Too Many Ideas and Not Enough Time

I was rebooted this week and that inspired me to write a new blog post in a long time.  I have been itching to write about tech and ideas that I have been learning since joining my latest job (checked my LI profile to see that) but nothing had motivated me enough just yet.   My co-workers were also subliminally influencing me on being more active due to their highly active blogging/social media behavior.  My current job has presented great opportunities that have really rekindled a passion for tech for me and I always did love working.

This week things changed.  I went through a training that I was not keen on.  So here goes my first post in a long time… (bear with me)

This week I went through Agile training conducted by none other than Ken Rubin and to be very honest I was skeptical going into it.  “Why you ask?”  Well, I consider myself be an Agile expert.  I have been executing agile in various ways (as it evolved) for over 10 years and have executed multiple successful agile transformations/transitions.  I have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t.  I recently presented on Leading Agile Transformation at AgileCamp in Newark, NJ.  Yes – I am the only one without a profile pic (doh!).  I had the privilege of sitting at an executive roundtable on Agile where I got my first exposure to Ken’s Agile views.  We had very similar views.

After attending 3 days of grueling training on Agile that was conducted at the highest level by Ken, I walked away learning a few key things.  We learned the basics and I found myself realizing that this was valuable not from an education perspective for me but from a reboot perspective.

Reboot?  Yes, the same reboot that resets/restarts a computer or as we now know affectionally with almost every darn super-hero movie – it is stripping a concept down to its core and rebuilding it back up.  I prefer the latter to describe my experience this past week.

I started to realize that I was allowing my past experiences, which have built up my Agile knowledge and prowess, to create an implicitly biased view of Agile for me.  I took a few notes but primarily kept focusing on “rebooting/resetting” my mind.  My key takeaways:

• Controlling WIP by Constraining and Optimizing – get some cursory information from Ken’s Blog Post on Timeboxing
• Focus on idle work not workers – The Baton analogy works well from Ken’s slides here
• Balancing predictive vs adaptive planning – Details can be found from this post.
• Quantifying the benefits of a POC/Tech Spike/Prototype (Buying Information) – Good info here by Ken
• Range answers – See Adaptive Planning by Ken

(Yes I did not give full details above as I wouldn’t be able to do it justice the way Ken did)

I walked away with an appreciation that I needed this reboot to ensure I apply Agile properly.  Not with a bias but taking the framework and rebooting it for the current needs while definitely borrowing from the past.  I need to start from the foundation (“the base framework”) not from the biased version of it from my career so far and then add my applicable experiences or “lego blocks” if you will appropriately.  Eliminating the bias was important – REBOOTED!  Excited to apply this going forward.

What did learn new? I did learn about SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) at a detail level (only had known about it at a cursory level) and how in truly agile fashion, companies have taken the base framework as just a guideline.  Companies have adapted and customized it to their needs.  The Lego Case Study (as pointed out by Ken) is a great example of this.

I not only highly recommend Ken as an Agile trainer but recommend getting his book – Essential Scrum.

Is this a promotion piece on Ken Rubin?  No – it is an honestly written post on what I walked away with and how Ken was able to reboot someone who has been doing agile for 10+ years.  I appreciated it.