Agile Conference presentations – a call to raise the bar

Here is an open call from me to people presenting at conferences in India. While it is heartening to see more people show up at the Agile events, nothing substantially new is being brought to notice. The maturity level is so low and very few presentations make sense to the audience. These topics would not have any importance when presented outside india.

The bygone year saw many kinds of agile conferences coming up. Scrum Bangalore, Scrum India, Agile Hyderabad, Agile India, Agile Tour in various cities. Having had quite a bit of depth in this field for many years now. I feel, here are some duties of organizers and presenters. I think this applies to any other technical conference too, esp. the ones that involve people taking out their personal time to come to these conferences.

Remember there are a few hundred thousand of us software developers, testers, architects, PM’s etc. in this country. Many are just waking to hearing these terms for the first time. What you say impacts those that hear you.

Organizers

If you are organizing any sort of conference, please ask for the deck and a small write up before the conference.

Put a serious deadline to the presenters submitting this for review.

Get a small group of trust worthy and unbiased reviewers to select the presenters.

Get reviewers to commit. Many seem to simply want to be in the review committee to be popular.

Make the review process transparent, based on the true spirit of Agile .

Every presenter deserves a constructive feedback.

If you need me to review for free, I will be happy to commit to this, provided you guarantee wine and cheese in return

If you have a theme, then make sure presentations have a flow in the conference. Example – If the theme is Agile Engineering, then do not do the first one on Unit testing and then the next one on scrum for service companies.

Publish feedback of presenters openly.

Keynotes takes away the charm from the real stuff.

Misleading information by a presenter, will have serious repercussions on your conference image.

Organizers; please put a guideline on acceptance of topic .Ex.how many slides and how dense the slide deck should be.

Presenters

Do your home work. Remember, the rules of presentation have changed these days. Not just less dense deck, but you should have very few slides.

NO DECKS PLEASE (lesser the better) Trainers around the world are going away from simply doing a deck based presentation to a more dynamic presentation technique. Audience must be actively involved.
Learning Rule #1 – The audience learn most from what they do in the class. So involve them however big a group.

make a mental/ small note of your ideas in a book.

One slide one word or one picture. – Do not do text at all. You can give a dense handouts along with your presentation.

Use back of the room techniques if needed. Please see Sharan Bowman’s 4C techniques. Connections, Concepts, Concrete Practice, Conclusions.

If you are a developer or architect, “SHOW CODE” What better way to teach what you know that show me the code. “Talk is cheap , Show me the code” ( Stolen text from someone in the family. Ask your audience to code).

If you are a tester – show how you test with tools. walk the talk. Ask audience to test.
“Start with the end in mind” – What is the final message you want to convey.?

Use simple anecdotes to convey your message.
“Story Telling” is a great way to get the point across.

When someone asks a question, repeat the question and open it up for discussion with audience, before answering.

Remember every question could be important. So don’t ignore any specific questions.

What sort of Games can we play with teams?

This list is a just a collection of games around and I may or may not have played all of them. Please contact the authors for detailed instructions.http://www.agilefairytales.com/games.html

Over the years in coaching, I have been using a lot of games. Most of these games are what I have learned by being with other coaches, going to conferences etc. There is a lot that can be done with teams by playing games. We learn a lot by doing it:) rather than reading about it:)

http://www.kanbangames.net/

Derek Baileys Lean Game

Learning through game

Packing Peanuts

The backlog is the eye of the beholder

The Kanban Game

Push Pull Game by Bill Wake

Tasty Cup Cakes has a tonne of games

Scrum Game – Another take on XP game

Story point and their relation to complexity and uncertainity

This article on infoq talks about story point and its relation to complexity or time. The argument seems to be it should be only related to effort and not complexity

When team members say Extra large for a story, generally it can mean one of the following.

a) I don’t have all the information needed and hence I think it is large ( This is not complexity or effort. This is the ambiguity or uncertainity. In this case we cannot really base the size on Effort as effort can only come to play when the team member knows that he or she needs to do

b) I know all about the story but this is complex. This is a good case to say this is complexity or more so effort. Its going to take me 10 days to do it as an example.

Story sizing is all about relative measure.

The real effort only comes to play when you work on story. At times what is a small story becomes extra large , the effort grows. So there should be not be a correlation to time alone. If we did time alone then why do we have to do task breakdowns.

Estimate size and derive duration. This picture captures the intent.

Does CSM certification make a good Scrum master?

I have been reading lots of discussions around the Scrum Alliance and its certification process. Does taking a two class make you a good Scrum masters? For an answer to this question, I asked some of my friends who have been great scrum masters.

The general opinion was that while the CSM class does give the basics of Scrum, it completely misses the ball on the “Human factor” involved in being a good Scrum master. Some of the best scrum masters seen are not certified but certification does help. The great thing about the CSM class is the interaction with others much less the certification part. Many times scrum masters learn by doing trial and error on Scrum basics and in doing so they end up causing a lot of damage to the team.

By going to a CSM or for that matter any training class , the interaction with the instructor and others in the class will get you going on the basics. I am an Agile coach and often play the role a scrum master. The toughest part in being a scrum master is not Scrum, it is being aware of what to do and what not to do in a team.

Every time I take the role of a Scrum master and coach Scrum masters, I always tell them not to apply the same rule to every team. Each team you will facilitate is different. As far as certifications go they are a nice to have tool , but that should certainly be not the criteria to hire a scrum master.

Along with it try to see if they pass the CFROC Test.

Are they committed to the team, Can the keep the focus on Scrum and distance themselves from the politics, Can they respect themselves and thier team members,
Are they open enough to help the team with whatever the team needs without taking any sides, Are they courageous enough to stand up to the team and protect them.

BTW this is spoken about in the CSM, but leaning and doing are two different things.

Do i need to buy an electonic agile management system

It depends. If you have an distributed team, you surely will need something more than sticky notes. In many cases Excel is good for distributed teams. But if that does not work then you could look at an online version of tool like Scrum works, Rally, Version One, Visual Studio for team etc.

But if you have teams that are face to face or teams that are distributed but are essentially seperate teams then you do not need anything more than a physical board.

Here is a version of a manual board

From PublicAgile

You can get this by downloading this template and then go to Fed Ex Kinkos to print and get it mounted on a large board. Costs you  around 80 dollars.