Just Nail That One Thing

I have become to value that the team should be imposed to only one new thing at the time. For example bringing in team room, pair development or TDD should not happen in a huge bang but a transformation time is needed. However when I had a chance to run an agile day with senior management I forgot this important lesson. I got over ambitios and tried to achieve too many things at the time.

1. I started with presentation covering agile development philosophy, results from our experiment and also the needs for more advanced future adaptation. All this in 1.5 hours with active discussion. Try to keep your presentations focused.

2. We then applied Open Space Technology and went through three sessions. This went fairly well considering we were only 6 people and all new to this way of working. Some difficulties in coming to a conclusion, but time-boxing still helped to cover the issues.

3. At the end I tried to run a 58 minute agile simulation. I combined XP Game and Scrum Simulation and run a preparation phase with vision creation, then two sprints 10min each and finaly a closure phase. This is OK and could be done again with some slight improvements, but where I made a huge mistake, was that I wanted to wrap up the results from Open Space within simulation. Time pressure from the simulation, new practices coming at fast pace, and meaningfull work at the same time. Not likely.

So my lesson; if you have some very important issue at your hand, do not try to be too clever. Just focus on nailing the one task with the highest priority/value and make sure it gets DONE (aka implemented, tested and documented). If you chose the wrong issue, well buhuu, that's tough.

On the bright side it at least wasn't anything like Dave Nicolette described happening during Jon Kern's presentation. So maybe it was ok from the learning point of view, and at least the journey still continues.

Head up. Reflect. Repeat.