I know there are more than a few Agilists who are bloggers among us and even more than enjoy taking pictures of their families, friends, their work, and maybe even their food on occasion (admit it, you do it).

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Action & influence, Inc. announced today that they are hosting more Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) and Certified Product Owner (CSPO) courses in Atlanta due to increasing demand. As the only company in Georgia to have a local Certified Scrum Trainer, Peter Saddington, they want to bring even more value to the Agile community and local Atlanta companies who want to leverage Agile or Scrum to bring quicker development value to their software and services. Having a local CST gives Georgia companies a great advantage, as their employees can attend local courses without incurring the costs associated with travel. Peter Saddington is one of the 140 Certified Scrum Trainers in the world and about half of them reside in the United States. Peter Saddington is the first CST to reside in the state of Georgia. Saddington says, “Our local clients who are looking towards Agile and Scrum have greatly enjoyed having a local trainer who can service their needs without flying in another trainer from out of state. Most of our clients in Atlanta have private courses for their entire development teams and organization.”

You can quickly find local Atlanta Certified ScrumMaster classes, http://atlantascrummaster2013.eventbrite.com/and sign up as an individual, team, or company.

According to one of Action & Influence’s students, Mike Rucker, who recently took a Certified ScrumMaster course in Atlanta said, “I was very pleased to find a local group that offered such a wide choice in class days and times. It was very easy to find a class that fit within an already busy schedule.”

Other testimonials of Action & Influence, Inc. classes:

“Peter’s mastery of the subject matter coupled with his excellent presentation and communication skills made for an outstanding learning experience.” – Jim Olwine from Atlanta

“Peter REALLY did change my life. He provided such great instruction on Scrum and the duties of a ScrumMaster. He gave lots of clarity on my career direction. Great job!” – Aletha Hill from Atlanta

“VERY INSPIRING. [Peter Saddington] is one of the best instructors I have ever seen in my life.” – Parveen Yadav from Atlanta

“I can honestly say that the ScrumMaster class has changed my view on software development, and breathed welcome fresh air into some tired sails. I am genuinely looking forward to the second half of my career now, with hopes to embody in my work all that Peter laid out in the class and the skill set of a true servant leader in the technical world.” – Mike Rucker from Atlanta

[HT: PRWeb]

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Are you an Agile Designer? Or just a designer looking for great resources? This webbie came up on our radar and so far I like what I’ve seen.

Now, sharing sites are a dime a dozen these days, this is nothing new. What I do like is that designers register, drop web pages or things of interest for others and they get ‘accepted’ by the community as valuable. Crowdsourcing at it’s best.

Don’t get it twisted though, this isn’t a FREE DESIGN TEMPLATE webpage. It’s more on the workflow, the process… helping a designer become more agile… or rather, able to be productive.

Worth a look.

AgileDesigners.com

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[I was recently asked what my journey to become a CST was like. So like an Agile blogger, I told them to wait for it to post on AgileScout.com ]

The path to becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) is one of the most arduous yet rewarding experiences I have ever gone through (and I spent 7 years in Master’s programs!). It has not only stretched me, but brought about a greater understanding of “mastery” of a craft, that, no matter how good you ‘think’ you become at something, you can always improve, become better, learn more, and grow as a person.

The day you stop learning is day you become ineffective in your work.

My CST Journey

I began my journey to becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer back in early 2009 when I began my investigation into the process and started collaborating with other CST’s about co-training opportunities. This was a time when the CST application process was evolving (and still is) and the requirements and application process wasn’t fully fleshed out. I, at the time, had been in my 8th year as an independent Enterprise Agile Coach and felt like the CST was the right way to go. I had completed my Certified ScrumMaster designation and my Certified Scrum Professional designation previously.

In early 2009 I had my first co-training opportunity with a fellow Agile coach. They went very well. I was stoked. I was excited. I had gotten a great review and was given priceless advice on how to become better. I felt like the CST was fast becoming a reality. I flew out to meet my 2nd co-trainer and we trained together. Another great workshop. I felt great… Then:

• Client work picked up.
• Timing just wasn’t working out.
• Work-life balance just wasn’t what it used to be.

A full year later, I still had yet to co-train with other coaches and trainers. My client list was full, my schedule was so tight that it became apparent to me that I may not be able to finish this race due to scheduling conflicts and overall timing not to mention funding from the CFO of my house (wife). I was burnt out, tired, and a bit frustrated.

It was all about the timing. It just didn’t seem to work. So what did I do? I made the tough choice to lighten my client load (OUCH! SCARY!) so I could open up opportunities to co-train. I made the time available, I reached out to friends and fellow Agile coaches for time slots, and I invited Agile coaches to come train with me at my client sites. I patiently prayed that the opportunities would come… and they did.

After a full 3.5 years I completed it… The road to becoming an official CST was complete… but the journey forward has just begun. YES!

[Peter Saddington Training on ScrumMaster Roles]

On Co-Training

Co-training with other Agile coaches is simply the best way to grow your craft as a coach. I have not only learned more about the small nuances of training people, but have met some of the most passionate Agile enthusiasts out there. My experiences have taught me one thing: We need co-training to be more available and accessible. We need to value co-training as something that only elevates and helps all involved: trainer, co-trainer, and client.

2010-2012 was a solid couple years of co-training for me. I not only co-trained for my CST designation, but I also co-trained with other Agile coaches just for learning. In 100% of my engagements with a co-trainer (with my clients) I have received feedback from all of them that the co-training helped the client participants learn better. What’s my point?

Take opportunities to co-train. Ask other experienced coaches if you can co-train with them.

As my father always said:

“Asking is always free.”

What have you got to lose?

[Peter Saddington loves big visible charts]

On the CST Process

The CST process is not perfect, neither will it ever be. Mike Vizdos talked about this almost 4 years ago, and it still holds true today:

“The process is not perfect. It will change. It must evolve. We must be agile. We must inspect and we must adapt…The process will never be able to predict with 100% certainty who will be a great trainer and who will be a mediocre trainer…And the process will never elevate CST into anything more than a designation, symbolizing strong Scrum knowledge and a talent for training. Being a CST should almost be a calling for a few people. It should be reserved for those who are gifted at teaching and who want to impart what they have learned about Scrum to those who need to know how to get started.” – Mike Vizdos on his CST Candidacy

[Peter Saddington teaching a CSM class]

The CST process is HARD. Period. You have to personally take into account your “calling” to do it. I seriously felt called to do this.  But being that it is a worthy goal, and also a “calling” of sorts, you have to take into account the (current) requirements (implicit and explicit) for this:

1. Have proven Agile experience… what does this mean? – That you have a proven record of working in Agile environments over time and succeeding.
2. Have a proven level of engagement with the Agile/Scrum community – Speak, get involved, jump in!
3. Co-train with N+ current CST‘s – To get their sponsorship and endorsement. *SOME PEOPLE MAY DISAGREE WITH THIS… that is ok! – [I had 10+ endorsements and co-training]
4. Fly out to co-train with them 1 or 2 or even 3 times on your dime and dollar (account for hotel, flight, car rental, food, etc.). – [Again, this is my experience here]
5. TIMING!!! – The timing is the hardest. If you’ve been an independent Agile Coach for as long as I have, you have to keep selling, keep mining for client work, and keep moving. Aligning time for you to co-train with another (just as busy or busier) trainer can be a nightmare.
6. Overall time – Yes. You should expect this to be a 18 month or longer process. Unless you’re a skilled warlock in the art of bending time to your will. – [My experience was 3.5 years]
7. Patience and dedication – This is a long hard road, no joke. You will get tired. You will be discouraged. You will be inclined to frustration at times. But keep pressing on. The light at the end of the tunnel is not the train coming at you, it’s a goal worth working for.

My Path Forward

Train With Me

I’m giving any Agile Coach, ScrumMaster, Project Manager, Development Manager, Programmer, or anyone interested in coaching and training companies to excellence, an opportunity to co-train with me.

My desire is to increase the knowledge and level of expertise within the software development community through mentoring and co-training fellow practitioners.

Why? Because you’re helping me become a better Trainer, Coach, and Mentor. As I learn from you I’ll become more effective in what I do. Oh yes, and hopefully you will learn a thing or two as well

Seriously? Yup. Words cannot describe how much fun it was co-training over 3.5 years with many different people. The learnings and experiences were absolutely priceless.

So, can anyone co-train with you? Yes… but first, we’ll have a conversation, then preferably meet up at some conference or local meetup and get acquainted in all the usual ways. We’ll start there. I have no other formula around how this will work, but I’d love to get to know you and start with a conversation.

Reading Recommendations:

 +  

• Drive – Daniel Pink’s book helped me better understand, at a deeper level, why we Agile Coaches do what we do: To help people attain Mastery, Autonomy, and Flow/Purpose. I talk a lot about these things by the way – [Just a great read anyways]
• Training from the BACK of the Room! - Sharon Bowman’s book completely changed my world of how I do training and workshops. No more death by powerpoint. Her book is top-shelf-grade reading material. It is how I plan and execute my workshops and training. My expectations are that you would understand her 4-point model.

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[We review Agile Tools. Have you seen our Agile Tools list?]

We’ve been looking around for another tool to review and it landed on our desk for sure.

[Enter]: SonicAgile – An Easy to Use Scrum tool in Blue

The SonicAgile folks tell us that they built SonicAgile because they wanted a lightweight and easy to learn project management tool which the developers could coordinate the work that their team performs on software projects.

SonicAgile supports the basic features that many other tools cover as well: creating backlogs, scrumboards, and burndown charts. It includes support for acceptance criteria, story estimation, calculating team velocity, and email integration.

Interested already? It’s simple. You can sign up for 30 days free. Booyah.

SonicAgile Backlog

You use the backlog to create a prioritized list of user stories such as features, bugs, and change requests. It’s a snap, prioritize a story by just drag and dropping the story from one location to another.

Likewise, it’s easy to add stories from the product backlog to the sprint backlog:

Tracking velocity is pretty intuitive and easy as well. Try it out… and then try to overload your team. A nice addition is that when you add too many stories to a a sprint… the system warns you automatically:

SonicAgile Scrumboard

If you’re running a daily Scrum everyday, you can use the Scrumboard to view at a glance what everyone on the team is working on. Below is a view of what an individual is working on in the Product Details Page:

Every story can be broken into tasks and acceptance criteria:

One caveat though, you cannot close a story — and remove the story from the list of active stories on the scrumboard — until all tasks and acceptance criteria associated with the story are done.

SonicAgile Burndown Charts

Currently, SonicAgile supports several versions of burndown reports: Release Burndown, Sprint Burndown by Task Estimates, and Sprint Burndown by Story Points charts. Below is an example of a Sprint Burndown by Story Points:

Email Integration

The folks over at SonicAgile tell us that their system was designed to improve your team’s communication and collaboration. Most stories and tasks require discussion to nail down exactly what work needs to be done. If your rockin’ a dispersed team, or a team that isn’t local, you can collaborate through email, right? When you use SonicAgile, all email discussions concerning a story or a task (including all email attachments) are captured automatically. At any time in the future, you can view all of the email discussion concerning a story or a task by opening the Story Details dialog:

Summary (And some Technical Details)

SonicAgile is very close to being a pure Ajax application (which I like). Looking a bit deeper we’ve found that SonicAgile was built using ASP.NET MVC 3, jQuery, and Knockout. Almost all of the MVC controller actions return JSON results. The controller actions are invoked from jQuery Ajax calls from the browser.

SonicAgile was built on Windows Azure, and the team over at SonicAgile is taking advantage of SQL Azure, Table Storage, and Blob Storage.

Going through the system, I wasn’t too disappointed with the experience. It was intuitive and pretty easy to navigate. I specifically liked the ease of the drag and drop functionality, which is a standard these days. The color scheme took a little bit getting used to though.

Since they’ve opened it up for free sign ups and 30 days of trial, it wouldn’t be a bad ride to take if you’re looking for a new tool to use. Consider dropping a couple minutes on this one, you might just find that it will work for you and your team!

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[We review Agile and Scrum Tools. Have you seen our Agile and Scrum Tools List?

iDoneThis is a tool that promises to bring lightweight status reporting to every company.  Its secret sauce is that it makes the process incredibly simple.  It’s the easiest way that I’ve found to run a stripped down daily standup… maybe even for dispersed teams.

If anyone you know has been too intimidated to try Agile because of what appears to be complicated rules and protocols, just turn them on to iDoneThis.  It attempts to capture the essence of scrum — daily iterative progress and improvement — without much of the overhead.

With iDoneThis, you aren’t going to get a product that’s loaded with features and configurability options.  If you’re looking for a very specific agile product and process, iDoneThis isn’t the tool for you.  iDoneThis’s is mantra is to keep it simple, and you might be surprised how powerful that is.

iDoneThis is so easy to use that after you sign up, you can keep using iDoneThis without ever having to go to their website again.

Here’s how it works.Every night, the whole team gets an email from iDoneThis asking, “What’d you get done for today?”  Just reply.  Whatever you write gets recorded in one place that you can search and review.   The next morning, the team wakes up to an email from iDoneThis.  It shows us a person-by-person list of what everyone on our team accomplished the day before.

Impressed with what one of your team members has done? Send them positive feedback and start a conversation with a single click.  The iDoneThis emails make it so easy to give feedback that it becomes almost reflexive.  See something cool?  Let that person know.

It’s that easy to keep the team in sync and making deliberate progress on a daily rhythm.

iDoneThis is an excellent tool because of its simplicity.  There’s no need to sacrifice individual workflow preferences for team needs, or vice versa.  Integration with email and cool communication features ensure that all team management needs are met.  It’s a simple tool that just makes life simpler.

If you see something you like, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial here.

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[We review Agile Tools - Have you seen our Agile Scrum Tools list?]

Have you gotten to a point where you realize there is no tool (whether it be for agile development, project management, etc) that directly fits your company needs? As most companies rely strongly on continuous innovation and iterative process, having a tool that fits their needs (not the other way around) is imperative to building great products.

That’s how Timebox came to be.

Many agile tools on the market offer plenty of benefits. Whether it’s an assortment of graphs and charts or ways to track and manage time, you’re bound to find a wide variety of numbers and equations that ‘supposedly’ make your job easier. The problem? They don’t. Most of these tools are large, confusing and often difficult to use (and ultimately train others on). With Timebox the goal is to eliminate confusion and allow anyone to start using the tool instantly! And the best part? It’s FREE.

List of benefits:

• Start using the tool in under 2 min
• Add and engage with multiple teams and team members
• A dashboard view of all projects and teams
• Cloud based
• Easy to understand burn down chart
• A filter that allows the viewing of specific teams in a project
• Security roles

Looking Good

Who says an agile management tool can’t look good? With Timebox, the user is never overwhelmed with too much clutter on the screen. And with the ability to see different icons for Bugs, Tasks and User Stories, it’s easy to differentiate which is which when scrolling through a backlog (without having to click anything). But Timebox doesn’t stop there! Each icon is also given a small badge that lets the user know what stage the item is in; Not Started, Started, and Accepted.

Teamwork

Agile and scrum are meant to be done in teams. Why shouldn’t your agile management tool support that also? With Timebox you can assign people to stories associated with different projects and teams and monitor them separately. The Dashboard shows not only the progress of the different projects, but also the individual teams within that project (including velocity history, points in progress, and points accepted).

Planning and Backlog Grooming

Project managers spend most of their time planning. Timebox makes it easy by using the historical velocity (of the team OR project) to provide an estimated time of completion. Project managers can use this feature to see when they can expect a finished product, and if it can fit in the timeframe of their sprint and ultimately their release date.

Bottom line?

We like it. It’s got all the feature’s you’d expect from a tool like this (it’s free to start), it has the aesthetic look and feel of something robust. It’s pretty. Sometimes thats just enough to get you started. Functionality? It’s got it. Now, take it for a spin and have a go.

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VersionOne Introduces Catalyst Edition

New Edition Delivers Automated Project Planning, Tracking and Reporting for Ramping Up Agile Adoption Beyond the Development Team

VersionOne Catalyst Edition is an all-in-one agile management tool built from the ground up to support and reinforce agile development processes. Catalyst Edition delivers improved visibility across projects, automated reporting and an easy path for teams ramping up their agile adoption to start small and scale with VersionOne as their needs evolve.

Built with the same rich UI as VersionOne’s Enterprise and Ultimate Editions, Catalyst Edition allows organizations to adopt a right-sized solution and then easily upgrade to more feature-rich editions at a natural pace as their agile adoption matures. Catalyst is designed for agile development teams with up to 20 users who have outgrown starter agile management methods – such as spreadsheets, whiteboards and sticky notes or agile plug-ins – and need to extend visibility beyond the team to include project stakeholders through real-time, shared project views.

What is Catalyst Edition?

All-in-one agile project management tool built from the ground up to support and reinforce agile development processes, improve visibility across projects, automate reporting and allow teams who are ramping up their agile adoption to start small and scale to a comprehensive tool (with same UI) as their needs evolve.

• Visibility across projects, simplified planning and tracking, and on-demand reporting with an affordable entry point and incredibly simple setup process – plus a path to easily upgrade to more sophisticated products as their agile adoption matures.”

Differentiators?

• A “right-sized” solution – Only lightweight tool on the market that aligns intuitively with a team’s agile processes, reinforcing and guiding teams through each step of the agile methodology without being prescriptive. Single teams can customize the tool to mirror their workflow processes and continue to modify and adapt the as they evolve; rather than having to choose between what’s useful now and what will be useful later.
• Simplified agile process flow and UI navigation to accelerate agile adoption
• Ability to manage all processes and work items within a single tool
• Centralized backlog management with automated calculation of burndown, velocity and estimate trends
• Effortless setup/administration – import backlog and get started in minutes
• Easy upgrade path for investment – smart scaling of agile

 Who Needs Catalyst?

• Agile development teams with up to 20 users and less than two years into their agile adoption.
• Who have outgrown starter agile management methods – such as spreadsheets, whiteboards and sticky notes or agile plug-ins – and need to extend visibility beyond the team to include project stakeholders through real-time, shared project views.
• Catalyst Product Info: http://www.versionone.com/Product/Compare_Editions/Catalyst/
• Catalyst Product Tour: http://www.versionone.com/webcasts/Catalyst_Tour.asp

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It’s been a long road since I first got rejected by many publishers and finally self-published and then grabbed Wiley’s attention!

#win

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We are often blind.

As Agile Coaches, consultants, and organizational improvers, we strive to help teams and businesses alike improve their performance, output, and even culture.

The problem is… that we often come into a team or business blind, not understanding the full context of each team and each individual who makes up that team.

This is a problem.

To be the most effective we need to understand how people operate. We need to understand how they work collectively, as a group, as a team, and as individuals. The quicker we can assess and understand the contextual culture of our clients and teams, we are left to empirically deduce assumptions that most often are half-truths.

As we jump into consulting or coaching with any client, it would be great to know their cultural context, how people are behaving, and even how to engage with them best.

Easier said than done, until Action & Influence dropped on the scene.

Action & Influence – Business Optimization and Human Potential

Action & Influence is simply this: A team and business assessment instrument that allows employees, managers, and stakeholders, the ability to understand how to communicate, collaborate, deal with conflict, and engage with each other better.

You now have the right levers to pull. You now have the ability to speak intentionally to each person because you know how they work and operate.

It is no longer an option to go in blind and guess. Know your people. Know your clients. Know how to tap into each team members’ potential.

[HT: myAI.org]

An Example of Individual Assessment Results

[Example Workshop Setup]

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