Agile Project Leadership Network, Orange County

APLN is now ALN - Different Focus, Different Venue

2011-12-29T08:37:00.001-08:00

Based on the change at the national level from APLN to ALN, and the effectiveness of their new focus on leadership level roles at the Agile 2011 conference, we have decided to follow suit.

The in-person, open meetings for practicing agilists (ScrumMasters and agile team members) at KBB, AAA and Neudesic are being replaced with invitations to roundtable forums for leadership roles. This meets a need in both our community and for the agile adoption efforts as a whole.

If you are an agile practitioners, I encourage you to attend the Agile SoCal events. I have been to them, and they are well attended, well run and have great topics.

If you are or know an agile business leader/sponsor for your organization, contact me for information on how to get invited to the new ALN leadership roundtables. If you are the agile implementation leader\coach at your organization, contact me to get involved in coaching circles.

As with any agile organization, we have to continue to inspect, learn and adapt. This change is living out what we advocate.

Please contact me with any questions you might have.

February - Agile Adoption at Tribune

2011-01-20T09:06:00.000-08:00

Shawna's presentation will take you through agile adoption at the Tribune Corporation.

She will unveil the mistakes as well as what was learned during the technical and cultural integration. Shawna will address how things that are not discussed often in the agile model (like budgeting, time tracking, resource planning, portfolio and program management) were dealt with, during this adoption process.

About your Presenter

Shawna Cullinan is a Product Owner for the Tribune Corporation. Her previous positions include Director, Project Management Office and she has also served as internal Scrum Trainer, Coach and enthusiast. Shawna has 10 years of IT experience focusing primarily on project and product management of content management systems. She received her Scrum Master Certification 4 years ago and remains an active memeber in the agile community. She has previously worked as Interactive Director for E! Online at Comcast Entertainment Group and Applications Manager at the Hallmark Channel.

January - Scrum Roles in Action

2011-01-06T17:31:00.000-08:00

In Scrum, there are three basic roles - Team member, Product Owner and ScrumMaster. Each role is defined with some basic specific rights and responsibilities and filling in the rest of what one is supposed to do is left as an exercise for the participants. In this workshop, we will review the rights and responsibilities for the Scrum three roles (plus stakeholders) and discuss what those roles look like when preformed well.

In addition, we participate in a short simulation highlighting the common communication modes between these roles and consider what is optimal for producing high-performing teams.

About the Presenter
Carlton Nettleton has been working with Agile teams beginning in 2001. He used Extreme Programming (XP) to deliver commercial products at a number of San Diego start-ups and later became more involved with Scrum after working at a large San Diego based defense contractor. He has been bringing lightweight, Lean tools into the Agile software development community after helping to develop FDA regulated medical devices. He has nearly ten years of experience working with software products and services in both a technical and business capacity. Carlton is a respected Agile thought leader in San Diego County, forming Extreme Programming San Diego (XPSD) in 2002. He became a Certified ScrumMaster in 2005 and a Certified Scrum Practitioner in 2009.

October - Author Lyssa Adkins on Deprogramming Project Managers

2010-09-16T16:39:00.000-07:00

Join us Wednesday, October 6th at 6 P.M. in Irvine for "Essential Deprogramming for Project Managers" with respected author, speaker and trainer Lyssa Adkins.

Lyssa Adkins is a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Project Management Professional (PMP), and Six Sigma Green Belt (SSGB). She is also a professionally trained Co-Active Coach. Adkins has over fifteen years’ project experience, and has been a large-scale program manager and director of Project Management Offices. For the last four years, she has been coaching teams in the financial services industry and coaching coaches who hail from across the Agile spectrum, from small consulting firms to large enterprises. Lyssa was a keynote speaker at the 2010 Scrum Gathering conference in Orlando, given a full-day for her deep-dive workshop on coaching. She was also a panelists on the PMO Roundtable facilitated by Jesse Fewell, founder of the PMI Agile Community of Practice. Later this year, she will be giving a full day tutorial at Agile Development Practices East Conference.

Adkins’ book, Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition was published earlier this year. It has a perfect 5 Star rating on Amazon.

September 2010 meeting

2010-08-23T12:23:00.000-07:00

The September 2010 meeting of the APLN-OC chapter will focus on the continued utility of physical taskboards to track and communicate development project details.

We will meet Thursday, September 9 at the Automobile Club of Southern California, 3333 Fairview Rd, Costa Mesa 92626. The meeting is in the Rancho Cucamonga training room, which is a new location for us. When you see the signs for “Credit Union” and “Purchasing” on the ACSC campus, you have found the place. You may find the site map below helpful. “North” on this map is to the right, if you are as confused as I have been by this graphic. The meeting will start at 6:00 PM, doors open for refreshments at 5:30. We should wrap up by 8:30 PM or earlier.

With virtual tools proliferating, Bachan Anand will lead a discussion on physical taskboards. Why do physical taskboards remain important? How can they be used most effectively? In what other settings are physical taskboards also effective?

Taskboards help to get the team engaged, increase process transparency and foster collaboration. How can taskboards be structured to provide maximum benefit to the team? How can taskboards provide more value for other stakeholders and roles, the ScrumMaster, Product Owner and organizational management?

This session will benefit existing Agile professionals as well as current and prospective Agile team members. By setting a stake in the ground on physical taskboards, we will attempt to organize a future meeting to present and discuss how virtual taskboard equivalents and project management tools fit into the complete picture.

As an added bonus, we will be raffling off a copy of Lyssa Adkin's new book, Coaching Agile Teams to attendees In addition, a 50% discount off the normal fee for Lyssa's upcoming CSM class October 7-8 in Santa Ana will be presented to a fortunate attendee.

APLN Mtg - July 15th - Innovation Games

2010-07-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

Next APLN meeting is on Innovation Games! On Thursday, July 15th, bring your Product Owners and Product Managers to see an exciting new way to determine the road map and features for your product. ScrumMasters and team members can get more connected to the vision and empowering their development work.

From Innovation Games site: "Innovation Games® Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play will be indispensable for anyone who wants to drive more successful, customer-focused product development: product and R&D managers, CTOs and development leaders, marketers, and senior business executives alike."

David Sheriff, Innovation Games Trained Facilitator and Certified Scrum Product Owner, will be leading the session.

More details to come!

Work'em Hard, Burn'em Out

2010-04-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

Agile was fashioned to make developer's lives better, thus making them enormously more productive. It is frequently observed that development teams get so fast they can run product marketing and product management folks right out of ideas. I overheard someone at 2010 Scrum Gathering opine that product management has difficulty with Agile because it makes them work for a change. Incendiary stuff.

Scrum specifically defines a single product owner for each development team. This person has a lot to do. They define releases. They represent enterprise business value. They help the team envision the big picture so the team knows where it's headed. They write user stories to encapsulate functionality. They prioritize the stories so the team works on the most important things all the time. They use ROI to rank user stories. They groom the backlog of stories to reflect new information. They are constantly available to help when the team needs more detail or finds a hole in the stories being worked. They accept or reject the team's output on behalf of the enterprise. They help buffer the team from bright new ideas so the team is not distracted during a sprint. And then there's all the stuff I left out.

Scrum wisely permits only one product owner per team. A "single throat to choke" is one of the less pleasant ways to explain this. All competing ideas and priorities funnel through one individual. Presumably an individual will not hold mutually contradictory ideas. Presumably the product owner operates from hard data on what the market values right now. Hard data, not personal opinion, accurately reflects reality. If a judgement call is required, presumably the product owner is most likely to be right. Finally, presumably one person can smoothly juggle all of the above.

Pragmatic Marketing's Barbara Nelson questioned that assumption at the APLN OC April 6 meeting. She mentioned an executive who valued razor sharp product management people. When the razors got dull, as they inevitably did in his organization, this executive went looking for new razors. Oops, we have a sour note. Scrum is designed so developers can work 40 hour weeks. No more death marches. If we are now burning through good product owners, we have just shifted the constraint.

Scrum does not detail the product owner's relationship with the world outside the team. If one person cannot stay on top of all the details, presumably that individual is part of a marketing organization that can. Like all good developers, Scrum only defines the product owner / team interface. What happens on the enterprise side of that interface is someone else's problem.

Maybe that's what comes after Scrum. Something else with a crazy name that organizes all the product owner stuff into a cross-functional team. Something that splits up the load, does all the research, analysis and strategy while focusing into development like one person. Just think, product owners could work 40 hour weeks. In my lifetime, you think. Well, wait. We now see developers as creative artists and development as a team activity. "Creative" isn't found in every product owner's job description?

April 6 Meet: Barbara Nelson, Pragmatic Marketing

2010-03-19T09:20:00.000-07:00

Barbara Nelson's talk is entitled "The Role of Product Management When Development Goes Agile." With more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, Barbara Nelson is an evangelist for market-driven products and has been an instructor for Pragmatic Marketing since 2000.

Prior to joining Pragmatic Marketing, Barbara served in product management and marketing positions for an enterprise accounting and finance software company, launching several products following the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. As vice president of product marketing, she worked closely with product managers, marketers and developers, showing the value of using market facts over opinions. She attributes her success to actively listening to the market, building products people want to buy.

Pragmatic Marketing's "Framework" is claimed to be the worldwide standard for successful product management. It defines the roles and responsibilities for 60,000 product management and marketing professionals at 5,000 companies in 23 countries.

If you are unfamiliar with the training and certification Pragmatic Marketing offers, this is an excellent opportunity to gain information.

The meeting is Tuesday, April 6, 2010, 6:00 PM

Kelley Blue Book

Aston Martin Conference Room

217 Technology

Irvine, CA 92618

949-770-7704

Food will again be provided starting at 5:30 courtesy of Technisource.

The meeting will be posted as a LinkedIn event. Please RSVP there so we have a headcount for meeting preparation.

You can download this single sheet flyer. Print and hand out to invite others or post locally.

You can connect with Barbara:

Twitter: twitter.com/barbaragnelson

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/barbaragnelson

E-Mail: bnelson@pragmaticmarketing.com

Product Camp SoCal 2/28, My Notes

2010-03-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

LFP*: Just my personal takeaways, no institutional ownership implied or intended.

On resume: It's not really about you. Lead with benefits for prospective employer. Research / Interviewing: ask "why is this requirement critical NOW?" The first answers you hear may not be the root cause of the opportunity. Present yourself as the solution to the root cause.

On sticking your foot in the door: To find a company email format, ie "first.last@company.com", search *@company.com. To find a title at a company, search "title" + companyname.

On creating your personal value proposition: are you a Vitamin or Painkiller? People buy vitamins with discretionary funds and buy painkillers in good times and bad. Catchy. "Better" is nice, "Significantly better" is differentiating. How do you do that vitamin to painkiller transform again?

On wireframes: Visio is fast and painless compared to other graphics-ware. Avoid re-invention: Search web for custom Visio stencils which may apply to your situation. (Personally, Visio has been my first graphics choice since the mid 90's. Still using 5.0. Suppose I should upgrade to the MS version?

On your career as a product: Everyone should roadmap their career. Nice thought. However, do you know anyone who's career followed a roadmap? My take: opportunity presents out of nowhere and not all that often. Recognize opportunity and be more ready to jump than not. Sometimes things will go badly. Pick yourself up. . . .

On voting with stickydots: I suspect this makes attendees "pile on" to ensure first tier offerings go early and they can get home. No objective research behind this conclusion whatever. On the "meetup:" well worth my time. Advise you plan to attend next time. "Un-conference:" right. lets.make.up.a.new.English.word.so.it.sounds.fresh. This reveals organization by marketing types (am one so I can recognize)

On anthropology and marketing: a complete mind-blower. The title may not have been voter friendly. By all means keep offering this session until I get some ideas I can apply without professional assistance.

On Pragmatic Marketing and Agile: Be certain your proposed software addresses problems the customer is looking to solve. What you (your CEO, whatever) think is (final-successwise) beside the point. Poorly thought-through user stories will crash on an Agile team. Agile teams move fast; they will run you out of ideas if you haven't done your homework and do not have real customers from which to solicit further detail. "Thought Leadership" is the best two-word complex process description I've seen in a long time. Pragmatic owns product marketing and sells it one seminar at a time. Best business model ISIALT.

On social media: Sprinkles. Quantcast. Filterbox. Radian6. Actually, she said Radian7, but the fact check department couldn't find it. Wow, Virginia, you can quantify the impact of social media.

happy to be here, thanks

David Sheriff

*legal fine print

Update on Thursday's Meeting

2010-03-01T16:09:00.000-08:00

There will be food provided at 5:30, thanks to Technisource, who is sponsoring sandwiches and drinks for our group. Technisource provides job seekers with multiple employment options, while delivering a wide range of IT staffing and technology solutions to help clients maximize their technology investments.

Correction on the parking - please note that there are some spaces that are “Reserved” and that reserved spaces are enforced 24x7 (as opposed to the reserved parking section which is only in force until 5:00 pm). Also, the entrance is off South Coast Drive, not off Fairview Road, as mentioned.

March Meeting at AAA

2010-02-16T16:14:00.000-08:00

The March APLN meeting will be on Thursday, March 4th, 6 P.M. at 3333 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa, CA (Automobile Club of Southern California). The conference room for the meeting is in the “C” building (see image). The entrance is between the “A” and “C” buildings. You may park in the “Reserved” or “Carpool” sections of the lot, which are the closest to the building, because the restrictions on parking are only enforced until 5:00 P.M.

February APLN Mtg Notes

2010-02-09T20:36:00.000-08:00

Due to a Kaiser policy, there was no presentation, but good conversation around several topics ensued around large agile adoption.

One recommendation was to use coaches and train all team members, as noted in a post on Yahoo's Scrum adoption. See Lessons from Yahoo Scrum Adoption for more.

Also, some talked about on large, complex projects, that getting good, thin slices of end-to-end feature/functionality is crtical, and difficult. See Elephant Carpaccio and Walking Skeleton.

Another topic brought up was what a snarky Scrum, where the ScrumMaster and team are prideful and arrogant in their interaction with the rest of the organization because the Scrum team are the elightened ones doing what's right, and everyone else is not smart enough to understand.

Others also described, and warned those looking to adopt Scrum, of the problems with ScrumBut.

Also, for environments of continuous changes, such as product support or operations, Kanban might be a good approach.

A question, and spirited debate, occurred around what is pair programming, what is the value and how do you sell it to management?

We also discussed the improvement (60–90% drop in defect density for some teams) from using Test Driven Development (TDD) documented in a Microsoft paper.

Agile project management tools were touched on, including Rally, Mingle, ScrumWorks, VersionOne, SeeNowDo and Microsoft TFS.

Also, the Scrum Gathering in Orlando is coming up - March 8-10.

February Meeting Details

2010-01-27T17:49:00.000-08:00

The next APLN meeting will be on Thursday, February 4th at 6 PM, hosted by Neudesic at 8105 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine.

February's topic will be an experience report from Kaiser Permanente's multi-team, dual shore mega-project to replace its pharmacy system. The project included:

introducing Scrum
running under a formal PMO structure
ramping up eight teams
several vendors
training offshore teams in Chennai, India
using embedded coaches
implementing an enterprise agile project management tool

Technorati Tags: agile, scrum, projectmanagement

Lyssa Adkins on Coaching

2010-01-26T17:53:00.000-08:00

Lyssa Adkins' presentation "What is an Agile Coach" at the Orange County APLN was great. Lyssa is the author of the upcoming book "A Companion for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Project Managers in Transition" from the Mike Cohn Signature Series.

She started off the session with a great exercise of having all the attendees go around and tell other people one thing they loved about agile, one thing they hated. She said this helped with modes of communication and encouraged everyone to get up at work, even in small groups.

Some of the items she brought up were that an agile coach has to learn to be detached from outcomes, take issues to the team, be a mirror, master your face, allow and be okay with silence, model being outrageous (what holds teams back, so be wild to get around what they can accept) and be freed from assumptions.

She also said to be willing to let the team fail. Don't save them from themselves. Some of our best learning comes from failures, and sometimes only from failures.

Be their biggest fan, but don't complement them on the good job they did. The work ebbs and flows. That's far less important than how they are doing on being a good team.

We want those we coach to be unleashed as a human being.

We also want developers to be solid developers. A great slide of hers read "Craftsmanship matters. Period." Software developers' career path can go to Tech Lead (XP is the way) and then to XP Coach, and the people stuff matters.

She also described the roles of Bulldozer, Shepherd, and Servant Leader, noting that "You'll make sure that people leave you better than they arrived", and Guardian of quality and performance.

There are changes to go through, such as switching from:

coordinating individual contributions towards coaching the whole team for collaboration
being a subject matter experts to a facilitator
invested in outcomes to invested in performance
knowing answer to asking team for answer
directing to letting them find their way
stop driving, to start guiding

There are aspects to the coach of being facilitator, teacher, coach-mentor, conflict navigator, collaboration conductor, and problem solver.

Personal retrospectives were noted as being a helpful tool. On that not, she asked the group to reflect personally if in each of several areas they "promoted" or "inhibited":

self-organization
being consensus driven
team success
trust
owns decisions and commitments
team believes they can solve any problem
empowerment
constructive disagreement

Click to view or download Lyssa Adkins' presentation on agile coaching. Also, more information can be found on her site for 1-on-1 coaching, Scrum training, upcoming speaking events, as well as her blog.

APLN Coordination Mtg - 1/21

2010-01-18T15:56:00.001-08:00

We're moving the start time back to 6:30 P.M., this Thursday, January 21st. Get involved and help shape the Orange County APLN. Looking forward to seeing you there!

1/21 Coordinating Commitee Mtg

2010-01-07T16:39:00.000-08:00

On January 21st some of us will be getting together to talk about how best to foster the APLN OC community, how to keep it active and vibrant, relevant and useful. Together we decide on the next couple of events, and on this occasion we will also be talking about new ways to support your agile endeavors and help you achieve your goals.

You are welcome to join in the fun of building a community. Bring your ideas and figure out with the group how to make them happen. This is an opportunity to be a "part of" and help shape and influence the local agile community.

We are meeting at the Starbucks in the new community across from The Spectrum - 38 Prism Place, Irvine, CA. We will start at 6 P.M. and try to finish at a reasonable hour.

Look forward to seeing you there!

More on APLN OC - January 7th

2010-01-05T22:32:00.000-08:00

The January APLN OC meeting will be Thursday, January 7th. The speaker, Lyssa Adkins, is a Certified Scrum Trainer and an Agile Coach, PMP and Six Sigma Green Belt. She is also a professionally trained Co-Active Coach which gives the skills to coach people one-on-one. She has over 15 years’ project management expertise, including time as a former large-scale program manager and director of Project Management Offices

For the last four years, she has been coaching teams in the financial services industry and coaching coaches who represent the gamut of Agile implementations, from small consulting firms to the giants of industry.

She is passionate about deepening the roles in Agile – specifically Agile Coach and Agile Manager – to help Agile move into its fullest expression.

New Meeting Address

2010-01-03T16:55:00.001-08:00

The meeting address is at Kelley Blue Book, 217 Technology Drive, Irvine. The meeting will begin at 6 P.M.

Lyssa Adkins at January Mtg

2009-12-20T06:57:00.001-08:00

Author and "lover of all things collaborative" will be speaking at the January APLN meeting, hosted by Kelley Blue Book. More details to come.

No Meeting July 2nd

2009-07-02T14:51:00.000-07:00

There is no July meeting for the OC APLN.

Moving From Scrum to XP - May 6th

2009-05-05T07:19:00.000-07:00

Denise Phillips will be speaking on XP practices and Scrum at the OC APLN, Wednesday May 6th. Many people have asked about XP and Scrum, and this is a great opportunity for an informal discussion of the differences and synergy between XP and Scrum, as well as hearing about specific implementation and experience with various XP practices.

Denise has years of experience in agile, both as a team member and coach. She has recently spoken on agile panel discusisons at local events.

The meeting starts at 6 PM at Neudesic's Irvine office, 12th Floor conference room, across the street from The Spectrum.

OC APLN Mtg April 1st - ScrumMaster Anti-Patterns

2009-03-06T12:18:00.000-08:00

Join us on April 1st at the Orange County Agile Project Leadership Network for a presentation on ScrumMaster Anti-Patterns.

ScrumMaster Anti-Patterns - Where Does It Go Wrong?

With the ever-growing popularity of Scrum, ScrumMaster has become a de facto role on many agile projects. Yet quite a few ScrumMasters struggle with the role, and a lot of organizations aren't gaining the benefits a ScrumMaster is intended to provide.

For example, do you recognize these anti-patterns? Do you know why they can cause pain?

* My ScrumMaster has never been on a Scrum team (but he took a class).
* My ScrumMaster can't really explain to me why we're using Scrum.
* My ScrumMaster is my manager.
* My ScrumMaster runs our daily status meeting.
* My ScrumMaster is busy writing code.
* My ScrumMaster never goes to lunch with us.

Through more than 4 years as a Certified Scrum Trainer and over 9 years on agile teams, I've spent a lot of time with ScrumMasters and what the role is supposed to be. But I've also seen too many dysfunctional ScrumMasters and how that affects product delivery and costs the business.

In this lively and thought-provoking talk, we'll explore the ScrumMaster role, why teams end up with dysfunctional ScrumMasters and how that hurts agile projects. We'll explore common ScrumMaster anti-patterns, why they occur and how to avoid them. We'll challenge the ScrumMaster role, compare it to other models, and address if agile teams really need a ScrumMaster.

Your Speaker:

Paul Hodgetts has been involved in lean and agile development as a coach, mentor and team member since 1998. He is the founder and CEO of Agile Logic, a local Southern California agile consultancy, and has helped companies like Microsoft, SAP, Cisco, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Kelley Blue Book achieve success with challenging, real-world agile projects

Slides from March Presentation

2009-03-04T01:58:00.000-08:00

...on building off-shore teams can be found here.

Great presentation from Edward Uy & Nikos Ioannou from Kelley Blue Book on how Kelley started their off-shore scrum teams in China and India. Kelley now has approximately 18 teams and 200 scrum users. One principle that permeates what they do is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, including using facilitated exercises from the Field Guide (separate book).

Good questions regarding apply the principles of the book were asked, such as how do you separate issues that need to be addressed from the actual person and what if there's only one person on the team that ever calls for accountability.

On the off-shore topic, KBB found the biggest improvement when the Scrum Master split user stories along technology tiers, giving someone in India the back-end part of the story, and a developer in Irvine the front-end. This increased communication and commitment to getting the story completed.

Also, KBB believes in having off-shore and on-shore team members visit the other team several times a year, and especially on kick-off of the off-shore effort having the U.S. team go to the other country for 3-4 weeks.

As far as tools, KBB is using VersionOne as their project planning and management tool designed specifically for Agile software development, and SharePoint for collaboration. KBB selected VersionOne over Rally in a selection process, and didn't include ScrumWorks or ThoughtWorks' Mingle because they didn't feel at the time, in 2007, that they were in high enough adoption. One useful discovery was using SharePoint's discussion threads for cross-team capture of agile requirements documentation.

Slides from Agile Architecture Presentation

2009-03-04T01:51:00.000-08:00

The slide deck from David Bleeker's February presentation at the Orange County APLN can be found here. Not only did I learn a lot about how to apply iterative, agile approaches to architecture and design, but I especially liked his insight on the role of the software architect and lead developer.

David's recommendation to weave good architectural design while iteratively building an application is to assign an architect to the team. You do this by making the architect the team lead. From a developer perspective, there's no reason that arcthitect shouldn't be knowledgable to do this, but the architect may not want to do this if he is more concerned with position. Otherwise, it would be great for the developers and architect.

Wed 3/4 Mtg - Agile Offshore & Five Dysfunctions

2009-02-20T00:58:00.000-08:00

Wed 3/4 - "Growing and Sustaining an Offshore Scrum Engagement"
Join us in March for a chance to hear one of the sessions from the Agile2008 Conference in Toronto last year. Kelley Blue Book's Edward Uy, Director PMO & Nikos Ioannou, Director, Industry Products, will be presenting a straightforward, sensible approach to implementing Scrum combined with a well-known team building model to help KBB successfully creat offshoring teams in China and India. Nikos and Edward will illustrate how and why they applied The Five Dysfunctions of a Team model by Patrick Lencioni to provide a foundation for growing and sustaining offshore teams several time zones away. They will cover examples of how employing this model has improved KBB's offshore engagements and overcome a number of challenges to improve the delivery of the Scrum teams.

Points include:

Making Review and Retrospective meetings more effective
Maximizing learnings during cross-team site visits
Determining the “best types of projects” to offshore in the early stages of offshore development
Overcoming productivity plateaus after several successful sprints

This presentation will also describe the important role Executive Management plays in driving the Scrum adoption for KBB and setting up these offshore offices. The presenters will review the communication channels they found most useful and the how these have changed over time.

As before, there will be a pre-meeting get together at the food court at The Spectrum from 5 - 6 PM, and afterward we'll walk to the meeting. See link to map at right.

Agile/XP SoCal Mtg - 2/18

2009-02-12T16:15:00.000-08:00

From Paul Hodgetts of Agile/XP SoCal, an announcement for another local agile user group.

A reminder that the next Agile/XP SoCal monthly meeting is *next* Wednesday, 2/18 at 6:00 PM.

Please be sure to RSVP to agilesocal@gmail.com so we can have your visitor badge ready and enough food for everyone.

-----

This month we continue our series focusing on core agile by exploring the framework and practices that make agile processes work.

Agile Project Execution
-----------------------

This talk will provide you with a practical guide to Agile software development projects. We'll focus on the Agile software development lifecycle, the necessary practices, and tips to create highly productive Agile teams. Along with a deeper investigation into key process areas, we'll also address frequently encountered concerns and issues such as the different roles on Agile projects and how they relate to traditional project roles. There will also be a comparison
of Agile and Waterfall projects and how the Agile process focuses on meeting specific product and project objectives.

Your Speaker
------------

George Schlitz is a Principal Agile Coach and co-founder of BigVisible Solutions. He has been using and championing Agile practices on projects since 2000, with extensive experience consulting in large organizations (10,000+ employees) particularly within financial services and manufacturing industries (with recent clients including Capital Group, Fidelity Investments, Barclay's Global Investors and Textron) and he most enjoys work in challenging organizational cultures. George is a Certified Scrum Coach and Practitioner (CSC/CSP) and a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).

When: Wednesday, February 18th
Networking and food, 6:00 PM.
Presentation and Q&A 6:30-8:30 PM.

IMPORTANT! In order to have a visitor badge ready for you, you MUST RSVP to agilesocal@gmail.com

Where: The Capital Group Companies
Yosemite Building
6455 Irvine Center Drive
Irvine, CA 92618
Exit the 5 or 405 at Sand Canyon.
From the 5, go south to Irvine Center and turn right.
From the 405, go north to Irvine Center and turn left.
Take the first right into the main parking lot at Capital Group.
Park there (no permit needed), go to the main entrance, look for the
signs.

Thanks to Capital Group for providing the meeting facilities.
Thanks to BigVisible and Agile Logic for providing the food.

Next APLN Mtgs - Feb & March

2009-01-23T20:36:00.000-08:00

The next APLN Orange County meetings are planned for Wednesday, February 4th and Thursday, March 5th from 6:00 -7:30 PM at Neudesic's Irvine office (map two posts below). The agenda for the meetings are below.

Wed 2/4 - "Agile Architecture - Closing the Loop"
What is the role of architecture within an agile project? How do you keep architecture engaged early and throughout in a fast-paced development effort? How do you make agile architecture work in a larger corporation? There has been a lot of conversation around agile and architecture, and February's presentation by David Bleeker will be a great springboard into deeper discussion. As an Enterprise Architect and Integration Manager at Ingram Micro, David provides leadership in SOA architecture and operations, metrics driven optimization and process development.

Wed 3/4 - "Growing and Sustaining an Offshore Scrum Engagement"
Join us in March for a chance to hear one of the sessions from the Agile2008 Conference in Toronto last year. Kelley Blue Book's Edward Uy, Director PMO & Nikos Ioannou, Director, Industry Products, will be presenting a straightforward, sensible approach to implementing Scrum combined with a well-known team building model to help KBB successfully creat offshoring teams in China and India. Nikos and Edward will illustrate how and why they applied The Five Dysfunctions of a Team model by Patrick Lencioni to provide a foundation for growing and sustaining offshore teams several time zones away. They will cover examples of how employing this model has improved KBB's offshore engagements and overcome a number of challenges to improve the delivery of the Scrum teams.

Points include:

Making Review and Retrospective meetings more effective
Maximizing learnings during cross-team site visits
Determining the “best types of projects” to offshore in the early stages of offshore development
Overcoming productivity plateaus after several successful sprints

Slides and Notes from Jan Mtg

2009-01-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

The slidedeck from January's APLN meeting, "What They Didn't Teach Me in ScrumMaster Training" presented by Phil Scott can be downloaded here. We had 14 attendees, including people from Agile/XP SoCal, Thoughtworks, Neudesic and several other companies. There was great discussion, questions, knowledge and experience shared. Some notes and summary of the presentation and discussion are below.

Some of the items shared by Phil included talking with the customers about what they think they want may not actually be what they truly want. If the customer comes from a background of fixed-price or traditional waterfall projects, there may be problems down the line. It may be better not to promise them "A, B and C" but rather "3 months effort toward your highest priorities." Much of the problem the customer might have with this is a level of comfort and trust. Getting them to agree to or "fixed budget, not fixed bid" can be somewhat of a Jedi mind trick, per Phil, but keep in mind that they still see and believe in the "illusion of predictability."

The stakeholders and executives don't understand nor should be expected to on Day 1. The ScrumMaster should coach and educate them, but that takes time. In the beginning, Phil recommended "taking the customer's temperature" often and hand-holding as often as needed. If they are steeped in classic waterfall and Gantt charts, it might be helpful to create project management plan documentation (how and why the project will be run and what the checkpoints are) to help educate and address their concerns and felt needs. Remember that, although people trump process, politics trumps people.

The importance of a strong Product Owner came up several times, and many agreed that many issues come out of any gap with this role filled well. If possible, recommended your ideal candidate for the role. Regardless of who the Product Owner is, be clear in what you need from them. Explicitly tell them, "Here's what I expect from you," and remind them of the aspects and importance of their role whenever it appears they are drifting in engagement or leadership. It was recommended to schedule regular meetings to walk through the backlog (separate from Sprint Planning) in order to establish a rhythm. By reviewing or scrubbing the product backlog together, you not only help the project overall, but also coach by modeling what it means to maintain and have ownership of the backlog.

Don't leave epics untouched because epics are risk in the plan. Decompose them into user stories early on. Also, address "dark matter" (general unknowns or vagueness) within the first few sprints. Prioritize by risk and architectural significance, as well as business value, so as to retire risk as soon as possible.

Please be sure to check back later for updates on the next APLN meetings and join the APLN OC group on LinkedIn.

Next APLN Mtg - "What They Didn't Teach Me in ScrumMaster Training"..."

2009-01-05T09:46:00.000-08:00

The next APLN Orange County meeting is the evening of Wednesday, 1/7/2009 from 6:00 -7:30 PM.

The agenda for this meeting is "What They Didn’t Teach Me in ScrumMaster Training" presented by Phil Scott, Certified ScrumMaster and PMP. Phil will present on some of challenges faced on Neudesic Agile projects that fall outside the Scrum domain. Phil is the Director of Microsoft Developer Communities for Neudesic and has coached many project managers in his role as head of Neudesic's PMO. Phil most recently spoke on a panel at the USC Code Camp event last fall.

The meeting will be at Neudesic's Irvine office (map below):

8105 Irvine Center Dr.
Irvine, CA
3rd Floor Conference Room

View Larger Map

The Agile Project Leadership Network is one of the local agile user groups in Orange County focussed on connecting, developing, and supporting project leaders, evangelizing the movement towards fast, flexible, customer value-driven approaches to leading projects of many types, and working with the software community and the people and companies outside of software and IT to help them become better project leaders. The APLN works with the Agile Alliance and supports use of various agile methodologies and practices such as Scrum, XP (Extreme Programming), and TDD (Test Driven Development).

Map of Meeting Location

2008-12-20T13:03:00.000-08:00

The meeting will be at Neudesic's Irvine office (map below): 8105 Irvine Center Dr. Irvine, CA 3rd Floor Conference Room View Larger Map

APLN OC at Spectrum Starbucks at 6 PM

2008-10-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

The first APLN OC meeting will take place at Starbucks at The Irvine Spectrum at 6 PM.

This Starbucks is located in the Irvine Spectrum Shopping Center next to California Pizza Kitchen near the major intersection of Gateway and Fortune.

Map of location within The Spectrum

http://www.shopirvinespectrumcenter.com/Search/Starbucks_Coffee.aspx#

Freeway map

http://maps.google.com/maps?rlz=1C1CHMB_enUS291&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=N%2033°%2039.127%20W%20117°%2044.745&um=1&sa=N&tab=wl

APLN is Coming to Orange County

2008-09-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

We are organizing an Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) chapter in Orange County with the purpose of promoting the growth of agile practices here, sharing real world experiences with agile projects, efforts and teams, and providing a professional networking forum for like-minded professionals.

The first meeting planned for Thursday, October 9th at The Spectrum in Irvine. We will be working on the chapter logistics, determining the meeting format, topics and speakers, and planning the chapter's next steps.

If you are interested in, part of or helping lead agile projects and initiatives, please come.

In the meantime, APLN Orange County needs you:

Contact us with your ideas and suggestions to help make this chapter yours
Subscribe to this blog for updated information and future announcements
Help guide the chapter by participating in the conversation here
Forward this link and other email announcement to your friends and colleagues