• First, I thank Rally for putting on this event here for us. They served a nice breakfast in a nice environment. The cost of the venue combined with the number of staff present was a significant investment in the Phoenix Agile community. Sure, they got exposure and marketing information. They also succeeded in producing and event that was neither pitchy nor preachy.
• A lot of people were there. I estimate at least 60 and there were still name badges left on the table. It was a strong showing of Agile interest here in the area.
• I thank the panelists from three local companies; Pearson, Universal Technical Institute, Infusionsoft.  They shared their stories and answered questions. This sort of sharing is important for all of us.
• Many of the questions from people showed a real desire to do things “right” and smart. The struggles are all different but we are not alone in performing them.
• I noted some of the company names on the name badges. The diversity was surprising to me. There were people from retail, utilities, government and heavy industry. Wow!
• I enjoyed meeting different people and sharing some points of interest or question. The community here in Phoenix has some great people!
• Lastly, I thank Chris Conrey from Integrum Technologies for car pooling with me. It was a quick trip and made the better with conversation. And he paid for parking!

I hope to see many of the same people at next Wednesday’s Phoenix Scrum User Group meeting.  Should be a great event!

That is a hard question to answer.  Not for a lack of information, but because there is so much out there.  A great problem!

To answer the question I just sat down and started typing a flow of information.  Below is the email I sent to the him, largely unchanged.  Eventually I should turn this into a polished document.  I hope you find it valuable and get a starting point that works for you!

Learning

First, I have a few Agile learning philosophy tips.  I’m sure you have your own learning style and I don’t want to pre-empt that, just give you a frame of mind.

Focus on “academic” (pure) knowledge before you dive into “useful” (applied) knowledge.  But, remember that full understanding doesn’t come without application.

There are many things about Agile that are so different in thinking to traditional project and people management that we may want to reject some parts and pieces right off the bat.  Suppress this reaction by seeking to first academically understand the concepts and practices. Like you are just taking a class in college that is a general education requirement with no thought of actually applying it after the final exam.  But you do need to get an “A” on the final, so learn the topic.

Work through the application stages of knowledge.  A concept pulled into Agile from marshal arts is “Shu-Ha-Ri”

• Shu - You learn and do the basics, sometimes without knowing why, because the masters say so.
• Ha - You begin to mix your own experience into the basics, learning where your knowledge can enhance the new knowledge.
• Ri - You are a master and the basics are just part of what you do, are now part of your experience.

Individuals, teams and enterprises go through these stages all the time.  The hardest is to accept the Shu stage because we have to unlearn other habits and trust the new knowledge.

It’s about people

As I stated in my presentation, Agile is about people.  Yes, eXtreme Programming (XP) is a set of Agile practices that tell developers to pair program and other specific things.  Yes, Scrum is a definition of certain meetings, documents etc. that help a team work in a more Agile fashion.  But these and other Agile frameworks are designed the way they are because it is the best way for people to communicate and work together.  Don’t let the practices become more important than the people.

Agile Manifesto

The definition of “Agile” may be ambiguous to you.  It also takes some abuse in companies who claim to be Agile but really only have some of the outward practices without following the true spirit of the movement.  To remove this confusion, go to the Agile Manifesto website, read, study and learn the statements and the principles.  If you are working to follow these ideals, you are becoming Agile.

Frameworks

The Agile Manifesto was created by smart people who had already developed one development framework or another, realized they had some common foundation and got together to define that foundation.  So, one of the best was to start being Agile is by learning and using a framework. The more popular frameworks (sometimes called methodologies) are, in my view:

• Scrum – The one with the most traction and widest use.  It is a project management level framework that focuses on the development team.  It is simple to understand the basics and get started but that makes it simple to do the motions without being Agile.  I started with this framework.
• eXtreme Programming – XP is also well known but not widely implemented.  It has some of the same elements of Scrum but emphasizes engineering practices where Scrum does not.  Pair programming is the most well known element of XP and probably the reason many reject it. XP and Scrum work very well together.
• Kanban – This one is currently gaining in popularity and originated out of lean manufacturing ideas.  It concentrates on work flow, making the flow very visible, thereby exposing bottle necks and waste that should be corrected.

I found Scrum the easiest to personally pick up and to evangelize into the enterprise.  Practicing it for three years now, I have much still to learn and am seeking wider Agile knowledge.

Online Resources

The internet is FULL of great resources about Agile.  Videos, presentations, blogs and email lists abound.  And it is just as good as what you find in books.  So don’t be afraid to go searching for things.  You will find treasures!  Let me give you some starting points.

• http://mountaingoatsoftware.com – This is Mike Cohn’s website.  He has written excellent books on Agile like “Agile Estimating and Planning” The site is full of good ideas and, I think, the slides of every presentation he has ever given.  A gold mine for learning.
• http://implementingscrum.com – This is Micheal Vizdos’s website, a Certified Scrum Trainer.  He uses cartoons to poke fun and knowledge about Scrum.  He was my ScrumMaster trainer and still helps me today. His training style is thoughtful and active.  If you want to take a course, he’d be a good trainer to pick.
• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/ – The email group for discussions of all things Scrum.  All the Agile luminaries, it seems, show up here and answer questions.  Troll the archive for great practical advise.  If I could never buy another book about Scrum, I’m not worried because this group has all the authors brain’s wired!
• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011 – This is a video of Ken Schweber speaking a Google about Scrum.  This was the first video that hooked me into learning about Agile.  It’s worth the time even though Ken is a bit dry.
• If video is a good learning mode for you, check here: http://agileroots2009.confreaks.com/ for videos of all the session of the Agile Roots 2009 conference.  Great stuff there!
• http://phxsug.org – This is the Phoenix Scrum Users Group website that I mentioned at the end of my presentation.  We have monthly meetings on the 3rd Thrusday of the month.  We focus on Scrum but other frameworks come up from time to time.

Books

• Anything by Mike Cohn.
• “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great” is awesome for doing this key element of team building practices.
• If you are introducing these practices into a workplace, you need to be a great change agent.  The book “Fearless Change” is indispensable knowledge for such an effort.

There are many more great books out there.

Try it!

The best way to learn is by doing.  Apply some of the principles and framework pieces as you can.  Try a retrospective or make a task board.  Use it, inspect how you did, adapt and improve.  That’s how it works.

Training

Education is compressed experience and a good class can jump start your improvement efforts.  If you don’t feel up to pushing change in you organization, hiring an Agile coach is a good investment.

Ask Questions

Find a community, site or friend.  Ask questions of them and yourself.  Ask here if you like since I like to answer!

Meeting details are available at the PhxSUG website, where you can sign up for this event and to hear about other group meetings.

I’d love to meet you there!

Let me just repeat that the meeting was an awesome way to spend an evening.  Great discussions and smart people willing to talk about their experiences with Scrum.

Come join us for free food and great discussion about the Product Owner role!

Certified Scrum Practitioner

The end of September my application for Certified Scrum Practitioner was approved!  How I could have been quiet about that I don’t know.  The process was interesting.  My first submission draft resulted in some requests for additional information.  The requests were spot on, pointing out weaknesses and missing information.  I was very glad for the review and extra work.

Approval took around two months.  I was disappointed and worried about this slow turn-around.  Of course, this was also the time of the recent tumult when Ken Schwaber and Jim Cundiff left the Scrum Alliance.  Maybe that had an effect on the processing time.

Gaining the level of CSP had been helpful with my work.  A few skeptics who actually know little of Scrum or Agile have expressed some additional interest after learning of the new level.  Some seem to take me a bit more seriously.  I see this as a positive benefit, but a minor one.  Continuing the learning is more important to me.

PhxSUG Topic Tables

October 21st the Phoenix Scrum User’s Group had our monthly meeting.  This time we concentrated on drawing for ideas from each other.  We declared the event “Topic Tables” to have multiple discussions at once around various topics.

After we wrote suggested topics, we voted on them as a group.  The four highest vote winners were distributed teams, integration of Scrum and traditional project management, calculation and use of velocity measurement and measuring performance of team members.  I found it to be a fun and interesting way to do the meeting.  It allowed for both learning and getting to know new people.

Ignite Phoenix 5

I posted earlier about my involvement with the crew of volunteers working on Ignite Phoenix events.  Last week Ignite Phoenix 5 went off so smoothly, I still can’t believe the lack of drama for us the organizers.  I love the Phoenix area and the great people on the team and that attend our awesome events!

Local ScrumMaster Discussions

I have been enjoying more interaction with local ScrumMasters and Agile practitioners.  In particular, I enjoyed a recent discussion with Chris Young, ScrumMaster at Integrum Technologies.  He has some great ideas and questions around working with small teams and handling the Product Backlog.  The contrast to the large teams I am currently working with was very interesting.  I hope to do some story workshop study with him very soon.

Developer Ignite 2

While I have worked on organizing Ignite events, I have never presented at one.  A few weeks ago I submitted a topic for Developer Ignite 2.  Intel has a significant presence in the Phoenix area.  They have taken up to sponsoring an Ignite event centered around software development topics.  My submitted topic is “The True Measure of Agile,” which was accepted for presentation!  The event will take place tomorrow, on the evening of November 11th.  I have been practicing my presentation as much as possible.  20 slides in 5 minutes without stopping is not easy to work in!  Certainly forces focus on the core message.  We’ll see how I do tomorrow.

My desire is to reveal the need to work toward the values expressed in the Agile Manifesto.  That whatever framework or practices you use, it’s not Agile unless these values are supported.  I’ll find out if I can do that in only 5 minutes!

I reported my impressions and notes of the meeting on the group website.  Head over there to see what I learned about agile developer excellence and Scrum developer certification possibilities.

Good Parts

The meeting was hosted by Infusionsoft, a software company that recently implemented Scrum to reportedly great results.  Being great hosts they had a huge “room” for the group, tables, chairs, wireless Internet and pizza for all.  A projector beamed the image of an empty chair on the huge wall, waiting for the special guest.

I was greeting attendees at the door with Amanda Pulawski, another volunteer.  We enjoyed helping people find their badges which we failed to alphabetize (a mistake).  We did not see the meeting actually start and walked in to see a very large group!  I roughly counted more than 80-90 in attendance.  Months ago I never imagined to see such a large number of people at PhxSUG’s first meeting.  Very encouraging!

As I walked in Perry Reinert (@PerryReinert), Director of Development for Infusionsoft, was working the microphone.  He shortly introduced Ken Ward, the local Scrum practitioner who was the main force to get the group organized.  And we quickly moved to the main event.

On the large projection Ken Schwaber (@KenSchwaber) was getting settled into the chair.  After joking about not being able to see us, he began his “Scrum, But” presentation.  This presentation discusses the too common occurrence of organizations who use a modified Scrum instead of all the practices.  They usually say something like “Oh, yes!  We do Scrum, but not [insert difficult practice here].”  (Here is a video version of the same presentation with Ken Schwaber.)

Ken stopped the presentation from time to time so the attendees could form small teams to discuss different scenerios of  “Scrum, But.”  He would come back on to ask and take questions from the small teams or the group as a whole.  It was an interesting and useful format.  (You can request a similar live event for your group from the ScrumHub events page)

After the interactive session with Ken about a third of the people left the meeting.  It was getting quite late, for reasons explained below.  Perry then introduced Jim Cundiff, Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance.  He had great remarks about how Scrum is growing and spreading.  The new Scrum Alliance tag line, “Transforming the world of work” reflects this wider view.  I asked some questions about the new certification exam and what it means to currently certified ScrumMaster, Practitioners and so on.

Bad Parts

A big picture question hit me as I was sitting in the back, looking at the large group below Ken Schwaber’s huge video image:  How does one do personal interaction and learning with such this many people?  Agilists know that efficient learning takes place in a highly interactive environment.  If attendance at PhxSUG continues at even half this level, scaling the interaction will take some work and thought.  Ken’s use of small group forming helped tremendously.

The video connection was bad.  Almost unusable bad.  Every few minutes Ken’s image would freeze for 10 seconds or so and then unfreeze to fast-forward to real time.  The fast-forward parts made the audio completely unintelligible for those seconds.  These pauses were very frustrating.  I don’t know what to blame, from the client software at both ends to connections in the middle.  It was just bad.

The audio nearly matched the video in quality, which made for a very quiet audience!  The remedy to the audio problem was to hold Perry’s mobile phone to the microphone while Ken spoke into his phone on the other end.  One might think that is a bad solution but it was better than the remote meeting connection.

A cautionary tale for remote presenters unfolded after one of the break-out points.  Ken somehow bumped his microphone mute button as he began speaking.  For several minutes he could not hear any reports of problems as he spoke about the next slides.  He gracefully recovered and repeated what we missed and even promised to do another session for us in the future to make up for the problem.  It was an honest mistake but did make the meeting last longer than planned.  Lesson: Watch that mute button!

Inspect and adapt will solve these birthing pains.

A Challenge to the Group

My last concern is that the Pheonix area Scrum community appears dormant even after such a sucessful and friendly first gathering.  PhxSUG has a Yahoo! group but traffic in the email since the event has been zero.  Does this portend an attitude of passive participation?  Or is it just that everyone is still getting ramped up to the idea of a Scrum group?  I’m not sure.

I intend to work on creating buzz and energy among the Scrum practitioners here in the Valley of the Sun.  I challenge all Phoenix area agillists to talk, exchange, communicate, meet-up, tweet and whatever else.  We’re probably all Internet savvy and know there is no need to wait till the next meeting to interact.  Interact now!

• Join the Yahoo! group and post questions, answers, observations there.
• Contribute photos to the Flickr group created for all of us.
• Create and announce meet-ups or other events.

Let’s take the energy of the kick-off meeting to create a dynamic, connected group!

Thanks

Thank you to Ken Ward, Perry Reinert, Infusionsoft and Ken Schwaber for a great first meeting!  The location was awesome.  The results impressive.  I look forward to the next meeting on May 21st!