It’s 2012, everyone is back in the groove after December holidays, so it’s time to get the circles going again. We will be kicking off on Monday 13 February, atLots are people are asking me about coaching circles. How was the retro, when are they starting up again, can they join, etc. I though it might be time for a post.

Last year ended with a great retrospective on the final round of coaching circles, facilitated by Cara Turner. This was the first round of circles where we split into 3 types: mentoring, coaching and dojo. It seems the end result was very positive. People loved the new circle types! See the photo’s below for the outcomes of the retro.

First we made some posters about the sessions.

Then we talked about things we didn’t like (burnt toast), things we loved (ice cream) and things we’d like to try (experiments)

In the end we had some suggestions and next steps actions

It’s 2012, everyone is back in the groove after December holidays, so it’s time to get the circles going again. We will be kicking off on Monday 13 February, at 6pm. Please signup if you will attend. If you are keen to join a circle or even just find out more about them to decide if they are right for you, then make sure you get yourself to the kickoff. As always those who can’t attend the kickoff may still join circles by adding their details to the coaching circles google doc. However please note, those at the kickoff get first preference for circles of their choosing. Also for newbie, it’s highly recommended you come to the kick off to get an idea of what’s involved and how it works. Remember we will need hosts who can offer venues, signup in the google doc if you can offer one.

First of all, the fact that I am only blogging about last months event, a mere two hours from the start of this months event, is definite grounds for an apology! Better late than never they say?

The first Thursday in December. Four confident looking presenters got themselves geared up. No walk in the park this. Each presenter had only 6 minutes to get their message across. Each slide had to be no longer than 20 seconds. What I didn’t know, until that evening, was that each slide had to automatically be set to transition after 20 seconds. No pressure!

First up was Sheetal Gordhan. Scrum is not for the faint hearted was her topic!

I’m looking at my notes now, and I see the Ken Schwaber quote: “Scrum is hard”. And right next to that I have Sheetal paraphase: “This kak is hard”. I like Sheetal’s version I remember us all having a good chuckle, leaned back in our seats and took in a nice big gulp on our drinks. Our evening was set, we were here to have some fun!

Sheetal’s presentation reminded us that only a small percentage of teams are actually successful in Scrum. It’s really not easy and we need to prepare ourselves when we embark on this journey. Even though there are 1,000′s of articles online, it’s still not enough to prepare us for what lies ahead.

I can honestly say that I, in 6 minutes, had learned more about what a newbie organisation to Scrum should expect than I have in any course attended or article read.

My favourite slide of Sheetal’s. Hmmm, this is a tough one, there are so many. I liked the Google statistics of how many results one can expect when searching for Scrum information. But one that really stood out for me was the All Blacks doing the haka. Titled ‘Scrum Rituals’.( Remember, this event was in early December, only a few weeks after the All Blacks were crowned World Champs!). What are your development teams rituals? The usual stand-up and retrospective, or do you have something unique?

Next up was Meloné van Heerden, with her presentation entitled, What makes a great leader. Meloné had recently attended a course on this subject, and used the opportunity to apply her learning’s into the software development, in particular, Scrum, environment. One could see that the learning’s had a big impact of her, as her talk was passionate and energetic.

The subject of an ‘authentic leader’. What is an authentic leader? Or rather, what makes a leader authentic? Mel took us through the 6 step of process of discovering the authentic ‘you’. A necessary self-awareness process. A look at intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.

My favourite slide of Meloné’s. I personally liked the way in which she modelled the need to effectively set a leadership example, with well-known figures. Nelson Mandela and Barrack Obama featured, with Obama’s family an example of how important it is to build a support network. But my favourite would have to be a slide which represented who we sometimes don’t change. Any guess who features? Have a look at the photo below.

Next up, the good man David Campey. David had an interesting approach. Each of his slides represented a photo he had taken of his agile working environment. We got to meet his team. His manager. His Product Owner.

It told a story of a project. Starting from a photo of his Product Owner, looking very visionary in a room with blue-sky type walls, through to photo’s of his team hard at planning, and ending with his team out on a boat trip

I’ve always found it fascinating to see how other organisations work. How they approach their Scrum repertoire. Especially local companies.

David’s presentation was recorded, so please have a look for yourself. I’ve already sent this out to my development teams. Motivational stuff!

And finally, Karen Greaves, who needed little introduction off course! Her talk was titled: “Agile Management: How to create a culture to help your team succeed.” It was awesome! Need I say more. Who thought a talk about management could be fun

Thank you to everyone that attended. And a big thank you to our four brave presenters. You were all superstars!

Join SUGSA Cape Town on 2 February when we have Release Planning with Scrum: Controlling the Chaos.

When: 2 February 2012, 6:00PM

Topic: Release Planning with Scrum: Controlling the Chaos                    

Sign up: Please sign up here in order to help us with catering.

Venue:
Allan Gray Portswood office in the Presentation Room on the third floor. You can download a map here. Everyone parking in the Portswood parking area will have to pay for their own parking tickets. There is also parking available in Beach Road.

Synopsis:
The Agile Manifesto tells us that we should be responding to change over following a plan.  This encourages us to plan into the future at the last responsible moment.  But we still may need a plan.  A plan can help inform our customers what may be in the next release or by when their favourite feature may appear.  They can help inform stakeholders on the cost of the current focus and hence whether the investment makes sense at this time.  These are Good Things for a business.  The essence of agile planning is to understand that the plan may change.  The plan must be reassessed for validity every time new data comes into the system – usually at the end of a sprint. Plans often allow us to appear more certain than we may actually be.  The hardest part with planning in Scrum is ensuring that everyone understands that things change and we will respond as soon as they do.  Effective agile planning allows us to more reliably respond to the changing business and market needs as early as possible.

Objectives:
In this talk I will discuss some of the techniques that I have used over the last couple of years to do release planning.  I’ll touch on of some of the things that have worked for me and some that haven’t.  The ideas will range from some simple maths, to reporting release progress through a release burnup and overviews, to the how to deal with change and ensuring that people understand what it means.  I hope by the end of the talk I will have shared some ideas and generated some conversation around controlling the chaos that can surround a software development release.

About Patrick Vine:
I started my career more than a decade ago at Microsoft in Redmond. Since then I’ve moved through different companies as developer, architect and manager in diverse technologies and industries.  I first started to dabble in Scrum a couple of years back while working at Yellowtail Software where I helped the roll out of Scrum. While there I gained an appreciation for how well you can manage software using Scrum.  I’ve worked on Fixed Price, Fixed Team, Fixed Budget projects. I am passionate about working with Scrum, learning more about software development and helping teams get better on a daily basis.

Sponsored by

Last month we ran a “nominate for Neuland” competition for people to nominate the most influential agilists in their environments. I’m please to annouce our winners who each get a pack with a SUGSA moleskin notebook and 4 Neuland markers. A big thanks also to the community for appreciating those around you. See below for the inspiring text we received for the nominations.

• Aslam Khan
• Samantha Laing
• Melone Van Heerden
• Claude Botes
• Sharna Sammy
• Gerald Stober
• Kevin Trethewey
• Maritza Van Den Heuvel
• Rian Van Der Merwe
• Andre Venter

Aslam Khan received two nominations

I nominate Aslam Khan. Why?  For being involved in the world community and for share his learning with all of us that software development is hard but it is possible to learn how to make less of a mess some of the time.  He is inspiring with his positive, humble, patient attitude to helping people understand simple design and agile software development.  There needs to be more developers in the South African agile community like Aslam.

I nominate Aslam Khan. Though he doesn’t like stationary at all. Aslam has inspired and motivated me to do thing I never thought possible in the last year. He remains calm and thinks out of the box. He usually pokes at me to look at situations from all angles and then encourages (and pushes?) me off a ledge I am scared of.Thanks to Aslam I have become more, believe more and behave less

Samantha Laing received two nominations

I would like to nominate Sam Laing as she is always willing to help, introduced the coaching dojos concept to the community and is shamelessly addicted to the acquisition of neuland markers.

Sam Laing for two reasons:

1: Agile Games! Fun! Awesome! With great learning comes great laughter

2: Sam is a source of wisdom and strength in our company’s agile transition. She is always focused on how to move forward from a situation, not only offering insight but helping each of us to find the path of action we are most committed to taking for ourselves, which makes her an excellent coach. And in all our challenges and successes, Sam exercises greater diplomacy than anyone I think I’ve ever worked with – deep respect.

3. (Yes, of course there’s a third). Sam’s appreciation for Stationary is beyond measure. She deserves Neulands! And they will definitely be going to an awesome home

Melone Van Heerden received two nominations

We would like to nominate Melone van Heerden from Allan Gray.  Two and a half years ago, she was the first dedicated Scrum master in the retail IT development space at Allan Gray. It was her responsibility to prove that dedicated scrum masters can be justified in our organisation. With relatively little experience and no role models for support, she worked exceptionally hard at making it a success.

Based on her impact in the teams she managed, our company decided to recognise scrum masters as a first class citizen in the development space and we employed an additional 2 dedicated scrum masters for retail IT – a ‘luxury’ which many agile environments don’t have.

We believe that Melone was instrumental in making this luxury a reality for all our scrum teams. This year she took Scrum to our Institutional business. Our institutional business has replaced their core system and recognised the success of Agile in the retail business unit.  The institutional development team had a fairly different culture and she had to show that Agile could add value in their environment.  At the same time she had to continue to run her scrum teams on the Retail side.

As a learning organisation Allan Gray tested its assumptions with regards to Agile in retail IT. We considered structural reporting changes and the implementation of the scrum master role in two teams. The teams having experienced both dedicated and part time scrum masters accepted only the structural changes, supporting the scrum master role as it has evolved in the past three years. The success of Melone and the other scrum masters has convinced our organisation of their importance in a variety of ways.

We have yet to meet somebody who is as passionate about what they believe in as Melone – she eats, sleeps, breathes and believes in agile – its thanks to Mel that Allan Gray can consider themselves part of the South African agile thought leadership!

I’d like to nominate Melone Van Heerden. She is a regular attendee at the monthly SUGSA meetings, and although she is not a committee member she has been instrumental in securing the Allan Gray venue for the monthly SUGSA meetings. She works behind the scenes for every event to make sure we have the room setup we need, the slides preloaded, and the signin sheet at reception. What impresses me most about Mel is her humility and willingness to learn from others. She never thinks of herself as an expert, even though she is probably one of the few (many only) people I know who have held a ScrumMaster position at a single organisation for 2 and a half years.

Claude Botes

Claude Botes age 23, he is a colleague of mine. I started working at a software developement house recently, KRS (Khanyisa Real Systems). Our developement team is one of 3 working for the same client, each team works on a different part of the system (with regard to business value). We currently have a scrum master, who is very efficient at her job. But what about my colleague Claude? Well, Claude has been a developer for at least 5 years now and understands the project and all its dependencies extremely well from a technical perspective. It is this combined with what I have to say next, that puts Claude on an extremely good footing toward an agile management role. Over the last while, Claude has upped his game dramatically. He has started ensuring the team understands the project from a business perspective, and at the same time makes sure they understand its importance, that they invest in the project / system and ultimately fall in love with it.

Claude has opened my eyes to the agile movement. He has made me realise that agile is not one method, but a consumption of many that make up an agile approach. He has taken the time to comprehensively study material and now sends out a weekly letter on attaining an agile approach. Claudes key feature is that he hits the developer with the language and the desires a developer has. He speaks to the people who make the system, and who are therefore the ones who need to be invested in, from the same platform. His desire to build relationships and coach the people who need it, not only make me want to see agile in my developement style, but life in general.

Although our company is aiding Claudes objectives generously, personally, I think Claude deserves more investment and opportunity than he can get from any single software developement house. From the time I’ve known him, he’s proven himself not only to be a man of his word, but one of solidarity. We’ve spoken about many things and what strikes me about his way of life, is how he is where he is because of his own sweat and toil. He works for what he gets, in and out of the workplace. This, is evident in his approach to agile coaching. This is evident to not only myself, but others too. Unfortunately, I am not able to convey to you just how he shapes our team, coaches individuals and pushes for agile objectives, because I simply do not have the experience in project oversight and guidance to do so. So although I have said some things here, be sure I have missed many key points. So whether you’s consider Claude as a nominee or not, I’d just like to assert that he has definitely made a difference in the way I see software developement. Thanks bro…

Sharna Sammy

I’d like to nominate Sharna Sammy. Although she is new to the agile community, she heard about agile through her husband who works at Web Africa, she immediately understood it to be something great she could use. She jumped straight in and gave it a try. She also gave a lightning talk at this year’s Scrum Gathering, and is now a member of a mentoring circle. What inspires me most is her enthusiam to learn as much as she can, and her undying energy for trying new things.

Gerald Stober

My nomination is for Gerald Stober.  He has been inspired my agile journey this year by being instrumental as a mentor. We have had healthy debates, sessions of knowledge sharing and experiences. He opened my eyes to see the benefits of scrum when you internalise and see the potential it has (I previously came from a PM background) We have been doing Scrum in our  teams for just under 2 years and it was time to take our team a level up in the process. I myself had to be certain that my level of knowledge and role as SM could unleash what the team was about to experience.

He encouraged me to attend the SUGSA events, the Scrum Safari and Agile circles (which we currently host at our office). Through this I was able to mingle and converse with like minded agile enthusiast. My hunger for being more versed in Agile practices increased and so did my passion within my role, I wanted everyone to feel the excitement.   Through engagements, watching video’s by different Agile practitioners, daily emails, reading and  pushing me into situations that made me “bring my role” as SM to the team,  Gerald influenced how I thought about things, approaches to use  and to gain the confidence to be able to nurture, facilitate and help my team to grow and mature within the process.

Kevin Trethewey

My vote goes for a scrum passionate member of that first JHB coaching circle: Kevin from drivensoftware.net.

Maritza Van Den Heuvel

I’d like to nominate Maritza van den Heuvel for the inspirational agilist thingy. She is ferociously  passionate product owner, she runs two (count em two) blogs including one on doing Kanban with her kids. She was instrumental in bringing David Anderson to South Africa and effectively kickstarting the interest in South Africa as a result. She ran an awesome session on Product Ownership at the Gathering. If only SUGSA meetings weren’t in the evenings we’d see more of her, but her voracious twitterings are a remarkably close substitute, and of course I can’t wait to see what her contribution to the upcoming “Scrumban” new edition is likely to be.

Rian Van Der Merwe

My nomination is Rian van der Merwe, Head of Product and User Experience Design at Kalahari.net. As a Product Owner, I consider Rian an inspiration and role model. Through his talks and blog I have picked up lots of good  ideas to further the agile product management cause in my own environment. When I needed some specific advice about getting User-Centred Design going at my previous company, I was also able to bounce ideas off him over e-mail. Despite his success, he remains approachable and willing to share. That’s what being agile is all about!

Andre Venter

I would like to nominate Andre Venter. I have been a systems analyst for many years and I’ve always gone the “go live in one go” route.  Andre is quite an evangelist on the scrum issue and for my current project I’ve tried to use the principles of scrum that he has painstakingly explained to me J.  I was dubious to begin with and although I’m not going the ‘pure’ scrum route, I’ve split the project into functions and am working on taking them live one at a time.  It’s working very well and both my boss and users are happy since they are able to see something that is working without waiting so long that they’ve forgotten what they asked for

Pecha Kucha is a trademarked format ideal for high-powered, energetic presentations. Started in Tokyo, Japan, in February 2003, the format allows each speaker 20 slides and 20 seconds of talk time per slide. The slides are automatically forwarded after 20 seconds with no chance of return. Read more about this simple, but challenging format on the web site of the local Cape Town chapter.

When: 1 December 2011, 6:00PM

Topic: Pecha Kucha

Sign up: Please sign up here in order to help us with catering.

Venue:
Allan Gray Portswood office in the Presentation Room on the third floor. You can download a map here. Everyone parking in the Portswood parking area will have to pay for their own parking tickets. There is also parking available in Beach Road.

Ending the year in high mood our December event promises to be a night of good, (mostly) clean fun!

A number of brave SUGSA members will present around the topic of the Agile Software Development Methodology.

Sheetal Gordhan is currently a servant leader to the R & D team at Mobilitrix where she spends her time asking questions, demanding results and giggles often.

“I will use the 6 mins and 40 seconds to illustrate why I think Scrum is not for the faint hearted. I will make reference to Ken Schwaber, Scrum values and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and some of my own experience to illustrate this statement.”

Meloné van Heerden is currently a ScrumMaster serving two teams at Allan Gray. Since qualifying as a Certified ScrumMaster 2.5 years ago, she feel that her philosophy around scrum is best described by a quote from Keith Sawyer:
“We are drawn to the image of the lone genius whose mystical moment of insight changes the world. But the lone genius is a myth; instead it’s group genius that generates breakthrough innovation.
Collaboration drives creativity because innovation always emerges from a series of sparks – never a single flash of insight.”

“Self-organisation is a fundamental concept in agile software development. This does not mean that there is no place for leaders, nothing could be further from the truth. Leaders can influence how teams self-organise, but being an effective leader is not easy.
Allan Gray offers a brilliant leadership program to all it’s leaders and I had the privilege of participating in the leadership program this year. I would like to use this time to share some of my key learnings with you.”

Karen Greaves is currently the Software Development Manager at Fundamo, where she works with four awesome Scrum teams to deliver great software regularly. She also regularly co-trains Scrum classes with Peter Hundermark, hoping to become a CST soon. She was previously the Scrum Coach at Intec where she was responsible for their Scrum roll out to approximately 100 people in Cape Town R&D. She has worked in software for over 12 years in a number of different roles and environments. She is passionate about building good software, and creating a work environment which enables technology professionals to be creative, motivated and productive. You can read her blog here.

“Agile Management: How to create a culture to help your team succeed.”

David Campey, Douglas from dotlogic and Andrew from graphicmail have also volunteered and we will give you more info about their talks as we receive it.

As you may know if you attended this year’s Scrum Gathering, here at SUGSA we LOVE Neuland markers. We happen to have a few left over from the goodie bags, so we thought about running a competition: Nominate for Neuland:

Nominate  the people who have been most influential in your agile journey this year. They don’t need to be a member of SUGSA, but they need to be living in South Africa. Write up a short paragraph on why they have inspired you, and send it to info <at> scrum <dot> org <dot> za, before 21 November.

We will  post a list of nominees with their stories, and ask the community to vote for the 10 most deserving agilists. Each winner will receive an awesome gift pack including a SUGSA moleskin journal and 4 Neuland Big One markers.

Get nominating!

Oh and the small print… Any SUGSA committee members are excluded from winning, since you know we love those markers so much we might just rig the votes to get them

Nominations for the 2012 Cape Town SUGSA Committee, are now open to all SUGSA members.

If you would like to nominate yourself to be on the committee, please forward a picture, short bio, and statement about why members should vote for you to info@scrum.org.za before 21 November 2011.

After the nomination deadline has passed, the list of nominees will be circulated to all SUGSA members, and voting will take place electronically leading up to the December monthly event. Each SUGSA member is entitled to vote for up to three nominees. The committee will be chosen based on up to five nominees who have received the most votes.

High quality software that meets the business needs can only come from an exceptional development team. Lets talk about the secret sauce needed to make your team exceptional.

Stand-ups every day? Check.
Impediment-removing Scrum Master? Check.
Product Owner who understands prioritising? Check.
Teams that deliver working code every sprint? Check.
Review every sprint? Check.
Retrospective every sprint? Check.

Does this make your business truly Agile? For me there are a couple of checklist items missing:

Development practices that deliver high quality code?

A team of developers who understand one another and operate as a cohesive unit?

Team productivity doesn’t drop when a particular team member is away?

How would you answer? How would your developers answer?

It’s bring-a-dev-day at SUGSA! In fact bring your whole development team.

About Austin Fagan

I work for Unboxed Consulting.

I started writing software in 1999. I think I’m as bad now as I was then. So I don’t code now, my team keeps me as far from the codebase as they can, they shudder at the thought of me coding. I still can’t help being passionate about development. Weird.

I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to Agile techniques and great development practice since 2006 and I’ve been boring people silly about both since.

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