Tandem Coaching Blog

Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile Part 1

Dive into the world of Agile Metrics, spotlighting Cycle Time's crucial role in Scrum and Kanban integration. Discover how embracing this often-overlooked metric can lead to significant gains in predictability and efficiency. This article marks the beginning of a series, aiming to demystify Agile measurements and their practical applications for today's dynamic project management landscapes.

Information Radiator – Sprint Health

Information Radiators are a great way to make things transparent for a team or organization. The radiator pictured above I a sprint health radiator. It can be used however you choose to implement and using whatever colors you select. I just happened to be using a white board and green, blue, and red dry erase markers when I created the one pictured above.You could also make this smaller on a flip chart and create a new one daily to show progress over time which is really cool because the team can see how far they’ve come each day. It also shows them when new work is added to the sprint or when things are not moving along as expected. Take care to ensure that this information radiator is used to display and radiate information that is useful to the team to see the health of the sprint and make decisions about changes they might need to make in the way they are working. Don’t use this as a whipping stick to prod the team to work harder, faster, or more recklessly!Let me give a description of the radiator parts, options, and how it’s used.

Information Radiator – Gut Check

Information radiators are a great way for you to communicate information to a team that they just are not seeing for themselves. It also helps you to not have to nag the team with information they aren’t ready to hear about things they are doing that self-sabotaging.I created this radiator when I was working with a team that had gone through several sprints where they kept voicing that they were going to finish all the work until the last day when they finally admitted that they were not going to finish. I’m not sure if they were deceiving themselves or if they were afraid to admit failure but either way there were several reasons why I could see early in the sprint that they were not going to complete the work, but they couldn’t accept fate until the last day of the sprint. By then, there wasn’t much that could be done to change directions or not frustrate stakeholders with surprise unfinished work.

My Agile Journey to CEC

“If you want to be a CST, do something about it. Get out there. Join the Agile community. Go to user groups. Go to conferences. Speak at conferences. I want to see you and know who you are. And you can never stop coaching. You can’t be a good CST if you aren’t coaching. That’s where everything you know comes from. That’s where you gain your credibility and true expertise that can help people.”

Coaching – It’s more than just asking questions

A common belief is that the difference between coaching and managing is simply asking questions rather than giving orders. I used to believe this. Instead of making decisions for my teams and telling them what to do I would ask them questions and get them to derive their own solutions. I thought that meant I was coaching. But the more I got into coaching the more I really wanted to make sure I was doing it right and being effective. So, over the past two years I have invested in myself and in my craft. I have learned everything I can about professional coaching and gotten mentoring by master coaches.

Definition of Done – More Than a Checklist

This is Mark. He challenges me. He confronts me. He inspires me. I think he is amazing. Mark doesn’t do things because someone like me who claims to know a bit about agile says so. He looks at the world from every perspective. I love this about him because he forces me to think deeper than I’ve ever had to in many areas. He stretches me as a coach and forces me to keep growing.Definition of Done was an area where Mark really inspired me to dig deep. This was his concern …“I hear and see people teaching Definition of Done like it is a checklist of all the things a team has to do in order for a user story to be done. I think this undermines ownership of quality code by the team because the checklist becomes a crutch and an excuse to be mediocre. It causes people to say things like, ‘Well it meets the definition of done,’ when they know that the code still isn’t as good as it could be. It develops the attitude of, ‘Oh well, it wasn’t on the list so I don’t have to do it.'”

Psychological Safety – On Taking Chances

Okay, so the truth is that this picture is not me. It’s not even Vermont – where I happen to be working and freezing right now! It’s my cousin Theresa and it’s in Illinois. She is standing on her Dad’s frozen pond and loving it! When I saw her post this picture on Facebook all I could say was, “That is so cool!” But other people who viewed the picture were saying things to her like, “Get off there!” and “Are you nuts!” and “OMG you are scaring me!Experiencing great things in life sometimes means taking risks. Without risk we will never be as innovative as we could be because we’ll always be playing it safe. Some people are afraid of taking risks because with risk comes the possibility of failure. But, mature agile leaders and teams will recognize that failure doesn’t have to be bad. We learn things through failure that we would never know if we hadn’t tried and flopped. We learn what we never want to do again and what changes we can make to create a better team or product in the future.

Agile Manifesto – What it means to me

The Agile Manifesto talks about uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. It goes on to state that through this work and helping others, four consist values have developed. To me, these values go far beyond software development and set a platform for making decisions and forming thought processes.