mr-katari

[mr-katari]

Is Agile Dead?

I’m in the IT services industry, specifically serving the federal government, and have often scratched my head at the general productization of Agile, variants of Agile, Lean, etc. Within the services market I specifically serve the federal sector who is always last to adopt anything. While It can be said that the Agile S-curve is at a saturation point it doesn’t hold true when looking at the public sector. The concern I have is the amount of money that is being spent on a product that has hit or exceeded its saturation point (in this case Agile).

To me Agile is dead but not from a value standpoint. I think it died when it became a product and less of a mindset (I slightly hate this term because of its flowery context). I believe many of the problems contributing to the death of agile stems from the fact that now as a product, lexicon and rigid process framework it is difficult and expensive to adopt. As a “consultant” who makes a living off of providing transformation services to the federal market place I cringe everyday at the transformation work being done. The value is in the mindset and manifesto yet we preach that this value can’t be realized without some new framework and it’s shiny certifications. Give me a team of talented and motivated individuals and I could implement the manifesto using a waterfall approach and deliver successfully. In fact this has been done plenty of times.

The products that enable that mindset and manifesto will continue to “crest and crash” over time. The fall of scrum gave rise to Kanban and so on and so on. As responsible service providers, particularly in the public sector, we need to boost our efforts to drive our clients adoption of the mindset without worrying about the products they adopt. I think doing so will enable them to be agnostic and can continuously change as new “products” enter the market. Yesterday it was Waterfall, after yesterday it was Agile, today it’s SAFe, after today its DevOps, tomorrow its <insert adverb/adjective>Agile. Any organization committed to continuous improvement should be free to learn, learn from and grow.

http://vitalitychicago.com/blog/reports-death-agile-have-been-greatly-exaggerated

[mr-katari]

The Wonders of Trello

Most who know me know that I’ve been a big proponent of Trello for a number of years now.  I’ve gotten several free months of gold membership just by referring people.  Additionally, most who know me professionally know that I’m obsesssed with 18F, GSA’s presidential innovation fellows brainchild.  I just recently found out that 18F uses Trello for their task management and for agile management.  It works people!  Check it out: https://trello.com/18f3.  My wife and I have been using Trello to perform agile programming to manage our household.

[mr-katari]

Why Data Transparency?

Since I started blogging about using agile programming for managing my household some folks have asked me why I am so transparent with my tasks and if I felt that it’s a bit too personal.  Honestly, while I recognize the need for privacy I also recognize the power that transparency brings.  It helps folks become more self aware.  While I wouldn’t put on blast my finances for obvious reasons but making my tasks or to do list transparent for the public to see it gives me a sense of awareness that there is SHIT to be done and that I need to do it as the world is also seeing this.  Oh, and as it turns out we the people also expect our government to act the same way.  Hence the reason for Obama’s data trasparency act (http://www.datacoalition.org/what-is-data-transparency/data-act/).  “It requires the Department of the Treasury and the White House Office of Management and Budget to transform U.S. federal spending from disconnected documents into open, standardized data, and to publish that data online.”  It just helps put accountability into people’s hands.

[mr-katari]

Now that we’ve completed our move and come back from vacation we will resume sprinting.  Backlog has been updated and work items are being processed as we speak.  Wife and I will be doing sprint planning for Sprint 4 today!!!  Details to follow.

[mr-katari]

IFTTT Test

[mr-katari]

Sprint 2 Recap & Sprint 3 Thoughts

I’m combining our recap from sprint 2 and thoughts for sprint 3 into 1 post.  My wife and I are moving to a new place this week and as such things have been chaotic.  We found that it was too difficult to plan and timebox a move since there were constantly things we could not plan for in advance and as such we had to do things reactively.  As such we ditched our scrum based approach and have moved to a psuedo-kanban approach just for sprint 3 while we do go thru with this move.  I use the word psuedo because we can’t use WIP limits as things MUST GET DONE - no exception.  However, we do see the benefit of information radiation in the form of a kanban board.  This sufficiently gives the wife unit satisfaction in KNOWING that things are being accompished and that her “planning” is working.

As far as sprint 2 wrap up in concerned, we did hit a few hiccups.  Which we need to get better at addressing.  We had some last minute travel plans that hit causing us (me) to not finish all of my tasks.  In the future we need to do better job of planning and anticipating scope changes.

Breakdown of work accomplished:

Planned Velocity (# of stories) - 25

XS - 13

S - 6

M - 4

L - 2

XL - 0

Actual Velocity - 20

[mr-katari]

Sprint 1 Complete - Metrics

We’re data geeks at the end of the day.  As I mentioned we are experimenting with using t-shirt sizes to measure complexity.  The following metrics breakdown how many stories we were planned for grouped by complexity rating.  It comes as no surprise but the 4 stories that were not completed were assigned to me.  I need to do a better job of either estimating commitments or managing my time better…I believe the latter is probably my best course of action…the goal is #happywifehappylife right?  Overall successful sprint.

Planned Velocity (# of stories) - 33

XS - 6

S -18

M - 7

L - 2

XL - 0

Actual Velocity - 29

[mr-katari]

Sprint 1 Complete - Retrospective

We wrapped up a successful sprint 1.  But regardless of how well we executed there is always room for continuous improvement.  As such and in the spirit of agility my wife and I ended the sprint with a retrospective to think about what went well, what didn’t go so well and what could be improved.  Our discussion led to the following thoughts:

What went well:

organized

easy to track tasks

easy to see progress throughout the week

put more ownership on both of us

able to assign due dates based on priority

allowed us to be more accountable and gave us a sense of urgency

What did not go so well:

better estimate LOE

not diligent about doing scrum everyday

scrum calls were a diff time each day we had them (inconsistent)

need to do a better job of realistically planning of what we can do

[mr-katari]

Test for Twitter

Test

[mr-katari]

Agile by being Agile

Day 3 update, we’ve decided against adding social items to our backlog as generally speaking they will be prioritized higher creating a biased situation.  What we decided to do is manage what we can do via capacity planning from the perspective of free hours to burn.  For example if I am out of town Fri - Sun then I will only commit to those work items that can be completed Mon - Thurs as my capacity as decreased due to vacation.

[mr-katari]

Our backlog and scrum board, we are utilizing labels for estimation and due dates to signify when things need to be completed by.  We will use google docs to capture retrospective notes.  Props to Trello (www.trello.com) for building such a great task management tool!

[mr-katari]

Agile Programming For Your Family

For long time now a source of frustration in my household has been the lack of action on my part (the husband) to do house hold chores.  It’s not due to indifference or that I just hate doing mundane tasks but mostly due to other more fun things in my life taking priority or simply me forgetting to do so.  The wife will ask me to wash the dishes, or take out the trash or fold clothes and I’ll casually say “yes Hun, I’ll take care of this later” and later happens and NOTHING gets done.  Multiply this by 100 and by 365 days for 3 years and you can imagine a very unhappy wife.

Now things outside of my home life has been great.  Most notably with respect to my career.  I dived into the world of Agile Programming and iterative development about 5 years ago.  For quite some time now I’ve witnessed the power and benefits that come with managing development projects using an Agile methodology.  I can talk hours on end about the benefits of transparency and accountability and lean development principles and how it can benefit any development project.  The more I started to think about it the more I realized the benefts of accountability, transparency, and lean development can be applied to things outside of development - such as family management.

My attempt to bring happiness back to my wife (for all things related to chores) I pitched the idea of using Agile management to family life.  Now my wife is does project management has heard of Agile but has never witnessed the benefits.  So I pitched it as both a learning experience for her and a method to ensure that I do the things that I promise her I would.  She was immediately on board.

Yesterday, Monday October 26, 2015 we started our journey towards Agile programming for the family.  Taking concepts from SAFe and Scrum and Kaban I’ve come up with a tailored concept at that we would apply going forward.  We started out by developing a vision statement where both her and I play multiple roles.  As product owners we decided that our vision statement is “To Create an Effecient Household while Maintaining Personal Balance”.  Additionally, as product owners we started to develop backlog which we knew would be living and that we would continually add to.  As a result of a first pass through we created a list of about 50 items which included things like washing dishes, packing lunches, doing laundry, taking out trash, responding to mail, going to the mall, getting groceries etc.  Next as a scrum team members we went through an exercise of estimating complexity.  Since we don’t actually need reporting metrics we opted agianst poker planning and decided to use tee shirt sizes to estimate complexity.  Next we decided to start by working in 1 week sprints; Monday to Monday.  We would have a scrum call every evening on our way home from work.  The tool of choice is Trello (www.trello.com) which we will use to manage our backlog and sprint progress.  As of now its Day 1 in our sprinting and I will continue to update this as we progress towards our goal of a happier life at home.

[mr-katari]

Using Scrum to Manage The Family

Today marks the start of a new platform by which I plan to manage my family affair.  My wife and I will be using Agile Scrum to manage our daily lives.  I will be blogging about it here at Mr. Katari’s Daily Musings.  Stay Tuned.