Badass Agile

Question 1 – When coaching teams when should you have one on ones with the individuals and when could having one on ones impact self organizing teams and creating silos?

Team coaching is about coaching performance in the room: How they interact, operate, flow. Can you make that flow more efficient?

Individual coaching – Should always do it for executives and individual agile leaders because:

Some conversations might need to be private

Great coaching sometimes brushes up against the root of interpersonal or performance issues, fears, etc

Coaching sessions should be brief and based on individual coaching plans or outcomes. Coaching everyone all at once will disable that.

Whether you do individual coaching for team members is up to you. I stick to business and agile leaders (anyone who can help an individual initiative or Agile spread in general) and to anyone else who requests it. Some individuals just don’t want coaching and some won’t do the homework necessary to benefit from the recommendations and improve

Question 2 – Why can’t I use a Gantt chart to track the many dependencies in hardware design, prototype development?

You can do whatever you want

Gantt charts are great for plotting sequences and dependent chains

You DON’T want to use a Gantt chart to plot things that change very frequently because it is nearly impossible to plan chaos and its a lot of work to replan it when it changes

the argument then is whether or not the things you’re describing are chaotic. The rule is if you have a mostly dependable, repeatable process, informed by years of refinement and experience, you have a mature process and it can be mapped out easily

There’s a reason why Gantt’s are so popular – for the early stages of industry, especially manufacturing, repeatable processes needed to be documented well so they could be trained and repeated (the earliest form of automation)

However, now, where creativity and autonomy are part of the process, things become unpredictable, for which Gantt charges are not as effective

This week, let’s remember one of our most important fundamentals….the ability to leap.

It’s a skill we don’t teach in school – to be ready when you’re not ready, to forget all of your doubts and fears and just GO.

It’s a habit, in the sense that the more we do it, the easier it becomes, so what can you do to leap this week? What have you been avoiding?

Collecting our lessons learned and sharing them with others is a tribal behaviour that predates formal education. Let’s talk about how to apply this in our team practices

In experimental cultures, you are always accumulating learning. Long before the internet and even formal education, we had a tradition of sharing that wisdom among the tribe – at work, we have largely lost that tradition

Learning eventually leads to wisdom; knowledge that guides action

We should always collect, refine, and share our learning

Document your learning often – you can do this in Retrospectives or Reflections

Store, categorize and groom it often

Shared documentation system

Use tags or other metadata

Make it searchable and easy to access

Review it, memorize the stories around it, and share it often

So what did we learn from the practical yet unofficial use of Agile at the small business level?

To disrupt like a startup, you have to act like one. Focus on value, plan and invest lean for effective, rapid cycles

The minute you execute you should be adjusting

Make commitments and investments (including decisions) at the last possible moment

You literally have to break the cycle of traditional planning and analysis

You can now bring these techniques to different parts of a large scale business, but only if they’re willing to act like a startup in order to get the benefits

By the way, if you have non-business friends who are yearning to start a business, teach them agile fundamentals – so much wisdom is locked up in the simple concepts that can help them place small bets, get started with almost nothing, and evolve as they grow. This could prevent an otherwise brilliant idea from being snuffed out at the idea phase by new entrepreneurs who are too overwhelmed to execute.