Allan Kelly's Blog, page 21
July 27, 2020
September micro-workshops – tickets!
I’m running all three of my half-day workshops again in September:
User Stories Masterclass, 14 September
Agile Estimating & Forecasting, 21 September
Maximising value delivered in agile, 28 September
You can read reviews of these workshops on the Allan Kelly agile training pages where you will find more details too.
Tickets are on-sale now with Tito – with a 20% early bird discount. (I’m using Tito this time because it promises to handle VAT better for those of you outside Europe.) If you have any problems with Tito or would prefer to receive an invoice contact me directly via e-mail, allan at allankelly dot net.
Blog readers can get another 15% off with the code “Blog15”.
Plus, if you book and pay for one workshop you will receive a code for 50% off the other workshops – buy one get two half price offer.
As before there are a few free tickets for the unemployed and furloughed. I might release more unemployed free tickets nearer the time so join the wait list if you are unemployed and miss out.
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Recent talks online
During the last few months I’ve done a lot of online talks and presentations. Most have been public but some have been private, some have been repeats (with updates) of past presentations while others are completely new.
As always a full list in the insights section of my website and on my YouTube channel. These include:
Continuous Money to the London CD group – discussing Minimally Viable Teams in more detail
The Business Case for Agile in 2020: re-recording of a private presentation
Evolution: from #NoProjects to Continuous Digital (2020 edition): was updated for Agile Newbury
Common Product Owner Mistakes to Agile London
Mission Impossible: The Product Owner to Agile Northants
And “Everything think you ever wanted to know about the Product Owner but were afraid to ask”, a conversation with Adrian Reed.
Unlike conference recordings which show me dancing around a stage these were all delivered online so I expect you will find the recordings better quality. The slides are available as PDFs, again on my website.
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July 17, 2020
The Business Case for Agile in 2020 – video blog
A couple of weeks ago I gave a private presentation to an organization entitled: “The Business Case for Agile in 2020.” Actually, it surprised me a bit that in 2020 people still wondered what the business case for agile was but that probably says more about my arrogance and the agile bubble I live in.
I’ve re-recorded the presentation and it is now on-line: The Business Case for Agile in 2020 is on YouTube and embedded below.
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September workshops
Summer is here so things are quiet. I’m not running any more workshops during the summer and will use the time to review what I’m doing. Still, I have started to create an initial programme of events:
User Stories Masterclass on 14 September, half-day
Agile Estimating & Forecasting, 21 September, half-day
Maximising value delivered in Agile, 28 September, half-day
Tickets are not on sale but the events are listed on Tito so if you are interested register your interest today and as soon as tickets are on sale you will know. More details are on my Agile training pages – where you will also find some great reviews from people who have been on the courses recently.
I have lots of ideas for more online workshops so if there is a subject you would like to see please drop me a note (contact at allankelly dot net) and I’ll see what I can do – it would be great to know what people actually want!
I’ve not yet decided what to do about free tickets for the unemployed and furloughed. While I like offering these tickets – it feels like the right thing to do – I am getting high dropout rates from people who register for these tickets. The old case of people registering for something and having nothing to loose if they don’t turn up.
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Agile & OKRs – the next book
Last year I had a surprise: the company I was working with introduced OKRs – Objectives and Key Results. I started off very cynical about how effective these were likely to be but …
Not only did I come to like OKRs and the OKR setting process I came to see how they plugged a gap in agile and how they can be powerful for agile teams.
So a few months ago I started writing a book: A little book about Agile with OKRs.
I stalled for a few weeks but I’m working on it again so expect more updates in the coming weeks. Please let me know what you think of the book, and if you are using OKRs I would especially appreciate your thoughts and stories – I might even include them!
(Yes the name is deliberately chosen to build on the success of my “Little Book about Requirements and User Stories”.)
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July 1, 2020
June 30, 2020
The future of office working
The lockdown hasn’t effected my work environment that much. This is a picture of my home office, my garden office, my “man cave.” I am very lucky. When I’m not on site with clients I spend most of my time working here. Still, I miss visiting clients and conferences – although I did squeeze in Agile on the Beach New Zealand in the closing days of the old world.
A friend of mine works for Canonical – the Ubunto Linux people. The vast majority of the people at Ubunto work remotely. So while my friend lives in New Zealand he works with a team spread out across the world.
Once or twice a year, his whole team co-locates. They all fly together and work together for a couple of weeks, a sprint. Then they return home and work remotely with each other for another six months, then repeat. Once or twice I’ve seen Tim as he works in, or passes through, London. But as luck would have it the week I was in New Zealand he was on his travels.
In all this talk of how wonderful working-from home can be I don’t think there has been enough discussion about what makes a good experience and what makes it bad. The Ubunto story highlights a couple of points which I think are missing from much of the current discussion over remote/home working.
Firstly the team are equal: they are all remote.
Over the years I have observed big differences in the way teams which are all distributed operate and the way teams with only one or two members operate. When the bulk of a team are co-located and only one or two are remote there is an unequal relationship. My intuition says teams are better off when they are either all remote or all co-located. When five of the team are co-located and a sixth member is remote then things are more difficult.
The way lockdown came about this year teams went from one to the other overnight, literally. Which also means it was very egalitarian. Everyone was in the same position. That can only be a good thing.
The second thing I take from Ubunto is that face-to-face time is still valued. In fact, as we unlock I expect home working will be more common, more remote tools will be used but we will value co-locating and face-to-face contact all the more.
Where companies keep people remote I expect we will see the emergence of deliberate co-location. This might be a two week block like my friend or it might be a few hours or a whole day. I can easily imagine benefit from an agile team coming together for one day a fortnight to close out a sprint, run a retrospective and then plan the next sprint. (That will have a knock on effect in the office market as companies stop renting offices for years and rent meeting rooms by the day.)
In fact this will be essential. It is easier to build social capital – trust, comradeship – when you are face-to-face. For the last three months we have been running on the social capital and experience teams built up over years working together. The social capital account now needs toping up.
Existing teams, existing social capital and egalitarian distribution helped people work during the lockdowns. As we slowly move back to our offices that is going to change and we will need to make deliberate efforts to replenish social capital, keep people equal and build new teams.
New teams will benefit from working together face-to-face to get to know one another. Build some social capital and norms.
New employees in particular will need time together. Especially those, like fresh graduates, who are new to work altogether. Such people need to learn how to work. Doing that in a distributed environment is a challenge.
Those new to the workforce face an additional challenge: space.
Home working is OK for me, I have a garden big enough for an office (and I had the money to buy one.) How many people have been working of their kitchen table? or bedroom? Mixing your sleeping space with your work space can damage sleep patterns and add to stress.
How many new workers have that space?
I remember when I was a fresh graduate finding my way in the world I lived in house shares. I had a room in a shared house with similar people. Some of them I counted as friends but not all of them. Some of them had bad habits. Going to an office for work was important, staying in the house – especially when they were all staying in! – would have been too much.
Then there is the question of broadband: I have 200Mb fibre to the door but many people make do with a lot less and that can be variable. Not that 200Mb comes cheap…
If a company expect someone to work from home then I think they should pay for good broadband internet. They should also provide the equipment – I have heard of only a few employers who have given staff money to buy equipment for home.
In February and March many people all over the world found themselves having to work from home. Its been a better experience than many expected but I know people are flagging, I know people keen to get back to the office. In future I expect we’ll value face-to-face contact even as many people stay at home.
In the coming months people aren’t just going to walk back to the office and pick up where they left off. Work will be more varied. But now the initial pleasure and surprise of working for home is over we need to have a conversation about what companies need to do to support working from home in future and how it can be made sustainable.
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June 23, 2020
June 16, 2020
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