References Useful in Training

Note: to download when you cannot get to YouTube online, put “ss” in front of YouTube in the address.

Games

Simulating Agile Execution with the Ball Point Game

Simulating WIP Effects with Balls and a Banana

Videos

When training, some of these videos can lighten things up:

New Zealand All Blacks Haka (this is the meaning of Scrum? no ...)

Jeff Sutherland's TedX video on doing "Twice the Work in Half the Time"

VersionOne's description of the Agile Manifesto

Drive: The Surprising Truth About Motivation plus Dan Pink's TED Talk

Scrum in 7 minutes

The Rong Way to Do Agile: Team Structure from Atlassian

Writing Good User Stories from Rally

Product Backlog Example to build web site for Scrum Alliance (from Mike Cohn)

Planning Poker for Estimates from Mike Cohn

Example Ball Point Game

Prudential Ad Showing That We Are All Optimists When Considering the Future

Why Cost of Delay Matters?

Sinek's Ted Talk - Start with Why - To understand how to communicate with people especially as you introduce something new. Bit from 1:35 to 5:15 relevant for product owners, for example, when explaining “vision”.

High Performance Tree - Lisa Adkins on High Performance teams

How The Brain Stores Information - TED Talk on importance of visual processing etc.

Kenny Rubin "Essential Scrum" on Requirements and Change Management

Kenny Rubin "Essential Scrum" on Product Backlog grooming

Jeff Sutherland on the Daily Scrum

S&*% Bad Scrum Masters Say - Funny

Hitler at the Sprint Review - Funny. Discussion about letting things slip from Sprint to Sprint and Definition of Done.

SAFe 4.0 in 5 minutes - Simple introduction to the basics of SAFe.

Henrik Kniberg on the Product Owner role - Love the idea of saying “no”.

Lyssa Atkins on Scrum in about 10 mins - Every Scrum Master should know how to explain the framework.

Dave Allen - Teach Kids About Telling the Time to understand how slippery the english language is to drive requirements.

Steven Johnson - Where Good Ideas Come From to understand how innovation works - requires a collision of half ideas (the slow hunch) that have been fermenting in the background for a while. So idea is to provide an environment to connect. “Chance (of innovation) favors the connected mind.”

The Backwards Bicycle to understand how its hard to unlearn what we know, that knowledge isn’t the same as understanding, to learn you have to practice, practice, practice, and that you have biases and are unaware of them. See more at Why Is Agile So Hard - The Backward Bicycle?

Leeroy Jenkins What happens when 1 person doesn't consider the rest of the team. From World of Warcraft.

Day in a Life of Mob Programming. Helpful to talk about learning and trying practices even if we don't adopt wholesale.

Dilbert has "the knack". Funny video about becoming an engineer.

Rugby game. Shows structure emerging from chaos, minimal control, common goals, etc

Introduction to DevOps

Agile Manifesto Explained Quick 3 minute video on the basics of the Agile Manifesto, including a bit of history.

Are we in Control of Our Decisions: Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

Cordination Chaos: Good video to help explain why the old way of working no longer works as the organization grows.

High-tech Anthopology at Menlo: Video to explain how gemba helps when working on understanding customer requirements.

Submarine Leadership: David Marquet on changing the leadership model from “leader - follower” to “leader - leader”.

5 Dysfunctions of a Team: Patrick Lencioni presenting the materials of the book

Wisdom of the Crowds demonstration counting gum balls: Useful to help people understand how even uninformed people can contribute to a discussion in estimation.

To help people understand small vs large batch processing (the ideal of one piece flow in manufacturing world) when you cannot run something like the penny game:

Batch of 10 vs batch of 1, simultaneously

Batch of 10 vs batch of 1, serially

Dave Snowden on Organizing a Children’s Birthday Party

The Power of Empathy - For Leadership

Locating Yourself - The Key to Conscious Leadership - Are you operating above the line or below the line.

Design Thinking - Introduction to the basic ideas. While it is presented as a “linear” process, and misses notions of divergent and convergent thinking, it is a good start.

How to Use the Customer Empathy Map

Eric Ries on Innovation Accounting - How do we know we are making progress when all we are doing experiments.

Games

Zin Obelisk Game - Fun game to experience and examine the sharing of information in team problem solving and how leadership, cooperation, and conflict issues effect team problem solving.

Scrum Master vs Project Manager Game - Useful game which helps folks understand how the responsibilities of a traditional project manager are moved to both the Scrum Master, the Product Owner and the Team when applying agile approaches.

Also videos of games:

Airplane game

Ball Point Game

Other Useful Links for Training

12 Principles of Agile Development by Julien Henzelin

VersionOne "State of Agile" Survey (9th Edition). You need to register to get it - my version.

Help answer question "What does a Scrum Master do?"

Base approach to splitting stories. Additional thinking at from Bill Wake 20 ways to split stories. These ideas are to help to get to a minimal, end-to-end solution present which usually has high value, from which you can thin then fill in the rest of the solution in subsequent iterations.

Role of Product Management from Pragmatic Marketing framework

The Burning Platform metaphor by Daryl Conner. Idea is to have the resolve to make the change happen. Resolve can come from current or anticipated problems or current of anticipated opportunities, not necessarily as a result of “peril” (which is “current problem” classification.

Alistair Cockburn etc on Communication including richness chart and the implications of this richness.

James Coplien on the Borland Quattro Pro development which some say was the most productive ever recorded. To quote the abstract “The project assimilated requirements, completed design and implementation of 1 million lines of code, and completed testing in 31 months. Coding was done by no more than eight people at a time, which means that individual coding productivity was higher than 1000 lines of code per staff-week. The project capitalized on its small size by centering development activities around daily meetings where architecture, design, and interface issues were socialized. Quality assurance and project management roles were central to the development sociology, in contrast to the developer-centric software production most often observed in our studies of AT&T telecommunications software. Analyses of the development process are “off the charts” relative to most other processes we have studied.”

Discussion on roles beyond PO, SM, and team basics

Advice on Running Scrum-of-Scrums meeting from Mike Cohn.

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team by Charles Duhigg (New York Times article). Article which points out how little team composition (in terms of the A team, for example) really points to an effective team and that instead the “conversational turn-taking” and “average social sensitivity” on teams (supporting “psychological safety”) is what predicts team performance best. Other factors were also recognized as important - like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. To support the “safety” aspect “What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a 'work face' when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel 'psychologically safe,' we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.” “Sakaguchi’s experiences underscore a core lesson of Google’s research into teamwork: By adopting the data-driven approach of Silicon Valley, Project Aristotle has encouraged emotional conversations and discussions of norms among people who might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about how they feel”. And “It’s easier to talk about our feelings when we can point to a number.” My version what_google_learned_from_its_quest_to_build_the_perfect_team_-_the_new_york_times.pdf

Adaptive Leadership Accelerating Enterprise Agility - Jim Highsmith. Talks about the way we need to bring the agile mindset to the enterprise.

Work Characteristics and Work Performance of Knoweldge Workers: What Goes Hand in Hand? - Research paper on knowledge work and importance of various characteristics of the work on the performance of knowledge workers. From abstract “The aim of the paper was to investigate the interplay among a wide range of work characteristics and knowledge workers’ performance outcomes. Specifically, we examined the nature of relationships between various task-, knowledge- and social characteristics of work design and both task and contextual performance. Using an adapted Work Design Questionnaire and applying PLS-SEM modelling technique, we analysed cross-sectional and cross-occupational sample of 512 Croatian knowledge workers from 48 organizations. Our findings confirmed the existence and importance of interaction between work characteristics and work outcomes. However, the results suggest that only knowledge characteristics of work design exhibit a significant effect on both distinct dimensions of work behaviour, while task and social characteristics showed different effects on task and contextual performance, respectively.”

Create your own project cartoon - remember that picture - what customer asked for, what project management understood, etc. Here you can create your own.

Article - Sliding Toward Success and related tool Project Success Sliders Tool - Mike Cohn's approach to working trade-offs between the various constraints on a project.

This American Life - NUMMI and how America is slowly learning the lean lesson from Toyota.

Software Development Performance Index. My copy whitepaper-sdpispecifications-v1.pdf. This is work that came originally from Larry Maccherone while working with Rally. Ideas is to use performance, quality (release ability), predictability, and responsiveness. For example:

Release ability - if team worked on nothing else but close out bugs how long

Responsiveness - how long to get in a bug

Performance - thought put - closed work items

Predictability - how consistent is our delivery (versatility)

Discussion of remote vs co-location: Martin Fowler with a nuanced discussion on the trade-offs of remote vs co-located people.