Posts by Ed:
- Mr Miyagi
- Daniel
- Wax on, wax off
- Sand floor
- Paint fence
- Daniel punching a target on Miyagi’s chest protector
- Miyagi and Daniel (doing a Crane stance) in the style of the Simpsons.
- Daniel fighting the Cobra-Kai at the tournament
- Daniel getting the girl
Agile Tour Sydney 2011
December 23rd, 2011
What does Sydney have that Melbourne doesn’t? Well apart from the Bridge and the Opera House, this year Sydney hosted the first Australian instance of the Agile Tour, a series of non-profit, independently organised events held worldwide between October and December. Agile Tour originated in France in 2008 and has since spread to many countries, with the stated intention to:
“communicate massively together, all agile people, in the same period of time to help all cities to promote the ideas around the Agile, a way to manage complex project [sic]. Since 2008, this idea continues to create new stories, new cities continue to join us around the world and we want to accompany them to understand and discuss their vision of the [sic] Agile wherever there will be projects and people.”
The inaugural Agile Tour Sydney was held on 9-10 December at the University of Technology Sydney and was labelled “By practitioners, for practitioners”. Two of its main organisers were Jeremie Benazra and Karan Jain.
I decided that I should go for a trip up to Sydney to see what transpired and see if we could use some of the ideas in the future, in Melbourne. Here is a brief write up and a call to action at the foot of this article!! I would echo Rowan Bunning’s tweet:
Agile Tour Syd turned out to be the most immersive Agile conference experience I’ve had in Australia. Thanks everyone.
The importance of having “air support”
November 16th, 2011I came across this interesting Xtranormal video created by the folks at UPMentors via David Joyce’s recent blog post “Agile, Lean, and Kanban, Do They Change Management Thinking?”
You can see what UPMentors have to say about it on their blog post that accompanies the video.
I can definitely see echoes of the different scenes that I have encountered since I’ve been working as an agile manager. I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked on projects where there has been a clear mandate issued from management to allow us to get on with the job. This CEO and CTO level backing has its blessings and also its drawbacks. On one hand, having some top-level management providing “close air support” for us allowed us enough freedom to not be tied into institutional red tape and to be innovative. It allowed us to deliver what I consider would have been impossible to do were we forced to conform to the “standard operating procedure” playbook.
A flipside to this is that we discovered that this was considered by other parts of the company to be receiving “special treatment”. Circumstances evolved such that our “air support” was removed and then all of the behaviour seen in UPMentors’ video started to rain down upon us.
It’s definitely possible for institutional issues, as raised in the video, to be mitigated against although sometimes it can sometimes feel like it’s just you vs the system. It’s pretty hard to fight all of these battles while still trying to work on effectively deliver value for your project at the same time.
So, I’d definitely agree with a lot of what David says in his post. It really helps to have someone flying air cover for you.
I’d be interested to see what you have to say about this. Have you encountered any of the behaviour that is displayed in the video? If so, what have you done in response?
Miyagi, the Karate Kid and Scrum
July 27th, 2011As I mentioned in my last entry, I whipped up a small talk to do at last night’s Melbourne Scrum User Group meetup, which had the rough title ““Being Mr Miyagi and the Karate Kid“.
I scoured the web to find some stills from the 1984 movie and printed them onto A5 paper to show to the gathering, in this order.
The general gist of the talk was that when you’re learning something from an expert, you may not understand why you are doing something at first (steps 3-5) but you’re probably doing it for good reason. Eventually you should benefit from the routine of doing what seem to to be unrelated tasks.
In Scrum, there are only a few roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner and Team Member), artifacts (Product and Sprint backlogs and the burndown) and ceremonies (daily Scrums, planning, reviews and retrospectives). It’s a simple framework that gives a team a focus (step 6) to start from.
Later, more advanced techniques can be used (step 7) and eventually you will have the agility to adapt to the situation at hand (step 8). The outcome of this is better development and a better product that makes the customer happy…you’ll get the girl (step 9).
The discussion after my spiel touched on points such as making sure that you inspect what you’ve been doing at regular intervals with retrospectives and adapt what you’re doing for the future. We also discussed length of iteration 1 week, 2 week, 3 week, 30 days and even half day iterations.
While typing this up, I discovered a similar post by Jeff Gothelf in New York that relates The Karate Kid with User Experience and agile. Great minds think alike, or at least similarly!
I really enjoyed this month’s meetup and I’m looking forward to the next one.
Being Mr Miyagi and the Karate Kid
July 19th, 2011Update – I’ve done a follow up post.
…
I’m doing a talk at the Melbourne Scrum User Group‘s “Lightning Talk meetup” next week.
The deal is this: People take 5 minutes to pitch an idea at the audience. We follow up with 10-15 minutes discussion and then move onto the next speaker. We keep going until we run out of talkers or time.
I am going to do a 5 minute spiel which has the working title “Being Mr Miyagi and the Karate Kid“. It could also be called “Do or do not… there is no try” but I felt like being martial arts and not sci-fi 
No slides, just a few bits of A5 paper. I will update this post, after the fact and let you know how it went.
Change and improvement
July 13th, 2011This podcast episode of the architecture and design show 99% Invisible from radio KALW in San Francisco appeared in my Twitter stream today via @kjscotland (Karl Scotland).
99% Invisible-30- The Blue Yarn by Roman Mars
I probably don’t have to tell you that the lean concept in software development is adapted from the automobile manufacturing industry. In this podcast episode, a really interesting case study is shown where continuous improvement by reducing “waste” was achieved at a cancer centre in Seattle by adapting the Toyota Production System to healthcare.
Here were some salient points that I thought were notable in this:
Change is hard
“When Dr Kaplan told his staff they were changing the whole way they operate…the response was not pretty…There was a lot of anger…led by the doctors of course”
Change is hard. The improvement at The Virginia Mason hospital was a multi-year project. The driver of all the improvements was the needs of the cancer patients (as well as the need to save money). However this butted against the desires of some of the doctors e.g taking away offices with good views. Changing from a doctor driven experience to more patient driven experience is hard.
A different angle
“We couldn’t conceive of it intellectually until we saw it visually”.
People think they are dealing with an issue intellectually but until they see the situation represented in a different way…using a blue ball of string and a map of the hospital in this example, they might not be able to see where improvements can be made.
Using a different approach identified that waste existed in the form of patients having to wait a lot but until a different approach was…no one identified this. It was just the way things had always been done.
Sometimes people need a kick start. In general, people don’t really like being told what to do, although IMO there are times when this needs to happen but that’s the subject of another post. Helping see issues for themselves allows them to then work with you and their colleagues to solve them.
Jargon
“If you’re anything like me when you hear the phrase ‘management system’ part of your brain begins to shut down. Another part of your brain prepares itself for hearing either a load of complete nonsense or common sense tarted up with unnecessary jargon”
In many walks of life, issues can be over complicated by the use of jargon. Speaking in plain language is preferable; be careful about introducing terms like “sensei” or “Scrum Master” for example. Providing some terms as a framework can be useful but you have to be careful about them getting in the way.
Effort = Results
Putting in the effort to change yields results, despite the difficulties. In this example, it saved money by making the hospital safer and by eliminating waste and (presumably) helped the cancer sufferers themselves, improving the clinical experience by considering their needs as a priority. User Experience design for healthcare.
Further reading
There is a book about the Virginia Mason experience called Transforming Health Care: Virginia Mason Medical Center’s Pursuit of the Perfect Patient Experience
Here is a review of the first 3 chapters over at The Lean Blog
I haven’t read the book but it’s definitely on my “To Read” list.
The 99% Invisible podcast seems pretty good. I’ve subscribed on iTunes and it’s also available on Soundcloud.
![Karan Jain](<a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/GBvM2kmBV4DAKmFWWvX7itMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=embedwebsite"><img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-RLv3wOqv730/TvFZp827qPI/AAAAAAAAABk/Ow9Kyu4IwVA/s400/IMG_4539.jpg" height="299" width="400" /></a>){kind=link}