"Aha! Moments"

'''The following “Aha! Moments” were recorded during a private 2-day OpenAgile Training Dec 16-17, 2010 in Foster City, California'''

Progress meetings are reflections for the next engagement meeting

Types of tasks (or events) get represented on the task board as stickies, a different color for each, and placed underneath the value drivers. Value Driver#1        Value Driver #2                    T = represents task or event stickie T T T T                        T T T T T         T T T                             T T  T T

Skills & Learning

Titles & roles   I     Skills & Learning D&D Char ClassI Gurps build your own character

The line between reflecting and learning is fuzzy

A process is only a process by its own definition

Value gets delivered earlier if you work in smaller batches

Trust – innocent until proven guilty (shown to me)

Try: not splitting up the pennies in advance

Aha! - don’t waste people’s time in meetings

Guidance – the team is not perfect and that’s okay

Product life cycle – it’s not a circle! It’s a spiral.

Suspend disbelief in meetings

I like that OpenAgile makes room for intuition and inspiration

Dropping prejudices will help to begin the process with a clean slate

“Love “ alternatives – Passion for the work – Heart & mind in the work

Fit – just because there is one key doesn’t mean there is only one way to open the lock (or door)

Bicycle – even moving in a straight line is a series of tiny turns and corrections

The Learning Circle is an infinitive, continuous and homogeneous process. It can also be non-linear and adaptive.

Guidance can be internal (e.g., inspiration)

Share more pennies

Being the bottleneck can lead to anxiety and a decline in work

Affirmation - project manager protects the team members from outside distractions

The development of the individual effects the development of team, and vice versa

A virtue can have truthfulness as a component

You learn from failures more than you learn from successes but its okay to be successful and not learn so fast.

What is value? You can’t always hold value in your hand. Information is value.

The success of consultative decision making depends upon the framework/acceptance level of the OpenAgile process by the entire team

Pruning; Organic growth does not mean you can’t guide the growth (see Banzai)

Community – team becomes a community

Organic growth does not mean unconstrained growth

Growth facilitator and Process facilitator may not be needed 100% of the time

Grok and Role!

Ownership not consensus; you don’t need to build consensus in the team, you need to build ownership in team

Learning Circle = Life Circle

Truthfulness is a prerequisite to producing value

Being truthful does not mean full disclosure

Teams can change from cycle to cycle

Phineas and Ferb – each show is an agile iteration….and funny

Organic growth does not necessarily mean ‘uncontrollable growth”

Agile; it’s the living space between the tools

That silver bullet solution won’t do a damn bit of good against a vampire

Doing a fun exercise before introductions is cool!

Communication formula – (N*(N-1))/2 – us (14x(14-1))/2=91

In a n organization, titles & roles are valuable in differentiating levels of responsibilities, accountability, who to go to for what. Increases efficiency of communication in a team of lesser importance or none

Peter’s “5 types of decision making” & his correlation to consultative decision making is very helpful.

Tasks in the plan are relative to the value drivers (exchangeable)

Value can be much broader than monetary

Team stages; reflection, forming, storming, learning, norming, planning, action, performing

A performing team must reform every now and then to stay performing

The nature of predictability is different between mechanical and organic systems

Experts emerge – they are not assigned

Agile is about being willing to see need for improvement and ask tough WHY questions

A team has the capacity to guide itself

Where do I get the straw that downloads other people’s brains?

Guidance is a 2-way street. It comes from outside the team and from the team outward

Learning Circle is the product life cycle of Agile iterations

Cycle of action, to produce (a cycle of production) has potential to be consciousness raising if the learning circle emphasis is built in to the cycle.

Volunteering can be a way to avoid bottlenecks

No one likes to be voluntold!

Trusting and giving up control will make my project more agile and better