Cincy Deliver 2023

July 28th, 2023
Cincinnati, OH

with Art Lashchonau and Brad Nelson

Agile Coaching

Requires the emotional intelligence to influence without authority
Professional coaching only accounts for about 5% of the work

Impediments to agility at scale

inconsistency
hyperfocus
lack of purpose
lack of engagement
A coach doesn’t need to know everything to be effective.
Agile Coaches spend a significant amount of energy justifying our existence and expense.

A structured approach

organizational objectives (not “Agile”)
set in a contract, with a timebox
make a plan to achieve them
establish communication channels
standardize the basics
- definition of done
- practices needed to solve problems

How do we get managers to embrace coaches + coaching?

Use Scrum as a vehicle for agility if that’s what they’re already using

We tend to focus on team coaching first, but that may not be the right place to start. Managers tend to respond to PowerPoint (lol)

Scaling builds a coaching competency, not just a team-level coaching engagement for a team that may only end up disbanded.

Quantifying Technical Debt

with Nick Fahrig

Ask…

Don’t care: “Is the team under too much pressure?”
Don’t know: “Does the team have the right skills/people?”
Didn’t mean to: “What did we learn? How can we apply it?”
Leverage: “How can we track the debt to ensure it gets paid?”

📄 In Search of a Metric for Managing Architectural Technical Debt (R. Nord, et al)

As with real debt:

Always pay down more than the minimum
Cut up your credit cards–stop accruing!
Make a realistic plan for paying it down.

Choose Your Own Adventure: Lessons Learned from an Unusual Journey

with Jay Tower

48statesproject.com

How to foster adventure in your life

Terrior (“soil”). When you’re in an unfamiliar place, don’t stick to what you know (like chain restaurants). Seek out things and experiences that are of the place you’re in.
The Rule of Anecdotal Value. Useful for making life decisions. Which option will make the better story?
Seek out discomfort. Be an “outside” person. Do things that require hard work.
Experiences over possessions.
Curiosity over judgement. Judgement leads to fear, and fear shuts down adventure.
Surround yourself with adventurers. A story for this one:

A young math major chooses to become a Wall Street Quantitative Analyst. Quants make lots of money, and they tend to live a very fast-paced, work hard/play hard/spend hard lifestyle. But he figured that he would only do it for 5 years, live simply and save enough to retire young. But he quickly adopted the same loud/fast lifestyle of the other quants he worked with day in, day out. It’s been 20 years, and he’s still nowhere near retirement.

Mad Scientists, Saboteurs, and Con Artists: Seven Agile Habits of Highly Effective Supervillains

with Ben Friedberg

📘 Simple Sabotage Manual (1944, OSS)

We write for our future selves!

On a team, be essential, but not critical. Be the best at something, but don’t be the only person who can do it at all.

The most important part of failure is publication.

The Velocity Trap

with Brad Nelson

Lord Kelvin was wrong: we can improve things we can’t measure. (Deming)

Why are businesses in business?

It’s not for the money; they want to solve a problem.

Just as customers don’t buy from a business because they want the business to have more money–they want their problem solved.

Companies like Amazon or Meijer achieve market dominance by excelling at service–they overserve their customers, often at a short-term loss.

GM lost market share by not keeping up in service.

Success is a sweet-spot combination of a product/service being: + Desirable, + Viable, and + Feasible (Traditional output metrics (like velocity) only measure this one)

False concensus effect: You are not the user.

Where is value realized?

In the hands of the customer!

“If they laugh, it’s funny.” –Jerry Seinfeld on value

“We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” –Nokia

Lead Time: time from “aha” to “ka-ching”