Telephone Questions Flashcards
What does Agile mean to you?
Agile to me is the ability to move quickly and easily. Whether it is the organization itself or the team, the focus is upon delivering value to customers.
Agile is built around 4 principles and 12 values.
Being Agile means working in a highly responsive, lightweight way. There is still process, but it is just enough to not create waste and focus on delivery.
Why would one choose Agile?
Taking an Agile approach allows for change by anticipating it. Allows for being flexible. Work on what is most important. Builds a collaborative design with engineers, analysts and the business.
End users are involved throughout the process rather than just at the beginning. Earlier delivery of working software corresponding with early feedback and subsequent change based on that feedback that is welcome.
What are the distinguishing factors between a Scrum Master and Agile Coach?
Scrum masters tend to focus upon one team and influence that team with respect to scrum values and principles where as an Agile Coach is often multiple teams influencing teams with regard to Agile which is a super set of Scrum. The coach should also operate at all different levels of the organization including middle management and senior leaders. In fact some experienced lead coaches believe it should be 10, 60, 30 - Senior, Middle and operational teams.
What are the Scrum Principles and Values
Values - focus, openness, courage, commitment, respect
Principles - Iterative development, empirical process control, self-organization, collaboration, value-based prioritization, time-boxing,
What does coaching mean to you?
Coaching to me means being someone who draws the potential out of both individuals and teams. Rather than providing solutions as in a consultancy, a coach tends to draw the solution out of the individual and team rather than providing them with solutions from which they pick.
The coach does this by helping their clients to see new perspectives and possibilities which ultimately in our context lead to better performance as a product team and as individuals.
In order to orchestrate this, the coach will typically engage in activities both at the individual and team level relating to mentoring, teaching, facilitating, problem solving and resolving conflicts.
What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
Coaching helps the team’s performance get better, where as mentoring is more specific to individuals and the specific problem that a team is trying to solve where you transfer your knowledge and experience that is relevant to that specific problem.
For example, when I meet with JC last year, the first thing that we looked at was why the team was focusing on delivering all 60 customers as their key objective rather than just focusing on delivering 1 customer, and then iterating on that process and learning from it.
A small and simple adjustment, but it helped the team focus, which in turn increased their performance.
So, both are necessary and in one sense are two sides of the same coin that when joined together can help take the team forward.
How would you establish a highly motivated scrum team?
I think one of the ways to motivate any team is to empower that team to have control over their own work where they own it and are self-governing. Work with PO and EL to vision cast and empower the team with servant leadership.
The work has to be challenging and create an environment in the team in which they can master a particular skill set.
Also, aligning the team with a higher purpose will motivate, so having the team aligned with other teams but remaining strongly decoupled with little hand-offs. Being part of a larger vision, engineering strategy will also motivate.
What tools would I use? I think with regard to high performance, using Adkins high performance tree, or some kind of metaphor that creates a sense of this is where we are and this is where we are going - something that maps the current state of the team to some future more high performant state.
Give the team opportunities to grow - knowledge sharing sessions, lab-like work where they experiment with different ways of doing things including different technologies.
What would you do going into a demotivated team?
All of the above.
What are the differences between scrum and kanban?
Scrum and kanban are frameworks within Agile that help facilitate the Agile principles and values.
They have different philosophies - kanban focuses on (1) visualizing the work (2) limiting work in progress (3) reducing the time it takes for a work item to get from start to finish. In kanban, you are looking to continuously improve the workflow.
In Scrum, the team works in specific intervals called sprints where the goal is to create feedback loops. The team adopts specific roles, artifacts and ceremonies. Velocity is a key metric for Scrum teams.
- Differences - Scrum has fixed length sprints, kanban is continuous workflow
- Release - Scrum tends to be at the end of the sprint, kanban is continuous
- Roles - Scrum has specific roles such as PO, SM, Dev where as kanban has no prescribed roles.
- Key metrics - Scrum is velocity where kanban is lead time, cycle time and WIP
- Change philosophy - Scrum teams should not change during the sprint and kanban can change at any time.
What is your preferred delivery methodology and why?
For a team that is more mature and in particular a mature PO, then I would prefer kanban, for example a team of contractors or seniors. For a team that is more junior or has strategic members like an EL or PO that are newish in the role then I would prefer Scrum.
For a team whose stakeholders constantly change scope or mix strategy with operations, I would also prefer Scrum to protect the team.
What’s the most recent thing you’ve learned?
- The amount of work required to prepare a coaching session for 10 people. 20 minutes ain’t gonna cut it.
- I recently read the book “Agile Coaching” for practitioners which gave me a much broader view of the coaching role - not just working with operational teams, but with middle and senior management. It helped me to think more in terms of an Agile transformation or the organization rather than the Agile transformation of just a single team and how much effort and influence is required in order to make that successful at both middle management and senior level.
