Agile trainings and coaching @EPAM Czech Republic

Prague, ‘the City of 100 Spires’. I and Bogi were invited to deliver Agile related trainings and coaching for EPAM Czech Republic. ‘Agile thinking’, ‘Self-organizing teams’ and ‘Product Owner basics’ trainings, along with coaching on different topics were requested. Unfortunately, our stay in Prague clashed with the coldest Jan days and the freezing wind, impeding any tourist-wanna-be attempts. Nevertheless, the experience with the Czech Agile enthusiasts was great enough to compensate for the impolite weather.

(photos courtesy of EPAM)

Agile thinking

Our opening show was ‘Agile thinking’ delivered in two consecutive days. It covers all the stuff needed to adopt the mindset, the values and the principles. We went through all the advantages of being adaptable, nimble and improvements hungry. Covered the difference between vision and goal. Experienced setting a goal, understanding the context and delivering in iterations to get continuous feedback as soon as possible. In the end we briefly covered Scrum and the incorrect implementation when the thinking & beliefs (mindset and values) are missing or not adopted

Self-organizing teams

Designed as a half-a-day experience we let the audience self-organize and self-manage ‘in order to save the Earth’. It was a brilliant-gamified event in which the participants went through different stages, experiencing the depth and dynamics of self-organization, and created efficient and performing team(s). The journey, I am certain, none of the participants will ever forget - the common goal, the consistent endeavor, the stages, the challenges, the learning and the overall performance. The audience was mesmerized and totally engaged from the first minute until the very end.

Product Owner basics

It was the cherry on the cake. We concluded our ‘trainings sprint’, delivering for the current and future ‘business folks’, who would like to challenge themselves and become great product owners. Covering the role, the mindset, and the skill set, the participants took part in consistent gamified events, and practiced ‘gathering info from the stakeholders’, ‘creating artifacts’, ‘presenting to and refining the backlog items with the development team,’ and ‘reviewing the completed/incomplete work over a comprehensive review with multiple scenarios’.

During our visit, we were dragged into interesting conversations and coached the fellow colleagues into topics like ‘advanced Scrum-mastering’, ‘how to adopt Agile with Waterfall mindset clients’, ‘what is the role of the manager in Agile environment’, etc…

Exhausted, and happy we landed at SOF airport at the last day of our trip, recalling the amazing moments and feeling grateful for the whole experience. Thank you EPAM Prague!

Mastering ScrumMastering

‘I am playing a bear attacking ‘poor Tsanko’ (while he is pretending scared), Georgi is a hunter to hunt the bear. The rest of the trainees improvise on different roles: a pickpocketer is trying to rob Tsanko at the same time and another tourist is taking photo of us to complete the picture… It’s all part of the improv ‘Still picture’ game, included in the ‘Thinking outside of the box module’… and we had so much fun, creating scene after scene, after scene…’

It’s been amazing six weeks. Together with Bogoy Bogdanov we delivered ‘Mastering ScrumMastering’ training @EPAM BG

The training (in workshop format only) is complete focused on improving the skills of the participants and consists of 95% practice to 5% theory. No lectures, no ppts, no long and boring talks – just gamified challenges to improve skills in the following areas:

• Communication
• Coaching & Mentoring
• Agile team dynamics
• Delivering talks

Our main goal was to innovate a training encouraging everybody to practice:

• Body language & paraverbal communication
• Soft skills, building emotional connection & rapport
• Coaching and mentoring
• Organizing Scrum events and ensure they run smoothly + facilitation skills
• Removing impediments efficiently
• Influencing decisions
• Presentation skills + teaching techniques (engage the audience)
• Creativity and thinking outside of the box

Each training day, a different topic was covered:

• Starting a new team & persuasion
• Coaching. One-to-One coaching
• Team level coaching & mentoring (Daily standup)
• Team level coaching & mentoring (Scrum events)
• Talks: deliver to engage
• Improvisation in Agile (Thinking outside the box)

And it worked amazingly well. The participants outdone themselves, had a lot of fun, and performed on top of their abilities in each session.

The feedback was also very positive (hopefully we would be able to share the video feedback too):

• 'Fun, engaging, different points of view, a lot of practice'       
• 'Very interactive, full of funny moments, very dynamic & interesting approach'
• 'We covered different topics but not strictly following a traditional way of training. We were put into different situations, where we had the chance to challenge ourselves and improvise'

To enjoy more pictures check the EPAM post.

Agile & Scrum foundations training

Last week we completed another Agile & Scrum foundations training @EPAM Bulgaria. It’s been very intense and at the same time quite pleasant to train the wonderful group of young and hungry (for knowledge) developers at the company. 

Agile and Scrum foundations is training I have been conducting for years. The goal is to fully prepare any team or team members to start doing efficient Scrum and adopt the Agile values and mindset. It covers the following topics:

Agile mindset & values

Introducing Agile thinking and mindset is the most important topic. The idea is not only to help people understand the Agile way of thinking and doing, but also to test if it fits the personality of each participant.

Basics of Scrum, benefits of Scrum and the Scrum team

We talk about Scrum from a high-level point of view, discuss why we use the framework, and what the roles in the Scrum team are. It is followed by a game of Scrum roles. 

User stories & backlog refinement
How to write good user stories and how to initially refine the backlog is covered in the session.

Agile metrics and planning poker

I teach the secrets of relative estimation and we play a game of planning poker.

Scrum events, Scrum artifacts & tools, Kanban

We dig deeper into the Scrum events, artifacts and tools, discuss the basics of Kanban and how it could help the team.

Sprint simulator

A turn-based game, simulating a sprint for the participants to experience it in fast-forward environment.

There are also sessions about XP, retrospective game, and Agile & Scrum test so everybody could check what they learned and how to implement it in their work.

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Some of the participants feedback:

What was good?

- Short sessions. Well-structured and filtered info – no waste, only value. Recap sessions with questions. Real life examples.

- Games and the practical tasks.

- It was fun, engaging and had real life examples. The games were very practical-oriented.

- Presentations delivery was interesting, not in a boring way.

- The emphasis was on games, practical tasks and teamwork to strengthen the experience.

What could be improved?

- Include more real-life examples.

- Even more games :)

- Make it longer.

Most useful?

- Games :)

- XP and Kanban knowledge.

- Practicing the Scrum events.

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In conclusion, it was intense… but it was quite a lot of fun too. What is planned next is to deliver the Agile & Scrum foundations training for business and administration to support them in their day-to-day activities. Stay tuned :)

Uncommon Scrum practices - presented at #ale15

I have had the pleasure of presenting at the Agile Lean Europe conference. My two cents contribution was sharing my experience on applying some uncommon Scrum practices - and even those forbidden by the books.

The Scrum master role (advanced)

So let’s start from the basics. As we all know the Scrum books mainly describe the role of a Scrum master as:
- Facilitator / host / organizer
- Impediments remover / support

…And as we all know (again) nowadays there are two major types of Scrum masters hired in the development industry. The first one, we may call Scrum 'masteloper', is part of the team as a developer and contribute directly to the development of stories/tasks. And usually the person is struggling to find the balance between development and Scrum activities. The other type of Scrum master, I also consider part of the team, might not be a developer or should not contribute (often) directly to burning down stories/tasks and is dedicated entirely to coaching, training, supporting, negotiating and running the process as smoothly as possible for everyone.

It’s been a while and, after assuming both roles for different teams, I am now fully convinced that a team could only fully benefit from a Scrum master when his/hers responsibilities are closer to the second type of a role, described above. A Scrum masteloper is simply too busy and too logically oriented to contribute well in all the communication activities, and easily could lose focus on the big picture.

On the other end a full time Scrum master, dedicated only to Scrum activities could pace well, organize well, communicate better and even bring joy and fun to the team. But above all this person would be able to lead the team if leading is within his/hers personal abilities and characteristics. For example, here is a list of what I perceive and do as a Scrum master for my team of software developers:

* The typical stuff any Scrum masteloper will do

• Organizing and facilitating the Scrum ceremonies and process
• Supporting the tools and the stories/tasks organization (e.g. Jira, Trello, the sticky notes and the physical board)
• Keep a list of impediments and resolve or supporting the team in resolving them

* And beyond

• I am persistently negotiating to help different parties (PO, team, stakeholders, clients, management) get to consensus and stay on track
• Clearly communicating the good and bad news (on a daily basis) inside and outside of the team
• Keep myself informed about the importance and priorities of the items in and outside of the Sprint (it’s simply not enough to just look at the backlog – you need to talk to people… a lot)
• I lead and guide the team to reprioritize and commit to deliveries on a daily basis. Developing sophisticated software requires a lot of ongoing effort in discovering risks, issues and sometimes benefits. How we react and handle them on a daily basis is crucial. (Sprint planning can’t identify and predict everything)
• Keep everybody focused on the big picture – the important stuff. It is crucial as most of the developers tend to lose the big picture focus, doing the mundane stuff
• Coach and train the team members so everybody could grow to their best and beyond :)
• Speed the support and consulting provided or received for/by different teams/clients. I just find enough time to talk to other teams, clients and stakeholders. And it’s invaluable to support the Product owner in deciding priorities or even by taking ownership of a client’s issue until full resolution
• Keep the management well informed about the good and the bad within the team. No blame and shame here – only glory :), transparency and real picture. When we are victorious we celebrate together, when we fail we face the consequences together again – but the management team need to be fully aware of what’s going on
• Responsible for the fun and joy within the team. Scrum is meant to be fun… at least more fun than any other software development framework/methodology. I keep the folks spirit high, for example by revealing a funny collage of the last sprint effort I photo-shopped a day before the retrospective or by presenting a useful topic in a funny way
• Keep myself informed of the innovations in the Agile world, my team could benefit from 
• Coaching the guys and spreading the good practices in a specific way that would fit into our particular environment
• You could even see me doing some Project documentation… but that’s more on the PM part :), and only if needed