Agile Studio

Guest post by Dave Brands

Introduction
After previous successful editions, a third FedEx Day was organized at PAT, again with the entire company. Feedback from previous times revealed that more boundaries had to be set. To make the FedEx Day possible there should be a timely planning, ideally immediately after the last FedEx Day. Everyone must have the opportunity to be able to participate.

Planning
For this third edition the invitation was sent 4 months upfront. This way everyone got the chance to reschedule previously made appointments. The invitation consisted of two agenda items: the first one was the pitch, followed by the FedEx Day. The pitch was planned two weeks in advance of the FedEx Day. Simultaneously, we reserved the required resources (beamer, location, etc). About a month before the pitch an update was sent which clearly explains what was expected of the pitch and FedEx Day.

Pitch
Two weeks before the FedEx Day, we started with the pitches. For the pitches, we reserved a large room. For preparation we’ve set the tables aside and put the chairs in a circle. We placed large post-it’s and pens on the ground. We also arranged a setup with a laptop and a beamer. This could be used in the pitch. In the back of the room we placed a laptop with a timer. This way the pitcher could see how much time she had left. (http://www.online-stopwatch.com/full-screen-stopwatch/).

After everyone was settled we started. The group had ten minutes to write down the ideas they had on the large post-it’s. Then everyone got the time to share there idea to with the group. It was also allowed to craft ideas during the pitch.
For the pitch there were a few rules:

1. You may only pitch one idea at a time.
2. You have a maximum of three minutes available per pitch.
3. You clearly need to state what you want to do and what kind of help you could use.

People are allowed to pitch more ideas after everyone had the chance of pitching there first idea.
For the entire pitch, we reserved a fixed time box of 2 hours. This was more than sufficient for our group (25 participants, 20 ideas)

Teasing & lobbying
Between the pitch and the FedEx Day you could try to persuade colleagues to help you with your idea. Yammer was frequently used by colleagues. People were ‘bribed’ with cake and/or candy.
The management team was sending teasing emails on a daily base.

“Are you as innovative as Steve Jobs?
Everyone can Innovate. It’s a search for passion.
And if you’ve found it, you know right away. It feels good.

Just like Steve Jobs, you will notice that if you appeal to your passion, great things can come to you. Therefore, I invite you to try it.

Go on a journey into yourself. And use that what you’ve found to put down a truly innovative product. Sign up at Yammer, because I’m curious of what you’re capable of.
MT”

There was also a lot of teasing on Twitter and Yammer.

Kickoff
At last! Thursday, March 29th the day the FedEx Day was about to start. The rented power tool arrived (megaphone) and would herald the start at 13.00.

With a loud siren I invited everyone to gather in the canteen. Here we would start the FedEx Day with a nice glass of bubbles.
This was also the most appropriate time for a few household announcements. Now everyone was requested to put there FedEx project on the flipchart. Anyone who wanted to participate on a project had their initials written on the project.
Now we had commitment, everyone could start.

In the busiest traffic areas, we posted two flipcharts.
One with all committed projects and one with the household announcements.

The household announcements were:
Dinner  3/29 18.30 – 19.30

Breakfast 3/30 07.30 – 08.30

Lunch   12.30 – 13.00

Presentations  13.00 – 15.00

Votes   15.00 – 15.15

Award Ceremony 15.15 – 15.30

FatEx
During the kickoff, there were snacks prepared. For dinner we’ve started a poll. This way anyone could vote on what they wanted to eat. The top 2 was ordered. After dinner, a surprise dessert was delivered.
Throughout the FedEx Day, there were sufficient refreshments available. For breakfast our CEO prepared a full English breakfast. All this together and a fully catered lunch, made us rename FedEx into FatEx.

Presentations
All projects that were committed to must be presented. For each presentation there was a time box available of ten minutes. After those ten minutes of fame, the presentation will brutally, with the aid of the megaphone, be broken down. At the start of the FedEx Day there was a commitment of twenty-five participants on eleven projects. Ten projects were executed. For the eleventh project was explained why it was not executed during the presentation. After the presentations people were invited to vote. After all votes were counted the award ceremony started.

Martijn van der Corput, winner of the third FedEx Day

Received feedback?
The people were very happy with the tighter organization of this FedEx Day.

What would I do differently next time?
It would try to let people generate ideas before the pitch by teasing in an earlier stage.

Dave Brands

As I stated earlier, I decided to change the way I facilitate retrospectives. What did I change? What was the groundbreaking new style to employ or trick to use? After I tell you, you may probably think it is no rocket science. Or you may wonder why I did not tell you earlier. Anyway, it sure creates more honesty and transparency. So, here we go.

What I have seen in earlier retrospectives, is that coming up with tasks often does not really work. People tend to come up with tasks that are not actionable, tasks that they do not do themselves, or people do not follow through on tasks. I wrote about it here.

I decided, based on that very post, to switch styles and employ a different approach. So in the retrospective, after having defined a user story of the single big improvement we agreed on (Scrumming the Scrum) I invite everybody to…….

1) Only come up with tasks that they will sign up for themselves………….
2) And make an explicit commitment to do so…….. (e.g. walk up to the board and place a post-it with their name)
3) And….coming up with no tasks is fine. (If people do not want to do something about it, they will not do it anyway)

Is it working? I am not sure yet. But I like the transparency: “You want to make a change? Great! Write down your name and commit. You do not want to? No problem, great that we know upfront.” And please remember from my post about commitment: you will only get it if you have volunteers (1) who have passion (2) and responsibility (3) for the topic.

Want to know more or share your experience? Please let me know in the comments below or ping me on Twitter…

Regards,

Rob

• How to Conduct a Large Retrospective…
• The Three Ingredients of Commitment…
• How To Initiate Improvement in 20 Minutes…

A well-structured retrospective that generates change is vital to improve and grow as a team. When you facilitate a retrospective with multiple teams, you have a challenge to face. Do you have ineffective large meetings? Are these meetings slow, one-way, chaotic and not changing anything? Have you been thinking about conducting a large retrospective? After reading this blog, you will have a practical reference for facilitating effective retrospectives with a large crowd. You will have this post as a sample format to customize to the needs at hand in your situation.

It is wise to discussion the vision for such a session with your client. With my client, we agreed on the following:
- A timeframe of 1 hr and 45 minutes
- Everybody has to have a chance to participate (25-30 people expected)
- Cross-department interaction should be stimulated
- We want a positive vibe (right before Christmas dinner)
- The outcome of the meeting will be an explicit part of the business plan for next year
- Upper management agrees on the outcome and commits to follow-up

Based on these boundaries and the ideas I gathered from other sessions, the following structure was prepared:

• 10 min: Introduction. Set the Stage
• 05 min: Self-organize into cross-functional groups
• 20 min: Gather data in groups
• 10 min: Sharing insights. Converging into themes
• 10 min: Private voting. Selecting the topic
• 05 min: Explain the fishbowl
• 30 min: Discussion and task selection
• 10 min: Slack on the schedule
• 05 min: Close the retro

Allow me to go in more detail of the stages:

• Introduction. Set the Stage [10 min]
  Explanation of the goal of the session and the schedule. Let everybody speak briefly and “check in”. If people speak up at the start of a meeting, chances are higher that people speak during the meeting.
• Self-organize into cross-functional groups [05 min]
  Ask everybody to go to a corner of the room with their department colleagues. Every corner had a big colored post-it and several small post-its of that color taped to the wall (4 different colors total). Tell everybody to take a small post-it of their corner color and hold it in their hand. Ask the people to self-organize in 4 new groups while holding their post-it in their hand. Tell them you want multi-colored (cross-functional) groups of the same size, one (newly formed) team in each corner. Ask each group for a facilitator, who will commit to sharing the result of the upcoming exercise afterwards.
• Gather data in groups [20 min]
  Ask every group to find a quiet space outside the main room and discuss the topic of the retrospective. In our case, I asked them to discuss and agree on a prioritised top 5 of highlights of last year, 1 per post-it. Give the facilitators markers and post-its of their group’s color (referring to the color will help you keep track of the groups).

  Meanwhile:
  - Check up after a few minutes so you know where each group resides. Ask them if the goal is clear. Keep them posted on the time remaining.
  - Make final adjustments to the main room so the fishbowl setup is prepared for the next part. It consists of an inner circle for the facilitators + 1 empty seat (5 seats total) and an outer circle for all participants. Put a flipchart in front of the inner circle.

• Sharing insights and converging into themes [10 min]
  Invite the facilitators in the inner circle and all other participants to the outer circle. Ask the people of the outer circle to remain silent. Ask the facilitators to explain their group’s #1 item and to place the post-it on the chart. Members of the inner circle may ask questions if they do not understand the item (disagreement is no reason for discussion). After everybody presented their group’s #1, proceed with #2, then #3 etc. until all items are presented or the timebox ends. Ask the facilitators to converge overlapping items jointly, so unique items remain on the flipchart.
• Private voting. Selecting the topic [10 min]
  Label each unique item with a character (A-Z). Ask everybody to vote privately (on a post-it) by spreading a number of votes on the items. Give them boundaries by telling them their total number of votes (and maybe even a maximum they can put on one item). I chose for private voting so there is less influencing compared to public dot voting. In the latter method, early voters can set a trend and late voters can make decisions for the group. I wanted to prevent trendsetting.
  
  Ask for one or two people to count the votes publicly. Don’t do it yourself because you want to watch the group and facilitate if necessary. Thank them afterwards. Restate the “winning” item from the votes. Tell them the rest of the session is focused on this very topic. Some people do not like you removing the waste of the non-winning items and feel attached to the other items. This is OK. Tell them they can still pursue this later if they want to. Explain that this session focuses on the item with the most votes, as this is most important to the group right now.
• Explain the fishbowl [05 min]
  Explain the format of the fishbowl (source: FishBowl Retrospective)
  
  Rules:
  - Only the ‘fish’ may speak
  - The ‘fish’ may only speak when exactly one of the fish’ seats is empty
  - Anyone may come forward and sit in the empty chair at any time
  - Discussion stops until one of the ‘fish’ leaves their seat and returns to an observer seat
  - People may move between areas as often as they like
• Discussion and task selection [30 min]
  Agree on actions to address the topic. In our case, we wanted to relive our highlight of last year. We discussed actions to reach this goal. As a facilitator, your role is to stay invisible. If people have a hard time creating actionable tasks you may want to summarize, sharpen and ask powerful questions.
• Slack on the schedule [10 min]
  With a group this big, you need some slack time. The group will be unpredictable in moving around between the different exercises. I used the slack time to lengthen the fishbowl discussion.
• Close the retro [05 min]
  As a facilitator, you can restate the outcome and firmly close the retrospective. Simply tell the crowd it is over.

Want to know more or share your experience? Please let me know in the comments below or ping me on Twitter…

Regards,

Rob

• The Three Ingredients of Commitment…
• How To Initiate Improvement in 20 Minutes…
• Sharing Motivation in Teams…

Have you attended or facilitated retrospectives that did not result in improvements? Are the same retrospective topics coming up again and again without changing anything? Do you feel you are the only one who is signing up for tasks? After reading this post, you will know about my experiences and insights. You will definitely not feel alone in it. You may even want to use my changed approach…

Stating that teams should be improving their way of working may come across like a no-brainer, especially in an agile context. However, teams that have fostered continuous improvement in their DNA are not as common as I wish for. An example of quotes from retrospectives, where people discuss actions to improve on a topic (anonimised):
- “I think we should do X less and spend more time doing Y”
- “We should do X better”
- “We should review each others Z and confront each other on the results”
- “In order to do X more, we need more effective Y’s. I think, from now on, we will really stick to the timebox of Y minutes”

One more example: I have been with teams that generated (new) working agreements sprint after sprint. It was very hard to come up with actionable tasks. When we talked about sticking to the (fresh set of extra) working agreements in the retrospective after that, we made a working agreement on top of those. We agreed to check on the working agreements in each stand-up, to make sure the retrospective aspirations have been followed. And in the first stand-up after that, we…… forgot about it.

Do you see the pattern?

This is what I see: People genuinely think about what could be changed. However: The outcome is often not actionable, it is at best to be labeled as vague-ish commandments or aspirational working agreements. As a facilitator, you could guide the discussions so the aspirations are rephrased into actionable tasks that people can own. I do so by saying: “OK. How can you do that?”. Sometimes people then look you straight in the eye and say: “Yes, we will really do this differently. We will!”. My reaction to that is something like: “Yes! And what could you do tomorrow in order to realize this?”

This sometimes helps along in coming up with tasks. However, sometimes: all that remains is a long silence….

I was struggling with this. And then I read Harrison Owen’s book on Open Space technology. And it hit me. Commitment is about three things, in my own phrasing: “People will choose (1) to commit if they have a passionate concern (2) about it and feel responsible (3) for it.” So, in other words: Volunteers (1) who have passion (2) and responsibility (3) for the topic will make change happen.

I wonder if this insight changes something in how I facilitate retrospectives. I guess I will only change it if I …… (you get it, right?)

Prepare to be surprised!

Want to know more or share your experience? Please let me know in the comments below or ping me on Twitter…

Picture: Wikipedia – Cocktail

Regards,

Rob

• How To Initiate Improvement in 20 Minutes…
• Sharing Motivation in Teams…
• The Secret Of High-Performance Teams…

Last weekend at Agile Coach Camp Norway, Sergey Dmitriev organised an open space session on using LEGO® in a professional context. First, Sergey explained the differences between LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and StrategicPlay®. In the same session, we first built an model of our individual view of the coach camp. We finished with a shared model, where every participant agreed with. In this video below, Ulrika Park explains our model.

Want to know more or share your experience? Please let me know in the comments below or ping me on Twitter…

Regards,

Rob

• How To Initiate Improvement in 20 Minutes…
• Sharing Motivation in Teams…
• The Secret Of High-Performance Teams…

Have you ever been in a situation where you wanted to generate improvements in a small amount of time? How can you facilitate a well-structured session when you only have 20 minutes of time available? After reading this post, you will add a practical way of generating improvements to your toolbox. This approach is based on the elements of a good retrospective.

Materials: flipchart, small post-its (2 colors), big post-its, markers.
• [1 min] Let every participant respond in one or two words in response to: “What’s on your mind right now?”
• [3 mins] Explain the topic of the session. Give people (small) post-its and ask them to write their observations (max. 3) on this topic.
• [3 mins] Let people explain their observations while posting them on the flipcharts. Only allow interruptions when people do not understand the explanation. Disagreeing is no reason for interruption.
• [4 mins] Group the observations into themes with the group. Jointly move the post-its into groups and place a large post-it on top, with a name everybody agrees on.
• [2 mins] Give each theme a character (A, B, C, etc). Give everybody a budget of 3-7 votes, depending on the number of themes. Tell people to distribute the votes over the themes they find most important to fix right now, privately on the post-its.
• [1 min] Collect the results. Name the winning theme to improve on.
• [5 mins] Jointly discuss actions to improve on the top theme. Commit to the actions by writing post-its with the action and the name of the accountable person for doing it.
• [1 min] Close the session.

Disclaimer: This format works ideally with 3-5 people and needs a skilled facilitator. This approach is a suboptimal alternative to a full 1,5 hour retrospective. You still need the retrospective with your team in order to do proper root-cause analysis and catalyze significant improvement (see Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby et al).

Committing to something you quickly decide to do is always better than doing nothing at all. Reflecting on the improvements you (quickly decided to) do is the next step in continuous improvement.
In short: do, inspect, adapt…

Want to know more or share your experience? Please let me know in the comments below or ping me on Twitter…

Regards,

Rob

• Sharing Motivation in Teams…
• The Secret Of High-Performance Teams…
• Retrospectives and Your Mother-In-Law…

A retrospective should catalyze improvements in the team process. After reading Yves Ferlands post about how he used the Moving Motivators exercise (created by Jurgen Appelo), I was inspired to use it with our team. Let me tell you what we did.

We asked everybody to arrange their personal motivators on a table by using the motivation cards (download PDF cards here), horizontally ordered by importance. Next step was to look back at our agile transition this year, because a lot has changed in our work process. Everybody then determined how that change affected each motivator for themselves and moved the motivator card accordingly on their table: up (positive change), down (negative change) or the same (no change). Then, everybody was asked to explain their own motivation scheme for a few minutes. No interventions, everybody listened.

During these personal presentations, the facilitator collected the results and calculated the average importance and the average change in motivation to create a team chart. Please check out the format below (randomized to protect the innocent):

After the presentations we discussed our team chart and focused on the most important motivators for us as a team. How can we improve those?

It turned out to be a great retrospective and a useful format. Sharing motivators and discussing it is very important to grow a team.

Want to know more or share your experience? Please let me know in the comments below or ping me on Twitter…

Regards,

Rob

• The Secret Of High-Performance Teams…
• In-Sprint Done Celebration…
• Retrospectives and Your Mother-In-Law…

Image “motivation”: All rights reserved by healthylifestyleplus.com

This short videolog by Rini van Solingen describes how we combine Scrum and Kanban at PAT Learning Solutions.

Every two weeks in our sprint planning, our product owner “buys” time for solving production issues. Our helpdesk then orders the issues our developers work on during the sprint period by ordering the “Next” column on the Kanban Board. When a story is done on the Sprint Board, we pull the highest priority issue from the “Next” column on the Kanban Board. This makes sure our developers can finish stories with minimal disturbances. By doing this, we can A) fight fire if needed and B) keep improving our products to serve our customers!

This is an example of how we work at PAT Learning Solutions. We are consistently inspecting and adapting towards a custom implementation of Scrum, XP and Lean :
The PAT way!

If you have any questions or feedback, please post in the comments, so we can learn from you!

Regards,

Rob

Twitter: @robvanlanen
Blog: http://www.agilestudio.nl

• Scrum Board 1.1 …
• Why Autonomy Works…
• In-Sprint Done Celebration…

The Agile Lean Europe unconference in Berlin has proven to be a great conference to attend. It was very inspiring to meet lots of fellow agilists and share ideas. I was selected as a speaker to talk about FedEx Days. It is about setting a timebox of 24 hours in which team members are shielded from regular work. Team members will deliver something within that timebox and show it to the company (more info: Intrinsic Motivation: Our First Fedex Day…)

You can find the slides I used below.

The audience (approx. 60 people) rated my talk as a 4 (1=poor, 5=perfect). This is the feedback:
- separate idea and company examples: people get clearer view
- expectations too high
- clear, though a bit known
- active start was great (people standing up)
- didnt start with your name = good
- focus on the idea first, then show the examples
- make it more juicy (tone, dynamics)
- move more on-stage
- thanks, I’ll try this at home
- good that you did not prepare more than there is to it
- just keep on doing it
- ok
- interesting idea, presentation could have been longer
- nice, simple, open
- if possible, show more pictures of the team

Thanks everybody for your attention and feedback, very much appreciated!

If you want to give additional feedback, please do so in the comments section, so I can improve the talk for XP Days Benelux) . Thanks!

Regards,

Rob

Twitter: @robvanlanen
Blog: http://www.agilestudio.nl

Similar posts you might find interesting:

• Intrinsic Motivation: Our First Fedex Day…
• Why Autonomy Works…
• The Secret Of High-Performance Teams…

I would like to share a story with you. Our development team started using Scrum half a year ago. At that time, I shared a concept with the team: King-Servant pattern by Henrik Kniberg [1]. The benefits of using this pattern for us would be: Improve focus and teamwork to deliver the most important functionality at the end of the sprint. Sounds great, huh? However, my pitch for applying the pattern was not compelling enough for the team to go for it. I was disappointed at that time, because I believed it would work for us.

A few weeks ago, the team created the following improvement goal for the upcoming sprint (two weeks): “As a team member, I want more insight in the sprint so we can make our deadlines”. My natural tendency is to jump to practical solutions, in this case give a speech about the correct use of a burndown chart. But I remained silent. The ideas were: “Give a user story a deadline date within the sprint”. “Create a story timeline for the next sprint”. “Make one developer responsible for finishing the story before the deadline”. So, we tried it out the next sprint. You can see the picture of the story timeline below. Note: there is one timeline per product (X and F).

How did it go? In my perception, developers had a greater focus on delivering the stories they were personally accountable for. They naturally approached their colleagues for help. Everybody was helping along to meet the self-imposed in-sprint deadlines. In our last retrospective, the team decided to pursue this way of working because it was working for them.

Do I believe story timelines are a better solution for gaining insights than burndown charts? I do not, but it is working for our team! Why? Because the team acknowledged a problem, invented a solution and committed to the implementation. All these steps are done without intervention by management. Therefore my statement is: Stop micro-managing, start trusting your people. They will impress you with the results.

What do you think about it? Let me know!

Regards,

Rob

Twitter: @robvanlanen
Blog: http://www.fanlan.nl

• The Secret Of High-Performance Teams…
• Intrinsic Motivation: Our First Fedex Day…
• Personal Agility: Eat Your Own Dog Food