Groom a Coach

These notes are based on Groom a Coach Workshop conducted by Satisha Venkataramaiah on 8th July, 2017. The workshop started by asking participants to introduce themselves and their perspective on coaching. Each participant was supposed to describe meaning of coaching and their first coaching experience. Once this was done Satisha described Balance Coaching as a way to elevate a person step by step to a convenient position where s/he can take decision himself/herself.

Steps of Balance Coaching

• Design Alliance
• Choose a Topic
• Exploring a Perspective
• Resonant Choice
• Actions - Brainstorming
• Commitment
• Accountability
• Inquiry
• Challenge

Having described this we got a practical demonstration of balance coaching on one of the volunteers. This helped us understand how this is done. Then during the hands-on session groups of 3 Players were formed. Each one got an opportunity to act as coach, client and observer.

Terms and conditions of the discussion:

• Ask Powerful questions
• AWGO: Articulate What's Going On
• Metaphors
• Develop Intuition (No solutions should be provided)

Conclusion: From this we can conclude that “Coaching is a step by step process to elevate a person from Low Energy to Positive Energy by using Emotions, Choices, Dreams and Experience.”

CMMI & Scrum Workshop......

We had recently been to an introductory session on CMMI and how it can be extended to Scrum, organised by Lean Pitch, Play Scrum, Chennai Community.

Our knowledgeable host Karrupiah, with nineteen years of experience and a CMMI auditor, had taken the time out to enlighten us on the topic. Learning is Karuppiah’s passion and he has also acquired wide range of globally recognized certifications.

After a warm greet & meet session, we regrouped based on longer duration of practicing scrum, experience - exposure to CMMI and agile enthusiasts.

First on the agenda was an interactive discussion about Capability Maturity Model (CMMI) and ISACA – the body owning the CMMI.

We were introduced to concept of Constellation in CMMI. Constellations are group of components that may be combined to form a body of knowledge. Below illustration displays the constellations that exist in CMMI model. 

The number of process applicable to a constellation have been called out in detail in the presentation and can be referenced from the same. 

An implementation of CMMI is called as institutionalization and take two forms as illustrated below: 

Each of these levels have specific process areas (22 – 24 in all) that can be broadly grouped into four major areas as shown below.

As we progressed, we discussed slides covering differences, challenges, and common failures for CMMI & Scrum.

Towards the end of the session, we did a hands-on session (team activity), to identify the applicable CMMI process area and corresponding Scrum Ceremony for a given list of practical project scenarios.

We were enlightened on CMMI concepts and how CMMI could be extended to Projects adopting a Scrum Methodology.

Looking forward for the next session of enlightenment.

Happy Learning!! 

Attitude Problem of Employees in Organization

This is based on the problem given during PlayScrum Practitioner's corner: How to help the attitude problem of employee in organization?

Facilitator: Kedar Vaidya

This is based on practitioner's discussion on above problem. Kedar Vaidya facilitated  this discussion and provided inputs to reach the root cause of the problem and directions to solve the problem. Below image depicts different reasons for having the attitude, why people behave so, problems that arise due to this and ways to fix the issues.

Chat Discussion on Scrum for Fixed bid project

Below is a discussion and summary of views on execution of fixed bid project using Scrum and y-o-y gains. This discussion happened on 22/10/2014.

Shantanoo: Here is a question or something for brain work...

How in large outsourcing contract for application development where we use agile; the cost model would be on fixed price?

Shantanoo: And in addition, how would we measure and show y-o-y productivity gains? While projects are running on agile?

Satisha: There was a question. Is Scrum suitable when we are working on fixed bud project?

Satisha: Customers are willing to cooperate but internal sales folks have aggressively bid and won project

Satisha: These 2 folks from delivery team know that can't deliver it

Satisha: Also know waterfall is not useful

Satisha: So they are using Scrum

Satisha: But they see changes coming in at the end of every sprint

Satisha: So they were asking should we use scrum as they don't have provision for change control in their contract

Satisha: What would you suggest these guys do?

Sneh Shahani: First thing that they should do is to set clear expectations.

Atmaram: Also I think they are not able to identify hence freeze the requirements.

Sneh Shahani: And as anyways project execution is tradeoff between resources available and features to be delivered. So then then can only try and deliver whatever MVP or value add they can give.

Atmaram: Prioritization of us also should be focused

Atmaram: Absolutely so Scrum should be used to identify and deliver MVP and from any budget that is remaining can be used to complete remaining set of prioritized US

Satisha: Their worry is if we keep on taking changes they may not be able to meet scope per contract

Alok: I ditto with Sneh .... They need to trade off MVP along with CI ..

Shantanoo: May be this should be our next topic in meet up?

Shantanoo: If together we can create model for dealing this with customer then it would be great

Satisha: I did learn how a small startup handled this case which goes in line with what I do and preach

Satisha: He even showed what they delivered

Shantanoo: Here is a question or something for brain work...

How in large outsourcing contract for application development where we use agile; the cost model would be on fixed price?

Shantanoo: Here was last question i put up last time

Shantanoo: And in addition, how would we measure and show y-o-y productivity gains? While projects are running on agile?

Satisha: How do you show it now?

Satisha: Cross question: how do you calculate cost in case of fixed price? What parameters do you use?

Shantanoo: At present we show it based on productivity against euro value

Importance of Zero Talent Virtues in Agile Software Development

This article explains importance of virtues that depict the attitude of a person than the talent. This is based on a very popular meme on social media which lists down zero talent virtues like being on time, doing extra, being prepared, etc and applies that into agile environment.

This article is an example of collaborative discussion between many contributors from PlayScrum Vadodara community. A special thanks to all the contributors: Anand Vyas, Anil Sharma, Bhavin Acharya, Chintan Sisodia, Deepak Joshi, Harit Pandya, Jay Pandya, Misha Vaidya, Rajesh Panchal, Sachin Patel, Satisha Venkataramaiah, Sneh Shahani, Vaibhav Dhingani, Vishal Shah

Please have a look at the article by visiting https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2016/june/the-importance-of-zero-talent-virtues-in-agile-sof

Case Studies, Problems and Solutions from Practitioners from 11 June 2016 - Practitioner's Corner

Problem 1: How do I select a pilot team for adopting and implementing Scrum ?

Solution:

• Select a project (pilot) which requires shorter delivery to market.
• Choose a mature Cross functional team, small in size which already has good knowledge on the application.
• Choose teams having better Engineering practices
• Teams which have little or no escalations
• Engage metrics team of the respective organization to do an Agile assessment for the chosen team.
• Most important, teams for which there is Buy-in from Senior Management.

Problem 2: Scrum Master is a developer. He is associated with a team which is working on Niche technologies. Problem the Scrum Master faces are below,

• Scrum Master and the team is overworked.
• At regular frequency, Team members frequently drop their papers.
• Though Management is able to provide an alternate (Backup \ Shadow) resource, it is pulling down team's velocity.
• There is lot of emphasis from Senior Management on Daily reports which Scrum Master finds it as a waste of time.

Solution :

After a long discussion it was understood that overworked team members were not the reason for team members quitting at regular intervals of time. It was understood that the niche technology was the driver behind team members logging in extra time and at the same time quitting. If the Management could take care of their needs, this leakage could be arrested.

As far as the reports go, the 'PlayScrum' practitioner's have suggested the 'Scrum Master' to keep adding metrics to the report, make it complex so that one day 'Senior Management' could come back saying that this report is no longer required.

Case Study : XP on top of Scrum increases mature Scrum team's Velocity

Top Management decided that entire organization has to transition from Waterfall to Scrum way of project delivery

Many projects across the organization's distributed teams started to use Scrum (in 2 week sprints) and velocity data was recorded for 1 year. After 1 year, when the Top Management wanted ways to improve velocity, by doing XP, the teams were able to show significant improvement in velocity - primary reason being in XP, team could pick up items as and when completed).

Thanks,
Natarajan

Open Problem Statement from 30th July 2016 - Practitioner's Corner - Chennai.

Problem Statement

This problem was brought to the table by a practitioner 'Scrum Master' in the 'Practitioner's corner'. It could not be discussed due to the lack of time. Problem statement below,

The Scrum Master's team is functionally and geographically distributed scrum team. Scrum Master and QA team is co-located in Chennai. Development team 1 sits at Singapore and Development team 2 sits in another geography other than the two mentioned above. 

Scrum Team does not connect regularly with Product Owner unless when it is the 'Sprint Review'. Zeroth sprint always runs ahead of the Scrum Team's sprint. In the Zeroth sprint, group of architects discuss with Product Owner and come up with 'Architectural stories' and 'Feature stories' which 'Scrum team' has to work on.Team follows a 2 month sprint window whose breakup is below,

• Build and QA happen in parallel in the the First month + Integration testing with Upstream and Downstream teams.
• QA team provides UAT support to business in the second month.
• Scrum Team does not have resources for working on Non functional requirements (ex. performance testing).
• Release happens at the end of every 3 months

Issue faced by the Scrum Team:

• We hear from the 'Scrum Master' of the impacted team (details below) that even though there is the above process followed, 

• The application in production has performance issues (especially - Non functional ones)

Due to lack of time, we were not able to take up this problem statement and figure out the root cause. 

This is an open problem statement which can be picked up for discussion in upcoming Practitioner's corner.

Thanks,

Natarajan