Agile Notes (no. 68)
Notes from Agile Connect 2024 in Rochester, NY September 26, 2024
Hi. I know. It has been awhile. I started a new job back in the summer of 2023 and it consumed me for a long time. Things have evened out for me and I thought I would dip my toe back in the pool.
Last week, I attended Agile Connect here in Rochester, NY. This is one of the better conferences I have been to in my career. (And I am not just saying that because my company was a sponsor.) I captured a lot of very good takeaways.
The morning started with a group of professionals sharing their Agile “stories”:
Heidi F. from URMC used candy as metaphors. I loved, “Agile as Gobstoppers - some only get to a few layers, others more.”
Jody D. from M&T Bank had a great line - “roadmaps are the glue that holds strategy and tactics together.” I’m hoping to learn where this comes from - I need more!
Also “strategy is the what, tactics is the how”
John O. from Netsmartz shared his Top 5 KPIs:
big picture understanding of the project
treat the team as one, there are not favorites, one team
put the right people on the bus (straight out of “Good to Great” by Jim Collins)
turnover kills a team
likes his scrum masters to be PMP certified
scrum masters need “exceptional empathy”
consistent touches - 2 week scrums, all ceremonies, strict clock
communications - the more the better
Sat in on the Root Cause Analysis session put on by Darian R. from Agile Ethos. Always good to take it back to the tools:
Fishbone/Ishikawa Diagrams for problem definition
5 Whys
I enjoyed the “Maximizing Your Agile Team in an AI Driven World”
Learned that I am in a pretty good place of both understanding AI and using it
“You won’t be replaced by AI but you will be replaced by someone who knows AI better than you.” (Not a direct quote)
Learned about RAG (retrieval augmented generation)
Learned about Swagger pages
The Overcoming Adversity in Agile Panel was really good
Sheila H. recommends “Scrum: the Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time”
Sheila also mentioned the concept of a “shitty first draft” being ok since we are ITERATING ANYWAY (my all caps)
We discussed having the mindset of it being OK to fail and that as leaders we should be able to share our failures with our teams
The notion of a “Disruptor Award” once per month to acknowledge team members that are truly trying to inspect, adapt and improve.
The idea of DOING Agile first and THEN calling it “Agile” so as to not scare anyone. I how done this more than a few times. Doing it but not using the terminology.
I have a backlog (see what I did there?) of some other posts. I am not going to make myself crazy trying to post regularly. Too stressful.