The Agile Daily Standup - AgileDad

Presidents Day is one of 12 federal holidays in the US, celebrated each year on the third Monday of February. In 2023, Presidents Day falls on Monday, Feb. 20. The holiday was first established as Washington's Birthday in 1879 to honor President George Washington. It was commemorated on Feb. 22 until 1971, when it was moved away from Washington's actual birthdate to give federal workers another three-day weekend. After that, it was more commonly known as "Presidents Day." Depending on where you live, though, it may alternately be spelled "President's Day" (to acknowledge Washington) or Presidents' Day" (to include Abraham Lincoln, born on Feb. 12). According to the National Archives, Presidents Day will never fall on George Washington's actual birthday, since the latest the third Monday in February can fall is Feb. 21.

Winston Churchill once said, "Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts." Do you always press forward? Do you know what to do when faced with adversity? Do you know how to define success? Join V. Lee Henson for this lively discussion. 

What are the 9 Sprint Goal Principles to Support Your Scrum Team in Finding It's Groove? In a recent blog post from Stefan Wolpers, he discussed these principles:  Have a Sprint Goal in the first place Avoid the top-down Sprint Goal Avoid output-driven Sprint Goals The pseudo-Sprint Goal Have a reasonable forecast Don’t play safe all the time Avoid a confidential Sprint Goal Have a “flexible” Sprint Goal Deliver the Sprint Goal more often than not https://medium.com/10-min-briefing-on-startup-tech-news/sprint-goal-principles-age-of-product-com-8a904b66c3cc

What are the 6 ideas?  Good Product Owners Are Available Effective Product Owners Paint a Vision Successful Product Owners Collaborate with All Stakeholders The Best Product Owners Set High Expectations What Makes a Good Product Owner in Agile? Priorities and Flexibility Product Owners Are Good Storytellers

Join V. Lee Henson as we celebrate this holiday edition by focusing on the top three things we LOVE about Agile:  Agile Changes Lives Agile Focuses on Truth & Honesty Agile Helps Us Build World Class Products & Services

Is this the real life... Is this Velocity Caught in a backlog No escape from the apathy Open your sprint Give heed to the team and see....  Nothing like a little Bohemian Velocity to warm the soul! Join V, Lee Henson as we discover some handy tips on how to and how not to use velocity with your teams and organization. 

Why is it important to keep an idea journal? How do you leverage it and what should it contain? Join V. Lee Henson as we explore what it is and how it can be used. 

Responsibilities vs Accountabilities - A Better Understanding of Agile Roles Product Owner:  Accountabilities Product Vision: Craft a Product Vision that points the team in a meaningful direction. Product Strategy: Define a strategy enabling the team to decide what to do and what not to do. Goals: Set meaningful goals that enable teams to focus and intensively collaborate towards a unique direction. Value Maximization: Prioritize meaningful problems that maximize the outcomes for users and businesses. Communication: Ensure stakeholders are well-informed about results, decisions, progress, etc. In summary, they should never say, “I was unaware of that.” Responsibilities Stakeholder Management: Engage with stakeholders to partner up and create value for products. This includes organizing meetings, workshops, communication, etc. Backlog Management: Curate, sort, and clean up the Product Backlog to ensure it has the most relevant items to create value. Roadmap: Craft product roadmaps to provide perspective and set expectations on where the product is heading. Monitor results: Constantly evaluate KPIs to understand how the product creates value for end-users. Product Discovery: Ensure continuous learning to enable innovation and solve problems users care about. ScrumMaster: Accountabilities Scrum Understanding: Ensure business stakeholders understand how to play the Scrum game. Atmosphere: Develop a collaborative atmosphere with a balance between learning and delivering. Framework: Ensure that all Scrum events occur and that all artifacts are created as defined in the Scrum Guide. Teams’ Effectiveness: Enable the team to grow and become as effective as possible. Enable Self-management: Unleashes the team’s potential by helping them become self-managing teams. Responsibilities Ensure the Sprint Retrospective takes place: The Scrum Master may facilitate the Sprint Retrospective, but the responsibility is ensuring that it happens. Another team member can run the show. Ensure Retrospectives End Up with Actions: After each Sprint, Scrum teams discuss how to get better as a team. Scrum Masters ensure the result of the session has clear agreed actions. Coach stakeholders: Invest whatever is necessary to coach key business people to enable teams to thrive with Scrum. Scrum Events: Ensure the team respects the Scrum Events frequency and timeboxes them. Development Team:  Accountabilities Quality: Ensure the code meets the agreed quality standards. Scalability: Creates solutions that scale to the required business needs. Efficiency: Guarantee solutions are efficient from the users’ perspective. Maintainability: Develop an application that can be maintainable by other professionals. Responsibilities Solution: Implement solutions that solve the agreed problems. Test: Perform required tests to meet the quality expectations. Delivery: Define a delivery process and execute it accordingly. Estimate: Only those who work on the solution can estimate it.

Why should we NEVER Correct Course - Is It Really So Bad? In a recent email from Mike Cohn we discussed course correction and the difference between this and inspect and adapt. The truth is we often have a good, better, and best path, but it is really hard to know up front which path is absolute best and MOST correct. 

What are 4 Problems That Bias Helps Us Address? Too much information Not enough meaning Need to act fast What should we remember?  This 2016 article published by Buster Benson covers over 175 biases and how we use them in a constructive way. I do not think I have geeked out this hard in a VERY long time.  https://betterhumans.pub/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18