The 1-day course will be held 9/25/13 and especially interesting for executives looking for best practices how to elevate agile practices to the enterprise and project-selection process.  We typically run this course only one time a year as public enrollment session. Being at this venue makes even more special. Thanks Ken.

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Not only are Agile processes very popular and have shown great success for many organization, it is the only way a start-up company wants to work these days. Learn more and Register…

Well, here is an example which gives the opponents of context switching new fuel.  The MTA in New York City calls it ironically the “Fast Track” initiative.

Here is the challenge:  The MTA needs to maintain a large subway systems which operates 24/7.

That means, that while signals, rails and switches are being fixed, trains are running!  That created not only a more dangerous environment for the workers, but also periodic, frequent interrupts by allowing train service.

With the Fast Track Initiative, the MTA cuts through context switching and achieved impressive results. Instead of working with multiple interrupts, the MTA decided to close down an entire line for the night.  The workers could focus on work without interrupts and made significantly more progress than through a night without Fast Track. The results were so compelling, that the MTA, which started Fast Track as a random test,  expands the initiative to several experiments across the entire system.  If the benefits show further evidence of context switching penalties, I am sure the MTA will make Fast Track a standard procedure.

During the opening introductions I mentioned that in 2007, when I began publishing about agile portfolio management techniques, I saw many not knowing how to integrate this topic into the overall landscape of agile practices. My book “Agile Portfolio Management”, published in 2008, which was the first book that put this important topic on the map. The book did create a bigger interest in this topic but as Catherine Connor (Product Manager at Rally) told me during the RallyOn conference “Came out too early”. Well, the book is still available and presents a starting point for an evolving practice.

This week, during the conference, I received confirmation for what I knew all along; Agile Portfolio Management is hot and has left its infancy. Rally Software also released the first product line for project portfolio management recently. Needless to say, a massive commitment from a company just arriving at their 10th year anniversary. From a handful of people working with agile portfolio management back in 2007, to a panel in front of a sold-out 300 person conference with a focus on portfolio management.  In addition, agile product companies are offering the first versions of their new product lines and even the open space conference day was heavily influenced by portfolio management topics. I have to admit that I am proud to see that portfolio management is now fully part of the agile vocabulary.

Ryan Martens, co-founder of Rally Software tweeted during the panel discussion “Joe Krebs: I believe in killing lots of software efforts – biggest waste is lose of great opportunities”.  Ryan shared an important take-away, which I emphasized during the discussion. Killing a in waterfall project is often associated with a negative perception. With agile projects, the culture of killing a project is most likely something positive because it creates room for new ideas and opportunities. It releases people to work on more interesting and promising projects and to create better organizational focus. Because agile projects often stop their efforts not when the requirements are all implemented but when the Product Owner says so…. killing is most likely the norm rather than the exception. We also discussed the agile PMO but that will be something for another blog post.

If you are interested in learning more about agile portfolio management and would like to attend a 1-day training session, I am offering a one session on 9/24 in New York City and 9/27 in Boston. Enrollment is open.

Two statements really stood out of the book, which I will remember next time I am facing a difficult project situation. “Change isn’t made by asking permission – change is made by asking for forgiveness, later”. So many change agents, Scrum Masters ask for permission, although the Scrum Guide empowers the team “to do whatever is necessary to meet their Spring goal”. So many teams are obstructed by corporate policies, which are, if you are digging a little deeper into the problem, often not relevant anymore.

Another statement summed it up for me quite nicely, because I see many organization struggle with agile transformation, even if they are done with best intentions, material and people. A second Godin statement: “Change almost never fails because it is too early. It almost always fails because it is too late.” really hit it home for me when I picture various project situations I was in myself. Delay, compromise and the inability to act quickly makes change often more complicated and real change impossible.

Envious? Well, Shutterstock is agile.

The examples used in this article have something in common. Leaders create focus by determining which meetings are important, staying in touch with real work challenges and being protected from less important things. Managers use meetings as a forum for a command and control culture.

At the core of an agile enterprise are the executives who need to live and breathe agile principles. Only with trust, transparency, self-organization and courage, project teams excel and give the senior executives the space they need to focus on the really important things to lead their enterprise.

Although this article written by Rachel Emma Silverman for the The Wall Street Journal  is by no means scientific,  it shows some basic differences in management vs. leadership styles.

Jochen Krebs and Ken Schwaber during Scrum Power Pack in Miami January'12

Ken and I we have bundled two courses together to give future Scrum Masters and team members the best possible experience to make them successful. The first two days will be spent on the Professional Scrum Master (PSM) with Ken followed by a 1-day workshop delivered by myself. During the PSM, participants will learn much more than just the basics from the co-creator of Scrum himself. Ken provides invaluable information for every newcomer as well as seasoned Scrum Master alike. The 3rd day focuses on application and putting the Scrum process framework into action. Although I often mention that there is a “no powerpoint policy” during the Scrum workshop, some past participants were still surprised that there were literally zero slides.  That’s true, we will work on flip charts, boards and in group tables and will use the entire real estate provided by the venue.

The concept behind it is straightforward. In the future participants will most likely find themselves in a situation in which they need to facilitate meetings and consensus building. During the workshop, they will not only practice Scrum and learn it hands-on, they can also learn facilitation techniques through observation and application while we are going through the day. So far, I have not received feedback from any of the attendees felt that slides were missing. Some of them actually said, that they felt that slides would have been in our way. I think, the biggest compliment of all. I have reserved a few topics for the day, but I also dedicated time to for free flow format and explore topics relevant to the audience.

If you are interested in attending our upcoming Scrum Power Pack in New York 4/16-4/18/2012, you can do that by booking as a super early bird until 2/15. By the end  of that day the will change the ticket to regular early bird.

When I am on “personal” time, I will now leave the phone at home more and more often.  Another new “old” phone etiquette of mine returned by calling more often directly and leave a voicemail without the detour of email and calendar invites.

A few weeks into this new year, being very conscious about the new style, the results are quite stunning and it proofs that the context-switching penalty exists anywhere.

Obama for example mentioned “We can’t bring every job back that’s left our shore. But right now, it’s getting more expensive to do business in places like China.” and the CEO of Master Lock told him “ …that it now makes business sense for him to bring jobs back home”.

From an agile perspective, I also noticed another trend came reality which is very much a reaction to common challenges of distributed agile teams. In the beginning. many offshore models began distributing “testing” but kept product management, business analysis and software development on-shore. As much as this model might make sense in a phased, waterfall approach, this model is most likely frustrating for agile teams. In the past 6 years more entire agile teams were distributed, rather than only a few team members. That is probably related to the lessons many large organizations have learned the hard way integrating two things which emerged roughly at the same time, cost savings through off-shoring and agile software engineering.  Although distributing entire teams is a good idea from an agile viewpoint, it is not what Obama’s meant in his speech. In reality though, as long as product management and executives are still on-shore, issues around speed of development, ideation processes, need for documentation and proper communication will continue to exist. That’s why many so many Lean start-up’s do not distribute their teams.