Product Manager - version 2.0 @ Scrum India Dec 2011

The Scrum India Dec 2011 NCR meetup at Xebia, offered me a perfect opportunity to rant about my expectations from today's Product Managers in the agile world today, as we go about our daily (product development) chores. This post was takeoff from my earlier post sometime back on bringing the business dashboard closer to the workforce on the ground and linking the agile world with the overall business objectives. Feel free to comment on my digs and leave your feedback in the comments.

Ofcourse my presentation was in the Pecha Kucha style (my first one) and think i did ok :-),but you can watch my presentation video recording at the WizIQ channel.

Overall it was interesting to hear Amit Somani (MakeMyTrip) and their struggles to get the product managers, with some controversial points by Rajat Bhalla (Vinsol). You can watch all the video recordings at the WizIQ channel (video recording sponsors).

Product Manager - version 2.0 

Product Manager - version 2.0

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Agile Balanced Scorecard at Agile Tour India 2011, Pune

As part of the Scrum Alliance, Agile Tour India, Pune conducted a track on Agile Enterprise and my session on "Balanced Scorecard for the Agile Enterprise" was selected. The session focused on how Balanced Scorecard has traditionally been used across multiple industries for managing the organization performance towards the achievement of it's strategic goals. This session introduced key performance indicators for a Balanced Scorecard in an Agile context, which could lead to similar strategic focus and organizational alignment and how to capture the typical agile metrics in the overall Balanced scorecard for software projects. The session was extremely well received by the enthusiastic audience of 100+ attendees, comprising CXO's, senior managers and development community.

Agile Balanced Scorecard -Agile Tour 2011 Pune

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7 Steps to winning Agile wars

Sharing my presentation at the Agile NCR 2011, talking about the 7 step framework for introducing bottoms up agility in your organization. Watch out for details in my next blog posts.

How did you win your wars ? leave a comment...

Asheesh Mehdiratta Agile NCR 2011

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Speaking at Agile NCR 2011

Delighted as I will be speaking in the Agile NCR 2011 conference, Delhi...you can catch my talk on 25th Feb 2011 (4:00PM)....http://agilencr.org/pages/agenda

I will be speaking - 7 steps to winning Agile wars ...

any thoughts on this? Shoot me an email and I will try my best to answer in my talk. wish me luck !

Tribal maintaineance or Sprint Retrospectives : just another tribal ceremony?

Do you think that your sprint retrospective transitions the team to their cause ? or is it just another tribal ceremony?

The authors of Tribal Leadership talk about people forming tribes, which range from stages 1 to stage 5 (most evolved at stage 5). The tribal leaders in Stage 4/5 perform regular "tribal maintaineance". But do you know that this tribal maintaineance ritual matches the sprint retrospectives feedback loop (which agile teams perform after every sprint)?

Stage 4/5 tribal leaders, who regularly perform these "tribal maintaineance" or "oil changes" (as the authors speak), ask these BIG questions -
1. what's working well ?
2. what's not working ?
3. what can we do to make the things that aren't working, work ?

This indeed sounds familiar to the Agile Sprint Retrospective questions -
1. What worked well last Sprint that we should continue doing?
2. What didn’t work well last Sprint that we should stop doing?
3. What should we start doing?

But what's the difference in these stage 4/5 tribes and agile sprint retrospectives ? Do agile sprint retrospectives miss anything?

I think that the major difference in these tribes vs the sprint team answering these similar questions, is that the tribe is indirectly answering more key questions - " what's our cause ?" and "what are we proud of ?".

This tribal maintaineance activity provides the tribe a deeper understanding of their shared values. Once a tribe understands these shared values, the tribe members are united and therefore transition to a "we are great" tribe !! (stage 4), from a "I am great" (stage 3) !!

Thus this stage 4 melts all individual boundaries and the tribe members work collectively towards their noble cause. Surely Avatar's on Pandora were a united tribe with a noble and heroic cause !!

But what about your sprint teams ? do they see their cause from a sprint retrospective or is it just another tribal ceremony?

Agile 2010 conference registration

Agile 2010 dates are now announced by Agile Software Community of India (ASCI), happening in Mumbai(16/17th Jan) and Bengaluru(22/23rd Jan). Here are the links for Bengaluru and Mumbai registrations. I am registering my seat now....

Is your agile team usability infected ?

Agile teams generally do acceptance tests, unit tests with every sprint but what about usability tests ? The myriad test frameworks allow continuous feedback for the functionality or 'user acceptance' tests, but the user experience tests are sadly missing or delegated to the specialist designer.


What has been your experience ? Can you build user experience (UEX) focus in your agile sprints from the beginning?


Today the agile teams are mostly generalists and quality infected, but as we find that the user experience is not always a top priority. From my experience the user experience discussion in agile projects today usually happens POST the sprint demo. The product owner and the specialist UEX designer reviews the sprint demo against an intial user interface specification and provides feedback to the team. This may sometimes result in major changes or complete redo of the functionality, not a good sign (smells ?) But it is indeed possible in my view to use the available tools to engage in discussion and do rapid prototyping and reduce the feedback cycle time.

Here's my list of popular tools which can be used for agile user experience discussions with your UEX designers and Product Owner

1. Wireframesketcher
   
2. MockupScreens
   
3. Inkscape
   
4. Balsamiq
   
5. OmniGraffle
6. Axure
   
7. Morae

Ideally the agile communication for user experience discussions could range from simple paper drawings to using the quick dirty tools (see the popular tool set above), based on the user story maps (or themes and epics). The extreme user experience oriented step would be to setup a Usability lab fitted with cameras et al. as the NASA example demonstrates.

So what is your best bet ? what discussions do you have with the product owner \ UEX designer so that your agile team becomes usability infected also?