ALE2012 and Barcelona, Spain.

After much rumble and grumble on where the ALE2012 would be celebrated, we finally have the city... its Barcelona, Spain.
Jaume, Mel and Me were promoting Barcelona as candidate city for ALE2012. We had tough Competition from Vienna, Austria and Prague, Czech Republic was also in the finalists.
After looking at various PROs and CONs for each city the Location sofa decided on Barcelona, Spain.


the tentative dates for the ALE UNConference are 28-30 August 2012. Which is during summer months and its Barcelona one of most famous cities on Mediterranean coast. Its going to be a big HIT.


Just after a 2-3 days of our decision on ALE2012 location we came to know about Scrum Gathering 2012 Barcelona (http://www.scrumalliance.org/events/464-barcelona--global-event), which is also an important event for agilists from Europe and is planned for October 2012.
After the news spread on these events we were contacted by Salim Virani who is organizing http://leanca.mp/ in Barcelona which will be celebrated in January 2012.


So I can say the year 2012 is going to be a sizzling hot year for Barcelona in terms of Agile and Lean methodologies... and the local Agile enthusiastic community is very excited and happy about this events taking place in Barcelona.


We will be opening up different sofas for ALE2012, who ever would like to join us to organize this amazing event please track #ALE2012 on twitter..


Hope to see a lot of you in Barcelona during this year...




For those who dont know how #ALENetwork (alenetwork.eu) works, ALE is a network of professionals from eupore which promotes Agile methodologies in Europe and tries to help each other out through various projects like #ALESOS, #ALEUNIVERSITIES... etc.
and Yes we have sofas and not chairs.... we believe in sharing... and auto-organization.

Still trying to process... amezing #ALE2011 Unconference

I am back from #ALE2011 UNconference and then beautiful 2 days of tourism in berlin and meeting some friends, but i am still trying to process all the information, knowledge and contacts i gathered during the amezing event of #ALE2011 UNconference.

In my honest opinion first ever of its kind where participants participated  and not just listened.

I will soon be putting down my thoughts in a blogpost dedicated to UNconference and its amezing participants and organizers.

Stay tuned...

Back after long silence and looking forward to #ALE2011

I have been away from writing for quite a long now, due to many reasons some personal some external not going to specify all of them here..


I am quite excitedly waiting for 1st ever Agile Lean Europe(ALE) UNConference yes an UNConference, where we are awaiting many nice speakers, many nice participants from all over Europe. I am expecting quite many things from this unconference, many new things i would get to learn, listen to experiences of people and have nice chats with all the linchpins who would be around...


The interesting part of the unconference is Lighting talks, all the participants would have a lightening talk prepared the format can be anything... so I am preparing mine also..
I am decided on the topic of implementation of scrum in distributed teams and impact of cultural difference on implementation, I am planning to present how i handled it and then ask for better ideas from the people to implement them in future.


I am also looking forward to Dinner with Strangers, where people from lean start up community will meetup with people from ALE, hmm interesting.. its going to be great learning experience.


so from tomorrow until Friday i will be at the ALE2011 in Berlin, Germany and i am sure i will be tweeting many things i would learn and like so the hashtag for these days to look for is #ALE2011.


Lets see how it goes.... Here I Come Berlin... surely will post more after I come back from #ALE2011.

Change Management, the secret ingredients or careful elaboration?

After some days of brake of easter, here we are back to work, a nice day(some might say its not, its a gray day but I like it....) and also a start of new year and a new decade in my life. So there are changes viz. change of back to work from 4 days long holidays, change of decade for me..... that is what made me choose the topic of change management.


We all do change management even in our daily life, the change we do might be an impact of some other change or your change might impact some other plan and make someone else change something. We contemplate those changes with best of our knowledge and intension.


But today I would like to focus on change management in companies. 


The changes like change in culture, change in management, change in company focus, etc. involves (or should involve) a tremendous amount of attention on how you manage the changes.


Change in culture : 


The change in culture is a process, it doesn't get changed in one day or two. Cultural change normally brings reactions (as Newton´s 3rd law of motion states, "To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction"),  the reaction can be changed to a favorable one if the change management is done correctly.


The important part of any change management is interaction, communication. The perfect match doesn't exist when it comes to cultures, adaption and continual improvements are the key factors to make the match work and we have to be extra careful about communications and interactions, the information about the change and the adaptations should flow like a healthy river (a blockage and there can be a disaster).


Change in Management : 


Communication is the most important thing to manage the impact which this change generates, the information on what is happening and why is happening and how will it impact in future is very important for the collaborators in company. The communication has to be very fluid and clear.


Change in Company Focus : 


Some companies I have worked with change their focus in terms change from project based to product based or from any projects to specific types of projects. Reiterating the same the important part is communication, letting the collaborators of the company the change and how it affects to short, mid and long term.



Any kind of change requires a sound strategic visioning but its almost impossible to have long term plan which you can follow since the whole change process is based on adaption. People see, feel and then adapt the change for this Joan Kotter´s Eight steps to successful change are quite a fit, the steps are as follows

1. Increase urgency - inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.
2. Build the guiding team - get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.
3. Get the vision right - get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy, focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.
4. Communicate for buy-in - Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply, and to appeal and respond to people's needs. De-clutter communications - make technology work for you rather than against.
5. Empower action - Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders - reward and recognise progress and achievements.
6. Create short-term wins - Set aims that are easy to achieve - in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.
7. Don't let up - Foster and encourage determination and persistence - ongoing change - encourage ongoing progress reporting - highlight achieved and future milestones.
8. Make change stick - Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, new change leaders. Weave change into culture.

Even after all this there might be some point which we might not get it right then retrospective is the best way to analyse what went wrong and try to fix it. One this is sure and important someone has to take responsibility.


As its said by Robert Gallagher "Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine" ... so lets face it, the change is here to stay.

Why scrum can feel like a Overhead?

I had published this entry on some other blog, also publishing it here since i think its worth it.

Scrum an agile development methodology framework, many people might not agree and would say its a methodology. As Uncle Bob has commented scrum is deliberately incomplete and can be adapted and makes it best fit for each team.

Then in this scenario can it be really a overhead??

There can be various reasons of why scrum can be felt as burden or a overhead, let´s jot jolt down some of them..

1) Scrum has been imposed on the people and they feel its more to control them than to make life easier. This kind of sensation can be noted when it was only management´s decision to implement scrum and no adequate process of adaptation was undertaken. This can make people think that scrum is overload, its bringing more responsibilities. But really speaking there is only 15mins daily and 3-4 hours bi-weekly. if you hear its a overload/ Overhead, one of the things you can be sure is team is manifesting that the decision is being pushed on them.

2) The case also can be that team doesn't like to follow processes or was not following any formal process of development. In these situations the sprint planning, the daily meetings and the important aspect of iterative delivery can be result like a overhead for the team.

Most probably results from previous development process were late delivery, not meeting user requirements and unmate commitments.

3) The most probable reason is the team only looks at the things they have to do and not what are the improvements/ benefits such as greater visibility into progress, closer contact with customers and users who can validate that the most-desired features are being built, closer coordination and greater communication with coworkers to ensure all team members are heading in the same direction, and so on....

4) The other possible reason can be that the scrum principles are not being followed correctly. The daily meeting are not limited to 3 answers and are being done for extended period of time. The planning meetings are uninformative and also extended period of time. The sprints and teams are not blinded. and so on...

5) Feeling of scrum overhead can also be existent if the team doesn't feel integrated. If there is non-existence of common projects or common Goals. This situation normally arises in the companies which are oriented towards services rather than products.

Said this a team can work its progress towards a scrumbutt most probally goes through one of these reasons. The most important part of implementation teams believing in scrum and understanding how it helps them to improve the work environment.

In my own experience Scrum is lightweight, the management is low and it gives more productive time and helps us in improving our focus on the planned work, reducing the deviations and raising the alarms in early stages.

There is a Spanish phrase "El sentido común es el menos común de los sentido" means the common sense is the least common of all the senses. But Common sense is most important aspect of Scrum.

The Information in Daily Stand-ups

I know, many people have written down whats the importance of the Daily Stand up meetings in scrum, but there is always something new happening which makes you write down a few pointers for whoever wants to read it.

Sometimes when I attend the daily stand ups as a listener, it seems like they are doing the Daily stand-ups just because they are asked to do it, i get the sensation that they are not able to extract the value out of the information which is being exposed in these meetings. In some cases these meetings are converted in status update meetings but these cases are rare.

The information which is provided should be useful, in most of the cases i see that people explain I worked on "X" project yesterday, will continue today and no blockers. Is this really useful for the TEAM, in my opinion its not, may be a bit useful for a Product owner but no sufficient. we don´t need to give a status update here guys, we need to inform the team mates and Scrum master on what i am working on, what i will work on and if there is anything which can block my work.

I have heard people saying but i answered the 3 questions..... its not enough since the team and the Scrum master and most important product owner doesn't have a vision of what tasks were done and what is next in line, the member of the team which takes care of the testing doesn't have info on what he or she should start preparing to test.

So how do I see that information provided in the daily meetings should be.

1) I was working on task x1 and g2 yesterday, x1 is done and is ready for testing, g2 is taking more time that expected due to "abc" issue.

2) will continue working on g2 i expect to finish it in next 4 hours and then will take up task j4.

3) "abc" issue which was blocking is resolved, task n5 might get blocked if the design is not submitted by client today EOD.

So now the information provided here is telling me exactly which tasks to expect that they will be done, that one of the tasks presented a blocker yesterday but its resolved (and i know to whom to talk to get more info on solution) and that one task planned might get blocked (this is a message for SM and PO) and needs to be resolved beforehand.

There is a take away for each actor from the information provided.

As a product owner i know what is health of my project, i can know if the planned functionalities would bedone done by end of the sprint (having the scrum board in the same place where the daily meeting is done, also helps) and that i need to move things to get the page design and related material for the planned task to start and in turn finish. As a Scrum Master i know that there were impediments which were solved and they will need to be documented. and communicated in Scrum of Scrum. And as a team member, i get the info of who is working on what and what and this will helps me to find out dependencies of my tasks on others.

This information becomes useful when all this processing of the information is done.

Horowitz, Lois quotes "Not having the information you need when you need it leaves you wanting. Not knowing where to look for that information leaves you powerless. In a society where information is king, none of us can afford that."

Lets try to give correct information and get most out of the information which is being provided during the daily stand ups.

The first Entry

Here we go...

Until now i was a bit reluctant about starting my own blog, although I was blogging on some other blogs. Since last few days I have a feeling that I need to reachout so thought may its not that bad idea afterall to start my own blog.

I will be using this blog mostly to publish my ideas about my work surrounding and as you know some time it becomes difficult to seperate the two ambits, lets see how this evolves.

Thanks for stopping by, will make the first real entry soon.