Several years ago, I began exploring ways to incorporate collaborative practices and activities familiar within the agile community to improve the effectiveness of activities conducted by Human Resources that impact agile teams. What started in 2014 as an optional way for team members to get additional performance review feedback, has grown into a methodology and series of collaborative activities (or do I dare say “games”) to gather feedback and assess necessary skills to improve performance reviews, peer-to-peer feedback and even improve job interviews. Establishing and growing the World Wide Technology innovation practice for the last 3 years, we have hired all staff within a global consulting team using a series of collaborative games that determine if a candidate’s career needs, skills & desires align to the job at hand and most importantly provide a means to assess how well a candidate is able to collaborate with other team members when engaging in knowledge work. Within our innovation team, we use collaborative practices such as story telling, metaphor, and strategy games to exchange constructive feedback and build trust between team members, their customers, and their manager. Stated simply, use of collaborative play and games to enable feedback and provide coaching to peers, managed staff (direct reports), and even senior managers can significantly improve the mindfulness and understanding of feedback/coaching provided while also significantly increasing the psychological safety associated with such performance management activities and discussions. Join us to review what we have learned on our journey to introduce collaborative practices and play to better align Human Resource activities to be supportive of the agile mindset.

Several years ago, I accepted the challenge to build a global semi-autonomous innovation practice that focuses on collaborative consulting for rapid concept & strategy development. Sure this all sounds super cool, but part of the challenge was building such an innovation practice within a large traditionally structured global IT organization. When starting the innovation practice at World Wide Technology (WWT), our management team was aware of self-organization models popularized within the agile community, such as Holacracy, Spotify and Teal, and provided advance warning to not try those. Rather applying lean principles (since management didn’t forbid those), we focused on elements of our work that provided value to our customers and in doing so defined 4 key activities that are supported by the team members within our consulting practice. By defining these 4 key activities, team members are enabled to work within flexible boundaries necessary for knowledge work supportive of innovation but the definition of the activities provide a basis for management and coaching to evaluate business and team member performance. Using the defined activities to assess business & team member performance, we can reflect on how well team members and the business have performed and establish challenging yet attainable goals for future growth & improvement. Lastly, the key activities of the consulting practice create a mechanism that all members of the team can share their work enabling awareness, collaboration, feedback, and appreciations between team members on a globally distributed consulting team. Join us to learn how aligning around 4 key activities has enabled the World Wide Technology (WWT) innovation practice to grow by providing a simple management mechanism supportive of knowledge work that enables measurement to coach team member performance and evaluate business growth.

A frequent discussion within online forums and at agile meetups is how to hire the right people for an effective agile team. Many have commented that interviewing candidates using personally biased and possibly dishonest information on resumes, certification results, LinkedIn chatter, and assessment of technical skills can fail to identify good candidates. Imagine instead, you were able to assess relevant skills and behaviors supportive of being an effective member of an agile team using simple interactive games within a job interview setting. In this workshop, participants will experience a series of simple games designed to be used within an interview setting that focus on skills assessment for specific agile team roles, simulating real-life collaborative work activities and evaluating the human skills necessary to be an effective member of an agile team.   Interview games use game play and play metaphors to allow interviewers and candidates to simulate work scenarios and then debrief on demonstrated communication abilities, collaborative problem solving, creative thinking, exchanging feedback, identifying ways to improve, and empathizing with others. During this highly interactive session, participants will work in small groups and conduct mock interviews activities to experience the sequence of interview games and gain hands-on experience in how to facilitate and debrief the games presented.

The agile manifesto challenges us to favor customer collaboration more than contract negotiation, but what does that really mean and how do you actually do that?  Join us to experience a “fun” ideation framework that teams can use to engage in dialogue with their customers to determine what needs of the team / customer relationship are most important at the present time and then as a group decide on practices to support the highest priority needs.  As the ideation framework is completed, teams and their customers will be challenged to work together and achieve consensus on a limited number of priorities since we all know what happens when we try to make EVERYTHING a priority.  “Let’s Be Awesome” concludes with teams establishing and agreeing upon working agreements to build an “awesome” relationship between customer and team.  In this hands-on and highly interactive workshop, participants will have a chance to learn how to use the “Let’s Be Awesome” framework and cards to facilitate a team / customer ideation session focused on establishing the foundation for a strong relationship; an opportunity to learn, review and discuss many agile practices supportive of effective team / customer collaboration; and a chance to experience a “MarketPlace of Ideas” where they can exchange recommended patterns and practices for customer collaboration from others also attending the workshop.

The agile manifesto challenges us to favor customer collaboration more than contract negotiation, but what does that really mean and how do you actually do that?  Join us to experience a “fun” ideation framework that teams can use to engage in dialogue with their customers to determine what needs of the team / customer relationship are most important at the present time and then as a group decide on practices to support the highest priority needs.  As the ideation framework is completed, teams and their customers will be challenged to work together and achieve consensus on a limited number of priorities since we all know what happens when we try to make EVERYTHING a priority.  “Let’s Be Awesome” concludes with teams establishing and agreeing upon working agreements to build an “awesome” relationship between customer and team.  In this hands-on and highly interactive workshop, participants will have a chance to learn how to use the “Let’s Be Awesome” framework and cards to facilitate a team / customer ideation session focused on establishing the foundation for a strong relationship; an opportunity to learn, review and discuss many agile practices supportive of effective team / customer collaboration; and a chance to experience a “MarketPlace of Ideas” where they can exchange recommended patterns and practices for customer collaboration from others also attending the workshop.

If you have a portfolio, or you are on a team that is within a portfolio, chances are you either have agonizing and costly multi-day planning meetings to try to plan out work between teams to minimize dependencies and roadblocks, or you don’t do any planning and find yourself experiencing constant changes, challenges and impediments and may not have a good understanding of the near-term goal your team is working toward - sound familiar?  If it does, join us to experience “FireDice Portfolio Lab” where multiple concurrent sessions of the “FireDice” game are used to simulate a software development portfolio - participants can experiment during the lab to determine planning activities are too much, which are too little, and hopefully find a combination of activities that are “just right”.  “FireDice” is a team simulation that uses dice and cards to challenge teams to determine how to establish team-level WIP limits to promote the flow of work while also maximizing the value of work delivered.  In our lab environment, independent teams will come together to form a portfolio, players can choose which planning activities, signaling systems, and feedback loops are necessary to promote the flow of work from the portfolio and maximize the value delivered at the portfolio level.  “FireDice Portfolio Lab” allows participants to experiment with several different multi-team agile frameworks (Scaled Agile, Enterprise Service Planning, etc) to assess if the cadence, planning activities, and feedback loops prescribed within a framework are effective for their environment.  Participants can also choose to create their own framework or cadence for portfolio planning and then assess its effectiveness.   By participating in the lab, participants will learn the intricacies of effective portfolio level planning, and learn how to measure and assess if sufficient planning and feedback mechanisms are in place to promote flow and maximize the value delivered by all teams within the portfolio.

This workshop is intended to allow participants to experience simple practices that can improve the effectiveness of performance reviews and begin to better align traditional performance review discussions to be supportive of the agile values of learning and collaboration.  Traditional manager to employee performance reviews challenge the adoption of agile as all too often they are based on managers providing one-way feedback to staff based on information of questionable accuracy; however, by simply changing the nature of how performance review discussions are facilitated between managers and their employees, focus can be directed to collaboration and learning.  In this session, participants will pair up as managers and employees and go through a simulated performance review discussion.  The performance review will be based on a traditional SWOT (Strengths - Weaknesses - Opportunities - Threats) self-assessment activity but rather than writing down notes and then discussing with their manager, participants will be asked to build models using pipe cleaners to support each component of the SWOT analysis.  Once models have been built, participants will engage in a simulated performance review discussion where they will present & discuss their models with their manager - each pair will change roles to allow all participants to experience both the employee and the manager roles during the workshop.  The intent of this exercise is to create a framework for performance review discussions that has greater focus on discovery and learning.  All too often, performance reviews are facilitated using “context-rich” language which can lead to managers “telling” employees what to do without a full understanding of what the employee things.  This modeling technique shifts focus away from “context-rich” language so managers and employees can have a more open and emergent discussion where better better feedback can be provided.  Using the models to facilitate discussions, managers ask more open questions, such as: “can you tell me why you chose to use a red pipe cleaner for that?” and this leads to mutual discovery of improvement and learning opportunities.  Lastly we will touch base on the science behind the recommendation to refer to “reviews” as “effectiveness” reviews vs. “performance” reviews.  Join us to experience this technique in a safe setting, so you can decide how simple modeling techniques may enable you to better align “effectiveness review” activities in your organization to support agile values and principles.

Agile and Lean principles call for teams to delay decisions and activities until the “last responsible moment” so as to minimize rework and waste.  While this sounds good in concept, sometimes teams fall victim to waiting until it is “too late” to make a decision or get started on a needed activity resulting in missed opportunities and/or down-to-the-wire heroic efforts to meet a deadline.  At the same time, successful adoption of many agile and lean practices requires a culture of “organizational learning”.  Come experience a “mash-up” of these concepts in the “Last Responsible Moment” LEGO Learning lab.  In this workshop, participants will engage in a competitive LEGO simulation where teams will be asked to build a simple LEGO structure - each team’s structure will be scored based on its design, height, and how long the team waits to begin, whereby an incentive is provided to wait until the last responsible moment.  The intent of the build activity is to allow teams to improve skills to make effective self-managing team decisions, as ultimately each team must decide when they wish to begin building, so experience is gained in identifying trade-offs, and using decision making protocols.  After building, teams will debrief on what went well and where there were opportunities to improve seeking to increase their scores.  The focus of this workshop will then pivot to focus on practices supportive of organizational learning between teams.  Following the build challenge, participants will be given an “experiment canvas” and asked to define a problem, hypothesis, and indicator related to attempting to improve their score.  The build challenge will then be repeated to allow participants to conduct their experiments and test their hypotheses.  Participants will leave the workshop having experienced an engaging exercise they can use within self-managing teams to improve team decision making skills, and learned how to complete an “experiment canvas” they can integrate into practices such as retrospectives to improve organizational learning and sharing insights between teams.

One of the most retweeted Tweets from Agile2015 held during August 2015 in Washington, DC was “If you adopt only one #agile practice, let it be retrospectives. Everything else will follow. http://bit.ly/retrospection  #Agile2015” posted by Woody Zuill.  If you are interested in putting this into practice (or looking for new ideas and activities for the retrospectives you are already having with your teams), join us for a session to learn two new collaborative retrospective games.

We will begin with “Temperature Check” which uses the backdrop of a thermometer to allow teams to have a round-robin discussion regarding team activities that have team members “boiling” vs. other activities that are “freezing” people out.  During the game, participants will experience a “round-robin discussion” to discover challenges impacting the team, engage in “paired discussion” so as to collaboratively brainstorm improvement ideas, and conclude with “weighted voting” amongst all team members to identify what to do.  These activities are all driven from a single game canvas using Post-It notes allowing temperature check to be played in-person, or it can be played online using a collaboration platform for distributed teams.

Next we will visit the “House of Pain” which is a new game intended to promote higher levels of team happiness - during game play, team members use a canvas and Post-It notes to build a metaphorical house that represents “pain” they are experiencing as a team.  The house begins by capturing “types of pain” as participants work in trios - each type shared is validated and prioritized by group discussion and roman voting.  Once the highest priority pains are identified, team members brainstorm the source (root cause) of the pain.  The team then brainstorms actions that they hypothesize will reduce / eliminate a source of pain.  The game concludes by team members targeting the actions they wish to implement and for each prioritized source of pain - the team completes the “House of Pain” by defining an indicator to measure the impact of each prioritized action to reduce pain.  “House of Pain” can be played in-person using paper and Post-Its, or it can be played online via a collaboration platform for distributed teams.

In a conference setting, each game takes just under 20 minutes to allow participants to experience the game play and flow, so this session will entail playing both games with a brief period for Q&A.  All attendees will receive facilitation guides for each game and having experienced them in the session will be well prepared to use these new games in retrospectives following AgileDC.

Each year VersionOne conducts a survey to assess the state of the agile community, highlight emerging trends, and provide insights on practices and techniques that are proving successful.  I observed an interesting and alarming trend within the 2015 survey data.  Many in the agile community have commented that they frequently are asked to evaluate the effectiveness of agile methods, which leads to questions about how do we measure success.  According to VersionOne’s 2015 survey data, the most frequently tracked agile metric to determine success on a daily basis is “Velocity” - Jim Benson (author of “Personal Kanban”) has referred to velocity as “an imaginary number divided by an arbitrary amount of work” - it is a very imprecise metric due to the high variability and non-scientific origin of the data used to compute it.  I hypothesize that many of the questions surrounding the effectiveness of agile methods result from focusing too much on the use of imprecise metrics, such as velocity, to measure progress and determine success.  Additionally, VersionOne’s survey data from 2015 reveals that metrics based upon precise quantitative process or business data (such as: cycle time, customer retention, revenue/sales impact and product utilization) are used less frequently on agile projects, despite the fact that they all can be measured.  Join us for a discussion to explore the hypothesis that many are questioning the effectiveness of agile methods because too frequently imprecise metrics are used to determine success.  Using VersionOne’s survey data, we’ll talk about the importance and potential benefit of shifting to use the metrics that offer greater precision near the bottom of VersionOne’s list to determine success, offer guidance on how to track them, and how to interpret trends observed to make informed decisions.  All participants attending will receive a worksheet that highlights the discussed metrics with insights for how to interpret trends observed.  The following clip from a July 2015 episode of ThisAgileLife establishes the hypothesis and context for this presentation: https://youtu.be/TmiJQkQMlas

Are you overwhelmed and/or confused as to which metrics can reveal insights to make fact-based decisions to properly manage your agile software development portfolio.  Join us for a the story of a journey, where we will use the metaphor of “going on a road trip” to explain and demonstrate simple yet effective metrics for agile portfolio management.  As we go on our road trip, we’ll highlight the importance of defining and then using quantitative “roll-up” metrics to enable leadership to make informed strategic decisions without slowing delivery team activities while at the same time providing a foundation for team self-management and autonomy.  We’ll use the road-trip metaphor to depict the challenges that teams and organizations encounter attempting to manage their portfolio without effective portfolio metrics defined.  Think about what driving on a road trip would be like if your car didn’t have a check-engine light or a gas gauge, sound risky???  The good news is: it doesn’t have to be that way, and believe it or not, if you have measurements at the team level creating actionable portfolio-metrics is easier than you think.  As we recommend simple portfolio-level metrics to guide our road trip, we’ll define them, share how to interpret them, discuss the insights they provide, and offer guidance on how to gather or aggregate them from team execution data.  We will also touch on why and how the use of an easy to understand metaphor has aided significantly in creating and sustaining engagement amongst stakeholders for portfolio inception and governance activities.  Participants will leave having learned how to successfully navigate their next enterprise-wide initiative using quantitative data to promote alignment, maximize return on investment, foster engagement and reduce risk - everyone attending will receive a printed guide (worksheet) summarizing recommended metrics for agile portfolio management discussed.

Recently I had the privilege of interviewing several agile coach candidates in consideration to join my firm.  Instead of spending all of our time asking typical interview questions about past activities coaching agile teams and helping organizations transform, we asked candidates if they would be willing to coach several volunteers through a quick game of Jenga so as to see how they would perform coaching members of a simulated team.  The integration of game play into interviews for positions like agile coaches, ScrumMasters or any team member for that matter can provide valuable insights into prior experiences and assess communication abilities at a much greater level of fidelity than is yielded by typical interview questions.  The benefits of using games within interviews for coaching positions are analogous to the benefits gained by using a pair-programming session to assess both the technical skills and communication skills of software developers on agile teams.  Moreover, these valuable insights and the opportunity to experience how a coaching candidate would interact with actual team members was gained in just over 5 minutes.

Join us at AgileGames 2015 for a Jenga session where you’ll have an opportunity to experience game-based techniques for job interviews that will allow you to gather more precise information regarding candidates under consideration in less time.  During this GameJam session, participants will work in groups of 3 or 4 to go through simulated coaching interviews.  These interviews will be facilitated in a round-robin manner to allow participants to experience both what it is like to facilitate a game within a job interview as an interviewer, as well as provide an opportunity to experience what it is like to be interviewed using game-based techniques as an interviewee.

If you’re practicing scrum, you’re probably well versed in velocity, escaped defects and other common scrum metrics.  This presentation starts with a review of essential scrum metrics, how to properly use them, and how to interpret their trends.  We’ll then quickly pivot into advanced and emerging metrics that many scrum teams (and programs) have found beneficial - examples include: how to measure and quantify the cost of delay when your team is blocked, how to ensure your team is investing the right amount of time to maintain clean code and create automated test scripts, and how to assess that your team is sharing work to support the whole-team approach.  We’ll review a comprehensive taxonomy of scrum metrics and show examples of presented metrics in use.  We’ll conclude talking about opportunities to better empower scrum teams to self manage by integrating economic and budgetary data with scrum metrics - consider this example: rather than reviewing estimates & actuals for all the stories completed in a sprint, determine your team run rate and track the cycle time for each story completed, then use these two data points to compute the cost for each story completed during a sprint, finally ask yourself if your customer or sponsor would be happy with the amount they invested to complete each story - if you’ve never tried this type of economic analysis with your team, trust me, you’ll have a much different (and probably more effective) discussion.  By attending this session, participants will learn a comprehensive list of metrics and practices to gain greater insights to team / project health and reduce delivery risk - participants attending will receive a metrics worksheet that will list all metrics presented and include why and how to track each of them.

The practice of establishing & working within Work-In-Progress (WIP) limits helps to ensure scrum teams are able to deliver on their goals.  Proper WIP limits promote flow & enable self-managing teams to best decide where to focus their efforts.  While the concept of WIP limits is easy to understand, many new scrum teams struggle to establish & work within them - new teams may not realize the risks of not respecting WIP limits until it is too late.  In this workshop, participants will experience gamified learning on how WIP limits can improve scrum by promoting stories to be completed throughout a sprint vs. waiting until the final days.  “Fire Dice” was created as an agile learning game designed to provide new teams a safe environment to learn how to establish & work within WIP limits - “Fire Dice” come into play whereby teams can choose to exceed their WIP limit (using special Dice); however, this comes at a cost, hence players must assess the pros/cons of using Fire Dice.  The workshop and game will also provide participants an opportunity to improve and practice making respectful decisions as a self-managing team.  In this workshop, participants will have FUN by playing “Fire Dice” to experiment with establishing proper WIP limits seeking to improve flow within scrum based activities.

I have the privilege of coaching a few teams building a product and I have the ability to show their real team metrics LIVE - I might add the team has also given me permission to show their metrics to others, as we know that some metrics that a team keeps may only be intended for use by the team (we’ll highlight what these metrics are in the session).  Hence in this short demonstration session, we will pull up the team’s metrics live and see what’s going on - the "good" stuff and the "bad" stuff, as the reason to use metrics to guide team improvements is they tell us the TRUTH about what's really going on.  We will look over metrics such as cumulative flow across the full value stream, story cycle time, story lead time, block time and others.  We will go over how to review the data from multiple metrics and look for trends resulting from changes to the team and/or the team’s process - such analysis can stimulate lively discussion in team retrospectives so as to assess the impacts of changes the team makes to their process and also to identify adverse trends and/or bottlenecks to target with future changes and improvements.  We will also review how the team’s data is communicated to other teams via a monthly Operations Review meeting focused on program-level / multi-team improvements where teams exchange information on what they are working to improve, why they are seeking to improve, and what indicators / metrics are being used to assess the impact of changes.  Attendees will leave having observed a demonstration how to use quantitative data to achieve improvements using the scientific method.

Agile and Lean principles call for teams to delay decisions and activities until the “last responsible moment” so as to minimize rework and waste.  While this sounds good in concept, sometimes teams fall victim to waiting until it is “too late” to make a decision or get started on a needed activity resulting in missed opportunities and/or down-to-the-wire heroic efforts to meet a deadline.  This workshop entails a competitive LEGO simulation where participants will divide into small teams, each team will be given the same simple LEGO build challenge, and then each team will be able to conduct their own experiments as to when the “last responsible moment” really is.  Following the LEGO build challenge, participants will engage in a debrief to discuss the outcome of the challenge, identify factors that helped to successfully identify the last responsible moment, establish linkages between the LEGO simulation and agile software development activities, and of course congratulate the winners of the challenge.  During the debrief, participants will complete a debrief worksheet to reinforce key learnings and takeaways from the simulation that they will be able to take with them from the session.  Best of all, this is a LEGO session, so you will get to play with LEGO and fun will be had by all!

Join us to review and create a new “picture” that depicts the fundamental elements of the perfect user story.  Using a series of small group discussions and collaborative activities, participants will review user story writing essentials including: story hierarchy; the 3-C’s of user stories; canonical story form; proper language to use within user stories; splitting stories using a thin vertical slice; capturing metrics for complexity and business value; and adding acceptance criteria to user stories.  During the workshop, participants will be challenged to sketch the outcome of their group collaboration to create their own visual depiction of the perfect user story that they will be able to take with them after the workshop to help them recall what they learn.  Workshop participants will leave having reviewed the essential elements to write effective user stories for agile software development, while also experiencing the power of sketch and visual thinking as tools that can enable improved communication and understanding of complex information.  All will be engaged and have a bit of fun creating their own unique sketch of the perfect user story while also admiring the visual creations of fellow workshop participants.