Want to deepen your knowledge on agile? Start teaching it.

The first time I heard the phrase 3rd person teaching I wasn't sure what the presenter was talking about. It was in a Covey Principle Centered Leadership class and I'm pretty sure I was the only person in the class who didn't know what it meant. Or maybe some of the others weren't brave enough to admit they didn't know and they breathed a soft sigh after I asked and the instructor answered. The simple idea is that someone teaches you, then you take what you've learned and teach someone else. When you do this your depth of knowledge increases. So why not try this with agile?

Agile Checklist - are you kidding me?

Just hearing the word checklist in connection with agile development makes a lot of people cringe. When I hear checklist, I tend to think of repetitive work where the worker is provided a step-by-step set of instructions with the hopes of achieving consistency in quality and production times. Think line workers or fast food employees doing the same thing over and over. Or places where there's significant turnover like call centers. None of those examples sound even remotely similar to agile development projects. So at this point you might think you know where I stand on checklists. Maybe you do and maybe you don't.

Data centric projects & user stories

I've been able to work on a couple of types of data centric projects. One was creating an ODS based on consolidating customer data from multiple source systems. This involved finding the data, extracting, transforming, & loading, as well as matching customer records, de-dupping, address matching and data cleansing. Now I've been working with some teams who are focused on moving data into a data warehouse. When first working with data teams a typical reaction is that we can't do user stories. Or we have to complete the whole data model done up front. Or we have to load all the data at once otherwise we're duplicating work, ... Basically I get a reasonably long list of why we can't do incremental development for data centric projects.

Dependencies continued - minimize 'em

The last post was about dependencies with a promise to talk about minimizing dependencies as the next post. Well, finally here it is.

Dependencies on agile projects - who needs 'em?

I don't want to manage dependencies; in fact, I don't want to have any dependencies. Is that even realistic? On smaller efforts I think it might be possible. Lately I've been working on large programs with 50 or more people on the project, with multiple teams and many times multiple companies involved. Here dependencies are a reality.