As I sit here in my office, I’m excited to share some insights from my recent experiences in the world of Agile training and the innovative approaches we’re adopting to enhance our learning environments. This week, I want to delve into a couple of key topics: the new training programme I’ve launched and the concept of continuous forecasting, which I discussed with Daniel Vacanti during our recent Professional Scrum with Kanban class.
Office Hours and Engagement
Every Wednesday at 6 p.m. BST, I host office hours where I’m available to answer your questions. This is a fantastic opportunity for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of Agile practices or seeking advice on specific challenges they face in their teams. I encourage you to join in, whether live or by submitting questions in advance. If you prefer anonymity, there’s a simple form you can fill out—no identification required.
Virtual Training Setup
Over the past few months, I’ve been conducting all my classes virtually, and I must say, it’s been a rewarding experience. I’ve taught various courses, including Professional Scrum Foundations and Professional Agile Leadership, using Microsoft Teams. This platform has proven to be incredibly effective for managing classes, offering features like breakout rooms, file sharing, and persistent channels for ongoing interaction with students.
Here’s a quick overview of how I prepare for these classes:
Tech Checks: A week before each class, I conduct a tech check to ensure everyone can connect seamlessly. This involves guiding participants on how to log in correctly, as there are multiple ways to access Teams, and I want to avoid any hiccups on the day.
Utilising Tools: We also use Mural, a digital whiteboarding tool, which allows for interactive sessions. I ensure that all outputs from our sessions are accessible to students post-class, enhancing their learning experience.
Reification Sessions: I’ve introduced what I call “reification sessions” two weeks after the class. This is a chance for students to revisit concepts, discuss challenges they’ve encountered, and solidify their understanding. It’s an informal yet valuable way to reinforce learning.
Continuous Forecasting
Now, let’s talk about continuous forecasting. This concept emerged during our Professional Scrum with Kanban class, and it’s a game-changer for how we approach sprint planning and daily scrums.
The Scrum Guide doesn’t mandate that we plan our entire sprint upfront. Instead, it emphasises having enough of a plan to get started. This means we can adopt a more flexible approach, focusing on the immediate next steps rather than trying to predict every task for the entire sprint. Here’s how I suggest we can implement this:
Start Small: Begin with a plan for the next few days, allowing the team to adapt as they progress. This dynamic planning approach helps teams respond to changes more effectively.
Utilise Metrics: Professional Scrum teams should leverage metrics from the Kanban guide, such as throughput, cycle time, work in progress, and work item aging. These metrics provide valuable insights that can inform our planning and forecasting.
Monte Carlo Simulations: By collecting and analysing these metrics, teams can perform Monte Carlo simulations to predict outcomes more accurately. This statistical approach can help in understanding potential delivery timelines and managing stakeholder expectations.
Conclusion
As we continue to navigate the complexities of Agile training and implementation, I’m committed to providing valuable resources and support to help teams thrive. If you’re interested in exploring training opportunities, please visit Naked Agility, where you’ll find a range of accredited classes designed to enhance your Agile journey.
I look forward to seeing you in my office hours or in one of my upcoming classes. Let’s keep the conversation going, and together, we can foster a deeper understanding of Agile practices that truly make a difference in our organisations. Thank you for joining me today!
okay looks like we are online today in my office hours I’m going to talk a little bit about a new program that I have for training as well as something that I talked with Daniel Vacanti with it the professional scrum with Kanban class that we just had on Monday Tuesday called continuous forecasting that can help our software engineering team during their daily scrum and part of sprint planning to figure out more about what’s going on to you in a minute
naked agility is available for DevOps and agile training and consultant contact us for a free consultation
okay so um the things that I want to talk about first off I’m here to answer questions every Wednesday I’m at 6 p.m. BST British summer time I’m going to be trying to keep to that schedule at 6 o’clock on Wednesdays we’ll see how well that goes I shared it deliberately so that it didn’t fit on top of any classes that I was doing but hopefully it will be ok
if you have any questions please put them if you’re talking if you’re here life watching life please add them to the chat stream I should be able to see chats as you add them they might be a little bit of a delay but I should be able to see them if you want me to answer a question um next week Wednesday 6 p.m. then please ask the question anyway and I’ll get to it in whatever the next weekly second is I keep are a bunch of stickies here with the the questions that I’ve been asked and what what we’re going to talk about and if you have a question that you don’t want anybody to know that you’ve asked so you want to do an anonymous question then you can use this link right here and fill out a form just one text box it doesn’t ask for any identification and off you go
so that will be awesome remember as well the easiest way to get to the schedule for this is to use YouTube so you go to my channel on YouTube which you will find by just searching for Nick agility on YouTube no problem at all
you might be wondering why I look a little bit weird you might see my lovely covert cut and which isn’t even even I think I’ve not even got it even this was my first attempt at a haircut for myself I was looking more and more like Lemony Snicket from a series of unfortunate events so I decided that there there needed to be some cottage unfortunately the cut was not super successful so you can have a nice laugh in fact if I do a little spin is just as bad at the back and oh my goodness me I just saw the back for the first time and yeah okey-dokey
so my wife will hopefully be fixing that at some point so the things that I want to talk about and I’ve been teaching all of my classes virtually we’ve done two PSFS professional scrum foundations so far professional agile leadership and professional scrum master which I did for a program at wiggling in Oslo as well as a professional scrum with Kanban that I taught on Monday Tuesday there so and we’re kind of getting spun up on the ideas around how do we deliver classes virtually and I’ve got my set up everybody seems to have their own set up which is fine if whatever works for each individual trainer and their students I’ve been using Microsoft teams to manage that and it’s been working really well because you know teams doesn’t just have you know you’re on a call and then you have breakout rooms it has persistence and it has files it has permissions it has a way for me to share and interact with students on a long-term basis and what I’ve been doing and when you add a event to team everybody in the team is invited if you’re added to the team later you get invited so it’s really handy for me as a trainer I can just add people and to the team and then they get all of the the things they need to figure out how to join the class I had to get in so what I’ve been doing is kind of the week before the class I doing a tech check so that’s been sent out and we’ve gone over how to connect two teams correctly because there is more than one way to connect two teams if you just click a meeting link and you’re probably coming in as an unauthenticated user which means you have very restricted permissions you can participate in the meeting but you can’t access any of the other assets in the organization which makes perfect sense and however when I’m running the class we use multiple channels for breakout rooms we upload files we have applications and tabs that give the students some extra information or some extra interactivity so we need students to come in as an authenticated user and depending on how they’re doing that it depends on how much of a struggle that is and usually it’s perfectly fine if you’re somebody who gives me to add the email address that is your corporate identity same as you would log in to office 365 in your company then and you will just have a completely seamless experience using you use your corporate login and I don’t have to have any login details at all just your email address you accept the invitation and then you’re able to come in so that works works really well you effectively just log in in the same way that you would if you were if you were coming in from AK to one of your own corporate systems so that works great the other option is people use a Microsoft account so they already have an outlook.com or xbox comm or a hot meal and address that they’ve had for many years they can give me that they log in with their credentials and I don’t need to store any credential still they’ll log in with them and that’s fine and then the third one is and you still need a Microsoft account to actually try to get onto our Google and the Google meet at the other day and you have to provide Google credentials so I have an email address that’s enabled for Google even though it’s not a Google email address and you can do the same thing with Microsoft so you can take any email address that’s not a corporate identity and not currently a Microsoft identity so it could be you know your your gmail account or Yahoo or AOL or whatever that is and if I add that email address you when you go to log in and claim the the identity will be asked to follow some steps to enable that it’s usually pretty straightforward but it sometimes just takes a little bit of explaining and so we do a tech check the week before and it’s probably 30 minutes depending on the level of knowledge that users already have with teams but I’ve not had any problems so far teaching all the classes
the other thing that we go through is mural and we use a tool called mural which is a digital whiteboarding tool and it works pretty well it has its own idiosyncrasies just like any tool out there and there’s mural as well as mural and there’s a couple of other tools out there that folks women using whatever works and as long as I like to be able to provide the output so that the students can continue to go and view the work that was done on those services and so I download the files upload them to the team and then students can continue to get access which is pretty good
the other thing that I’ve been doing as well as the tech check before is something that I’m kind of calling reification where we’re going to work together to solidify some of the ideas and so I’ve only built it as an error at the moment two weeks after the class and ultimately ultimately effectively when you when you takes class from scrum de-torque through myself you get two attempts whatever assessments you get at the end assessments while not being valuable to identify somebody else’s skill level it might be useful in understanding your own skill level and what are the areas where you might want to go read up and figure out so the idea is that students get two weeks to take the assessment and if they fail they get another attempt but only if they take it within two weeks so the idea is my reification session which is just let’s let’s discuss the things you don’t know or that you’ve tried to do some things in your organization what what are the problems that you’ve hit and just spend an hour hitting on whatever questions that folks from that particular class have so that’s a new experiment that I’m running to see if we can’t add value there and I think that would be sounds like I just think it’s gonna be a lot of fun it’s a very easy value add and in the circumstance of we’re all at home anyway and I’ve been booking in over lunchtime UK time so I would do you know be conscious of other people’s time zones so if I’m teaching in PST at Pacific time then I’m not going to book it at lunch side my time because you’d still be in bed but I’m going to do that so I might experiment with some additional engagements with students after the class and but hopefully this will work out and then we’ll be able to add a bunch more
so that comes to and the thing that I was going to talk about which is continuous or casting um so that’s the only thing on my list today it was something that came up during the professional scrum with Kanban and it’s the idea that in in the scrum guide there is nothing which says you have to plan your whole sprint it says that you have to have enough of a plan coming out of your and sprint planning to get started that’s all you need you need enough of a plan to get started remember the team is going to inspect their progress towards their sprint goal every 24 hours at the daily scrum and they’re going to adapt that plan as the goal so maybe we don’t need to plan the whole sprint and figure out what all the tasks are maybe we just need to start with a smaller plan something you know the next couple of days worth of work and then we’re going to build on that as we go I would maybe take the current day plus two more same as we use with planning the in the product backlog and that will allow you to to dynamically understand what you can do and and maybe pull extra things into your backlog maybe push some things out depending on how things are going and do that dynamically
now one of the tools to help with that and it’s my belief and that professional scrum teams use the the the metrics from the Kanban guide for scrum teams so they’re going to be using throughput they’re going to be using cycle time they’re going to be using work and process and they’re going to be using and work item aging those are the four metrics that every professional scrum team should be collecting and if you’re collecting that data you would be able very easily to do a for example Monte Carlo simulation I think I have just an example and I’m slight with a picture of a Monte Carlo simulation from Daniels two-way did that work yes it did oh let me just put you
that you want to add to this section I am happy to take any questions and I see that there at least I can’t see and any questions coming in on the channels let me see if there’s anything in the anonymous there is not anything new in the anonymous feedback either and I think this will pick up once I get on a regular schedule but hopefully you find this useful to talk about continuous forecasting and the ideas around having a reification and a tech check for my training so if you are looking for training you can go to naked agility comm that’s where I list all of my training classes and all the classes I’m running at the moment are at scrum dot-org accredited classes and so the the official classes from scrammed and org with assessments so please go there and have a look if you want a private class obviously we’re not doing on-site classes just now we can’t really go anywhere but we are doing at live virtual classrooms I’m teaching a PSK not PSK professional scrum foundations class m in dublin next week and then in Pleasanton California the week after so if you want private classes we can deliver private classes pretty much anywhere in the world in any timezone and we just may need some preparation if it’s a crazy time zone I have one coming up in New Zealand so that’s going to be a very tiring maybe experience or at least it’s gonna feel like I’ve get jet lag for a couple of days as we figure that out so please get in touch and obviously if you want to ask your question anonymously you can use this link here on the screen and please subscribe to our channel so that you know when we go live and when we’re talking about things okay thank you very much
naked agility is available for DevOps and agile training and consultant contact us for a free consultation
