The Daily Standup

How Much Control Do We Need? Do you ever wonder what the correct threshold for being in control is? Is there ever a time where it is better to NOT have control? Join V. Lee Henson as we explore what control is and when it is healthy. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

How Your Agile Team Could Compete In The Olympics - Mike Cohn Let the games begin! Are you and your team ready for the Olympics? I hope so, since the games start tomorrow.
I want to share a few Olympic events at which I think agile teams would excel.
First are the speed events: swimming, sprint canoeing, the marathon, and the shorter running events. The emphasis agile teams place on going faster and seeking continuous improvement will serve them well in competing in these.
Some of these events, such as the swimming and running relays, require handoffs. Good agile teams become adept at small, frequent handoffs (such as from programmer to tester). This skill will serve an agile team well when participating in Olympic relays.
Good agile teams are cross functional. That is, individuals with different but complementary skills collaborate. Cross-functional agile teams would excel at the many sports that require different types of players such as football, hockey, cricket, volleyball, and water polo (my personal favorite).
These sports include experts who are highly skilled in one dimension. But these single-function aces need to be balanced with the skills of other team members.
While a cross-functional Olympic team can include specialist experts, the team will benefit from multi-skilled members. These pi- or m-shaped people are proficient at two, three, or more skills needed by the team. Sign these folks up for the triathlon, pentathlon, heptathlon, or decathlon!
The best agile teams collaborate and synchronize their work. We see this when testers create test plans while programmers are still coding rather than waiting for the programmers to finish. Agile teams who have mastered collaboration and synchronization could look for Olympic success in events such as rowing or artistic (synchronized) swimming.
A team’s Scrum Master would do well running the hurdles. Who better to clear obstacles?
And good agile teams excel in delivering the outcomes expected of them in the time frames desired. Teams who hit the bull’s eye should give archery a try.
Finally, I have to add that I’d like all agile teams to compete in the Olympic trampoline event. Shouldn’t work be a bit more fun? And what’s more fun than bouncing on a trampoline and winning a gold medal at agile,
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Ditch the Crystal Ball: A Simple Way to Prioritize Your Team’s Work - Justin Hawkins We have over 200 ideas in our backlog across our suite of applications. Each of those ideas represents anywhere from 3 days to 3 months of work for our product and development teams to fully define, build, and release. All said and done, we could keep our teams busy for 5 years with only the things we already know about and there are more ideas coming in every day. So how do we possibly prioritize this giant pile of possibilities? Here’s our dirty secret. We don’t.
https://productcoalition.com/ditch-the-crystal-ball-a-simple-way-to-prioritize-your-teams-work-a5f547ed7c88
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ScrumMasters NEED to Rethink Their Role or Become Extinct...
1) Help the team learn to self-organize in different ways 2) Listen for impediments out of the teams control and work quickly to get those removed 3) Anticipate problems and help the team avoid them. 4) Become equipped to radiate information about the teams work.
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Strategy To LAND Your Next Product Manager Role How can you find your next job in this economy? It is actually MUCH easier than you imagine! Join V. Lee Henson as he explores what you need to do TODAY to land that ideal role.
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The Untold Story Behind The Key Bridge Collapse in Baltimore How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

T-Shaped Personas Key Concepts

• A persona is an abstract representation of a typical user or customer. We often focus on the buyer persona and the moments-that-matter for our buyer’s journey. This article focuses on the customer already using our product or service.
• A feature is an important part, quality or ability of a product that makes it distinct or better; it usually contributes to the overall value proposition.
• A product feature matrix maps product(s) on one axis, to features on an intersecting axis. It is typically used to compare competing, similar products, or differentiate a product’s versions from product Gamma to Gamma+, Gamma 2.0 and so on.
• The T-Shaped person is a talent management concept, attributed to McKinsey & Company, that describes the depth or domain expertise of an individual along the vertical stroke of the letter ‘T’, while also describing that same individual’s breadth across varied other disciplines along the ‘T’ horizontal bar.
• A T-Shaped Persona is a new concept. It’s a business strategy tool, similar to the talent concept above, visualized by a ‘T’; it also conveys a breadth and depth. Its differences start with its job — act as a visual guide to inspect a persona’s adoption and use of our product(s). The vertical stroke of the letter ‘T’ signifies depth of product experience, while the ‘T’ horizontal conveys typical persona attributes like geographic, firmographic, occupational, and other traits.

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Stop Doing So Many Spikes - Mike Cohn One of the more common mistakes I see teams make is relying too much on spikes. A spike is an activity a team performs to get smarter about something. With a spike, a team isn’t trying to immediately deliver a new capability; instead, they are building the knowledge that will allow them to deliver the new capability later.
Spikes are a great tool, and I’d expect every team to use them...but not on everything they work on.
The best use of a spike is to reduce excess uncertainty. This could be uncertainty about how a feature should work or about how it will be built.
A team may opt, for example, to spike the user interface for a particular feature. Or it may use a spike to determine if a technical approach is feasible or will perform at the required level.
Each of these can be a good use of a spike. The problem comes when a team wants to use a spike on everything. Spikes should be used only in cases of extreme or excessive amounts of uncertainty. Spikes should not be used to reduce the typical, garden-variety uncertainty that exists in all work.
Further, spikes should not be used to eliminate uncertainty. Teams need to be comfortable bringing work into their sprints or iterations with open issues remaining.
Is your team reluctant to allow work into a sprint with any remaining uncertainty? That’s sometimes the result of team members feeling excessive pressure to estimate perfectly, to always achieve the sprint goal, or to always deliver everything that they brought into a sprint.
If that is happening, a Scrum Master or coach needs to work with outside stakeholders or whomever is creating these unrealistic expectations. Sometimes it’s even the team members putting this pressure on themselves.
But what’s the problem with frequent spikes anyway? It’s that overuse of spikes extends your time to value. This is especially true when the spike is done in one iteration and the rest of the work in a subsequent iteration.
Overuse of spikes also reduces the extent to which teams overlap work. This can increase the burden on testers.
For example, consider the case of a programmer who uses a spike to reduce the uncertainty of a backlog item. If that item is brought into the next sprint, the programmer’s work has been made simpler by the spike, but the tester’s has not.
If your testers are struggling to keep current with the programmers, consider whether the team is doing too many spikes. It’s a good question to ask yourself even when the testers don’t seem overburdened, if you want to succeed with agile. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

6 Micro-Habits of Highly Effective Leaders

1. Great managers follow simple habits and practices to stay highly effective.
2. They reframe fear as a sign to evaluate multiple options, ask questions, or reconsider assumptions instead of letting fear get in the way of making decisions or taking action.
3. Instead of giving power to naysayers by allowing them to influence their thinking or how they make decisions, highly effective managers stay away from them.
4. By working on things within their control instead of wasting time on things outside their control, highly effective managers expand their circle of influence.
5. Maximizing their team’s potential is their primary focus. By highlighting each individual’s strengths and combining them with the right opportunities, highly effective managers build high-performance teams.
6. Effective managers are highly self-aware of the limitations of their minds. They don’t let cognitive biases get in the way of how they think or make decisions.
7. They use their peak productivity period to do some of their best work. Matching energy to the cognitive demand of their work makes them highly effective.

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The BEST way to Improve Company Culture Is To KILL It First... You’re working long hours, for low pay, either in an open office environment that nobody likes or working remotely and feeling like you’re going to wake up tomorrow to one of those dreaded HR meeting invites. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of work-life balance anymore, because the gap between the two has disintegrated, and life is so expensive right now that you’re perpetually working in larger chunks to salvage smaller slivers of life. You’re not happy. I get that. And if we’re here to be honest, I’ll tell you I’m not happy either. All respect, but I’m not here to listen to a bunch of complaining or to resolve interpersonal issues all day. I’m in the same boat as you, only I don’t have anyone to complain to. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/