Agile 2013 – My Crushes

There are a few people in the Agile community I totally crush on. Let me start over.

There are certain things about the Agile framework that I appreciate—most have to do with the values & principles at the heart of the methodologies. When I first started practicing Agile, I didn't fully understand why we did things the way we did but later, I not only learned to understand why but also found that the 'whys' mattered more than the 'whats' and 'hows.'

Have you ever been on a highly-functioning Agile team? It's amazing and there's just nothing like it. If you ever work on one or with one, I swear you'll never look back. Mature teams practice the Agile values & principles—that's what makes them so awesome.

Because I have an attachment to these values, I find myself enamored by those who share the same. When I read books, scan blogs, and attend talks, I listen for keywords, for passion, and for the same interpretations I have. I get inspired by these people and sometimes I even feel like a groupie.

So, how does this related to Agile 2013? Conference sessions can be hit-or-miss. The topic summary might sound interesting but the content itself isn't, isn't as relevant as you thought it would be, or the presenter is just bad. Sometimes you have to 'vote with your feet' and find something else. This happened to me in my second session, "Complex Projects Aren't Plannable but Controllable" so I left about 15 minutes into it. Luckily, I had scanned the schedule and marked back-up sessions to attend. #2 on my list? One of my Agile crushes: Mike Cohn.

The thing about attending session and lectures by my Agile crushes is that I've pretty much already heard what they have to say. Mike Cohn's presentation on "Agile Planning" wasn't new content to me but sometimes it's good to get back to the basics—play in the sandlot, if you will.

Curious who my crushes are?

• Kent Beck
• Jeff Patton
• Mike Cohn
• Ken Schwaber
• Dean Leffingwell
• Ron Jeffries

Agile 2013 – Measure Business Value

At Nordstrom, we are becoming more disciplined bout data-driven decision-making. In Direct, we have been using a scoring system to measure Business Impact for about year. We’ve tweaked this formula a few times and added some curbs to aide in scoring. As the organization has adopted the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), more business units are finding their own business value measurements but there isn’t a consistent formula across the company. There’s been some debate about this and I was hoping this session would provide some insight into how we can normalize business value for our enterprise portfolio.

I was a bit disappointed in the session because it was more about a facilitation technique rather than a methodology for measuring value. This was an workshop-format where the presenter, Chris Sims, taught us how to prioritize using stack-ranking card sorts. I know how to do card sorts and their value is has diminishing returns above 20 items and about a dozen participants. It doesn’t really scale and while cases have to be made to ‘sort,’ it’s not really as data-driven as we want to be as an organization.

I’m not saying there wasn’t value in the session; it’s just not what I was looking for. It’s a valuable technique to know and is incredibly useful at the team level and on small-scale engagements. Diana McCasey said it well, “It’s like an Agile 101 course on measuring business value but what we really need is Agile 401.”

Quotable Quotes

‘Incremental Value’ The things that make your product better but aren’t differentiating. It’s important to not ignore incremental value when measuring and comparing business value at the feature level. This is something I continually fret over when we look at WSJF prioritization. I often worry that we’ll lose sight of the things we should do to maintain the quality and value of our products that don’t necessarily increase their value. Unfortunately, the session didn’t provide any insight into this; but I’ll take the phrase and carry it around with me.

'Dimensions of Value’ Business value shouldn’t be measured one-dimensionally. We already measure Business Value multi-dimensionally. In Direct, we use Customer, Financial, Enablement, and Strategic Boost as factors in our formula. This isn’t new but I like the phrase.

Things to Read Up On

•  Kano Model

Agile 2013

This week, I’m at the Agile Alliance conference in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m excited to share my experience and learnings with everyone.

First, introductions: I’m a Product Manager in Nordstrom Direct where I drive Customer Replenishment, Waitlist, and Returns Reduction for our eCommerce business.

I am an avid Agile advocate and served on the Nordstrom Agile Transformation Working Team. I started practicing Agile 10 years ago as a technical consultant, mostly using XP and then later incorporating Scrum delivery practices.  My first Agile project wasn’t a typical software development project; it was an 8-week vendor evaluation. The experience taught me what it meant to be disciplined and show results frequently. I ended up spending nearly 2 years with that client on 4 different Agile projects and I learned to value gathering feedback continuously and incorporating that feedback iteratively, traveling with lightweight documentation, creating shared understanding through conversation, and instilling ownership through team-lead demonstrations.

I got some Agile experience under my belt but it wasn’t until my next project that I really learned what ‘being Agile’ meant. I was working on a project to build a commerce-type engine and micro-site WCM that would be used to launch education about ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005. I learned the most about Agile from this engagement because of the team. I got absorbed by the values that the team not only passionately practiced but also embraced. I appreciated discussion and discourse about the Agile methodologies and I came to realize that Agile wasn’t about ceremony and practices but about the values and the team dynamic. I haven’t looked back since.

I could talk Agile for days so I’m pretty jazzed to be going to the Agile 2013 conference. What I’m hoping to get out of the conference: Understand how to better feed & plan at the Portfolio & Program level and manage the pipeline to Releases and Teams.