True Agility Requires Us to Re-examine Our Beliefs

Damon Poole, Founder and CTO of AccuRev and Vice President of the Agile Bazaar

Too many projects that “go Agile” are actually far from true Agility. They end up reverting to old habits or just change the labels on the activities that they are doing without changing what they actually do on a day to day basis. As a result, many so-called “Agile” projects get few if any of the benefits of Agile and some are even worse off than before! Why does this happen?

Years of software development experience prior to Agile has given us certain habits, opinions, mental models, and core beliefs both at the individual and cultural levels. Reading books on Agile, getting Scrum certification, and participating in an Agile project are all good ways to gain new experiences and learn new techniques, but it takes a while to counter the inertia of core beliefs, especially if we are not aware of them on a day-to-day basis.

This session will give you an opportunity to uncover and re-examine your mental model of software development by taking a look at the top ten Agile blind spots. This will allow you to discover the blind spots you or your organization may have so that you can work towards removing them and start experiencing the full benefits that true Agility offers.

Bio

Damon Poole is Founder and CTO of AccuRev and Vice President of the Agile Bazaar (http://agilebazaar.org). Damon is a methodology and process improvement expert with 19 years of experience helping companies of all shapes and sizes across a wide variety of industries find and realize their ideal process. His “Do It Yourself Agile” blog is at http://damonpoole.blogspot.com.

We're getting ready to launch our meeting series for 2010 - 2011.  Per your request, we've changed the meeting date to be the second Thursday of the month to enable you to attend other meetings in the area.

Yesterday we had our kickoff meeting for the agile team that's building a donor cultivation and management capability for the Partnership for Successful living in Nashua.  The goal of the meeting was to have the team ready to begin work next week, which we accomplished.  I have to acknowledge the team for moving through a lot of material at a very rapid pace.  Learning to write User Stories, for example, is often a whole-day class.  My explanation lasted about 35 seconds, then we just started doing it, and it worked fine.  We're particularly fortunate to have Terri Landry on the team whose extensive agile background will be a big help with the team's learning process.

The team is comprised of IT professionals from the Nashua Scrum Club who have generously agreed to donate their time (Al Beaulieu, Linda Cataldo, Gerry Gan , Terri Landry, Bruce Magnuson, Rick McLaughlin, Lee Menegoni,  Sean Reilly and George Sluz) and Partnership for Successful Living Staff (Carolyn McLaughlin, Miles Pendry and Venessa Sarlo). 

Over the next four weeks, the length of the first iteration, the team will be focused on a few major areas:

• Getting basic infrastructure in place - email accounts, shared calendars, team work space, etc.
• Helping Vanessa, our Product Owner, write process-focused user stories for some of the most frequently used donation scenarios
• Learning Sage, the donor management software, by attempting to implement a simple process in a test database
• Learning what data is collected and used for donor management across all of the agencies that comprise the Partnership for Successful living

We'll be posting periodic updates on the team's progress on the Nashua Scrum Club web site.  If you subscribe on the main page of the site, you'll get automatic updates.

Nashua Scrum Club is in the process of applying for federal non-profit status.  We're doing this for several reasons.

• People have expressed willingness to donate funds to the club, but their donor-advised funds will only permit them to donate to a registered 501(c)(3) organization.
• We're committed to connecting volunteers to agile projects for non-profits.  Being a non-profit ourselves will enable us to participate in organizations for non-profits, like the NH Center for Non-Profits.
• Various merchants provide discounts for non-profits.
• Non-profit status will enable us to apply for grants.

Where are we in the process?

We've been approved as a New Hampshire non-profit.  Our paperwork for federal non-profit status is complete and we're raising funds for the $400 needed for the application.

Why do we want money?

There are several reasons we'd like to have funds available for the club.

• We currently have no reliable revenue stream.  If we can't secure a sponsor for a meeting, the club organizers pay for the venue out of their own pocket.  If we have funds, we have other alternatives.
• We have other expenses.  There are a couple of purchased components used on the club's web site, for example.
• We would like to be able to offer programs that involve an up-front investment that recoup their expenses through paid tickets.

How can you help?

We'll have a place to provide contributions at the back of the room for our April meeting. Please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with any questions.