scrum team

• 3 Amigos approach
• call it what it is if you’re sprint length is longer than it is
• focus more on Kanban flow

Reading List

• Renee is reading about climate change (and how that applies to Agile) including “This Changes Everything” by Naomi Klein
• Craig is reading “CTRL-SHIFT” by  Jessie Shternshus and Mike Bonifer

TheAgileRevolution-111 (71 minutes)