Mentor #6: Amitai Schleier

Welcome back to Agile Tribe of Mentors. I've been quiet for a while as I've been getting a brand new agile conference off the ground (http://www.leanagilebrighton.co.uk). That's been taking up most of my spare time/ energy as you can imagine. However, I still have a few mentor posts in the pipeline that I've been meaning to get around to posting. Here is the first!

Amitai Schleier is another great example of how amazing our agile community is. We've never met, he reached out via twitter when he spotted the blog (following on from the awesome GeePaw Hill post) and he willingly and generously contributed his own response. Its also another great example of how beneficial this exercise has been for me, seeking other sources of knowledge and making connections with folks I might not typically get a chance to connect with. That's kind of the entire point of this initiative :)

If you get the chance I recommend you subscribe to Amitai's podcast "Agile in 3 minutes"

About Amitai Schleier

Amitai Schleier (@schmonz) is a software development coach, legacy code wrestler, non-award-winning musician, and award-winning bad poet. He publishes fixed-length micropodcasts at Agile in 3 Minutes, writes variable-length articles at schmonz.com, and contributes code and direction to notable open-source projects such as NetBSD, pkgsrc, ikiwiki, and qmail. Amitai’s ideas, prose, music, and puns have manifested at Agile Roots,Agile for Humans, CodeMash, Self.conference, pkgsrcCon, Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, NYCBUG, the International Rachmaninoff Conference, and theAlfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.


Here is Amitai's advice ..

Name 1-5 books you regularly recommend, or that you think all agilists should read.

• The Goal (Goldratt)
• XP Explained (Beck)
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Feathers)
• Mob Programming Guidebook (Pyhäjärvi & Falco)
 

Name 1-5 people you recommend agilists should follow on twitter (or other social media)

• @estherderby
• @ruthmalan
• @catswetel
• @SalFreudenberg
• @lanettecream

If you could get one single message across to the entire agile community what would it be and why?

Software is a human activity. To get better at writing software together, we have to get better at being human together.


What do you do when you get frustrated with the industry? Do you have any coping mechanisms?

Write code. Make music. Go for a walk. Write a particularly scathing episode of Agile in 3 Minutes.

What is your favourite failure you have experienced in your career that set you up for future success?

Got a release rejected by IT for what seemed like piddling reasons. We knew why we were confident in it. Ops didn't, and wasn't. Next week we paired with Ops to develop a feature. After that, we always got the green light.


What advice would you give to folks who are just starting their agile journey? What bad advice have you heard given?

My advice: doubt yourselves enough to try something, and trust yourselves enough to judge whether to keep it. Ideas aren't worth more because of where they came from, worth less because of how counter-intuitive they sound, or worth anything until you make them your own.


What direction would you like to see Agile go in in the next 5-10 years?

I'd like to see more organizations recognizing the primacy of humane relationships and reorganizing accordingly. I'd like to see more people feel that their whole human selves are valued and needed in the workplace and that their work is valued and needed in the world.

Thank you Amitai

Mentor #5: Chris McDermott

Welcome back to Agile Tribe of Mentors. So far so good with a steady stream of respondents to the survey :) The book list keeps growing and the insights keep flowing. Our community continues to amaze me!

The latest thoughts and advice come to you from Chris McDermott. I first met Chris a few years back at a London LeanKanban day (My first real introduction to Lean & Kanban ideas), not long after that I saw him speak at the London Lean Kanban conference, not long after that I discovered LeanAgile Scotland, the conference that Chris founded and launched. The community has a lot to be grateful to Chris for. It remains my favourite conference and I am always amazed at the caliber of talks and speakers there. If you ever get the chance to go, you should. You won't regret it.

About Chris McDermott

Chris is an Agile coach, developer and conference organiser. In his career he has worked in various different domains from the police, investment banking, reverse logistics to media.

Since reading Kent Becks eXtreme Programming Explained in 2003 he has been passionate about Agile development. After discovering Kanban, and subsequently Systems Thinking, he has became increasingly fascinated with organisational systems and how to make them more effective and more humane.

Chris is the founder of Lean Agile Scotland and the co-organiser of the Lean Agile Glasgow meet up group. He tweets here: @chrisvmcd

Here is Chris's advice ..

Name 1-5 books you regularly recommend, or that you think all agilists should read.

• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. His insights into how we make decisions are a must read for everyone agilist or not.
• The New Economics by W. Edwards Deming. While Out of the Crisis is considered Deming's seminal work I prefer The New Economics. In it introduces his idea of the System of Profound Knowledge which outlines the need to understand work as system, understand variation, have an understanding of what motivates people and also an appreciation of what is knowable/unknowable.
• Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck (original version). Speaks for itself :-)
• Great Boss Dead Boss by Ray Immelman. This, like The Goal, is a business novel that describes how people associate themselves with tribes and the way we structure organisations often leads to tribes competing against each other as opposed to working together.

Name 1-5 people you recommend agilists should follow on twitter (or other social media)

All of these great people https://vimeo.com/leanagilescotland

If you could get one single message across to the entire agile community what would it be and why?

Study the Cynefin framework and challenge yourself to always consider context and the applicability of your ideas in that context.


What do you do when you get frustrated with the industry? Do you have any coping mechanisms?

Speak to your friends and peers, share your frustrations, they’ve probably experienced something similar and can help you cope. Also don’t give up with the industry but know when to give up with the particular challenge you are facing.

What is your favourite failure you have experienced in your career that set you up for future success?

I once attempted to introduce an inexperienced group to XP. One half got it but the other half didn’t, I didn’t know how to best help them and in the end failed them miserably. Shortly after I learned about Kanban and the ideas of incremental evolutionary change. This helped me understand fitness for purpose and that in complex situations we shouldn’t design an ideal future state and close the gap but manage in the present and look to make smaller manageable and sustainable changes.


What advice would you give to folks who are just starting their agile journey? What bad advice have you heard given?

Try to understand why things like Scrum and Kanban work, understand the underlying principles and theories, so that when they don’t work you have a better chance of adapting to find something that does.


What direction would you like to see Agile go in in the next 5-10 years?

I’d like to see it continue to expand its knowledge and try new things, I’d also like to see less codification and big methods being sold. I’m confident we can and will do the former, less so about the latter.

Thank you Chris

Mentor #4: Michael "GeePaw" Hill

Welcome back to Agile Tribe of Mentors! This little experiment is going well so far. I've learned a lot and had some great recommendations of books to add to my reading list and folks to follow on twitter.

This 4th installment of the blog is testament to the generosity of our agile community worldwide when it comes to sharing time, thoughts and ideas. Michael is a perfect example. I've never met Geepaw, but he is someone who I have followed on twitter for a while and who's approach, comments and ideas have resonated with me. (It must be our shared XP background :). Anyway, I reached out to him to see if he would contribute to the blog, and he duly obliged.

About Geepaw Hill




About 20 years ago, he became an avid early-adopter of a programming method called Extreme Programming (XP). He fell deeply under the influence of ne’er-do-wells like Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Bob Martin, and joined that early movement with great energy and fervor.

He also became a software development coach.

He works with software organizations all over the world, down on the floor and up in the penthouse, helping them find and implement solutions to the vexing difficulties of shipping software value for a living.

Full bio here: http://geepawhill.org/whos-geepaw/
Follow on twitter here (Recommended): @GeePawHill

Here is Michael's advice:

Name 1-5 books you regularly recommend, or that you think all agilists should read.

• Extreme Programming Explained (first edition is better).
• Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns (i know. trust me.)
• Analysis Patterns. 
• Programming Pearls, both volumes.

Name 1-5 people you recommend agilists should follow on twitter (or other social media)

• ron jeffries @RonJeffries
• amitai schlair @schmonz
• alex harms @onealexharms
• llewellyn falco @LlewellynFalco
• kent beck.@KentBeck

If you could get one single message across to the entire agile community what would it be and why?

Bottom up one step at a time, make every change pay before the next change and STOP ALL BRANDING.

What do you do when you get frustrated with the industry? Do you have any coping mechanisms?

I drink, I play games, I listen to music. I vent to my handful of friends in the trade.

What is your favourite failure you have experienced in your career that set you up for future success?

I don't have a favorite. I've failed so many times in so many different ways. most of them have helped me later.

What advice would you give to folks who are just starting their agile journey? What bad advice have you heard given?

Avoid deep commitment to ideas that sound good until you have tried them. Experiment experiment experiment.

What direction would you like to see Agile go in in the next 5-10 years?

I would like to see it stop being called "agile", let alone the proliferation of branded flavors. I would like to see it become "software development".

Thank you Michael

Mentor #3: Katherine Kirk

Welcome back to Agile Tribe of Mentors

The 3rd installment of Agile Tribe of Mentors brings you insights from the excellent Katherine Kirk.

I first discovered Katherine and her work at the LeanAgile Scotland conference in 2014. In a high quality conference program, her talk "Navigating politics in Agile/ Lean teams" really stood out. (You can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/107165628)

Her focus on the human aspects of what we do coming from a rare, tribe influenced, point of view was particularly unique. It certainly provided those in the room with plenty of food for thought.
One strand of her presentation talked about roles and shared responsibilities when operating in a real life tribe. Hunters hunt, foragers forage, but sometimes a forager learns to hunt and is very proud of themselves when they catch something for the tribe! Relevant on so many levels.

Katherine is someone I highly recommend you follow on twitter (@kkirk) and if you ever get a chance to see her in action at a conference, don't miss it!


About Katherine



Katherine Kirk is a highly experienced independent transformation Consultant, international conference speaker and co-founder of the not-for-profit Inclusive Collaboration movement in tech (www.inclusive-collaboration.org).

Katherine’s primary area of expertise lies in co-discovery and insight facilitation through exploring and combining eastern and tribal philosophy to find practical answers to tough, on-the-ground issues, specifically involving contextually driven edge-cases and the cultural interaction between hierarchical management and Agile/Lean teams.

After gaining a first class BSc (Hons) in computing she completed post graduate studies in software engineering at University of Oxford and currently enjoys being an active participant of a community of Lean and Agile practitioners in Europe who explore and challenge the status quo through experimenting and collaborating.

Here is Katherine's advice:

Name 1-5 books you regularly recommend, or that you think all agilists should read.

• Lean Enterprise - Humble, Molesky, O' Reilly
• Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams  - Alistair Cockburn
• Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game - Alistair Cockburn

Name 1-5 people you recommend agilists should follow on twitter (or other social media)

Any that have spoken at LeanAgileScotland conferences up to 2017

If you could get one single message across to the entire agile community what would it be and why?

Everything is continually subject to change, inter-dependency and dissatisfaction. Your reaction to this determines your level of difficulty. Why: it’s the characteristics of our context.

What do you do when you get frustrated with the industry? Do you have any coping mechanisms?

Invent ways we can overcome the difficulties I see

What is your favourite failure you have experienced in your career that set you up for future success?

Thinking I had the answer

What advice would you give to folks who are just starting their agile journey? What bad advice have you heard given?

Stay in a state of humble learning and discovery.
Bad advice: you/I/they have THE answer

What direction would you like to see Agile go in in the next 5-10 years?

No borders. No boundaries. No meerkat wars. Community and support.


Thank you Katherine

Mentor #2: Eduardo Ribeiro

Welcome back to Agile Tribe of Mentors 

This blog is still in it's infancy, and the format & method is a bit experimental but already it is providing me with some great insights from some lovely people. Additionally its helping me with some great suggestions for reading material and people to follow on twitter. It feels a bit pushy reaching out to folks and asking them to answer my survey but it's leading to conversations and contact with folks I haven't spoken to in a while (or enough) so I feel like that's a positive! Speaking of positivity, allow me to introduce my old friend and colleague Eduardo Ribeiro.

I worked closely with Edi when we were both at Betfair (pre-merger with Paddy Power). This guy is a whirlwind of positive energy and enthusiasm. The words CANNOT and NO don't apply when Edi's around. He has a CAN DO attitude and a growth mindset to rival anyone. His thirst for continuous improvement always impresses me.

About Eduardo 



Edi is Lead Agile Coach at Paddy Power Betfair, based out of the lovely city of Porto in Portugal.
His passion is helping people, teams and organizations foster a culture of continuous improvement where experimenting and embracing change becomes part of their DNA.

You can follow Edi on twitter: @edu_f_ribeiro
He also blogs prolifically at : https://beyondleanagile.com

Here is Eduardo's advice:

Name 1-5 books you regularly recommend, or that you think all agilists should read:

• Powerhouse: Insider Accounts into the World's Top High-performance Organizations
• Black Box Thinking: Marginal Gains and the Secrets of High Performance
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
• The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses
• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking the Rules

Name 1-5 people you recommend agilists should follow on twitter (or other social media):

• Allan Kelly (@allankellynet)
• Ben Linders (@BenLinders) ‏ 
• K Kirk (@kkirk) ‏
• Lyssa Adkins (@CoachAgileTeams) ‏
• Dan North (@tastapod )

If you could get one single message across to the entire agile community what would it be and why?

Be courageous and keep helping people and business to foster a culture of continuous improvement where experimenting and embracing change becomes part of their DNA.

What do you do when you get frustrated with the industry? Do you have any coping mechanisms?

I've realized that this can happen more often than we could expect even after all our efforts. Still, we need to keep trying. I believe that every day is a new day and with a new day, new ideas come that we can try once more.

What is your favourite failure you have experienced in your career that set you up for future success?


I don't consider my favorite failure but my favorite learning moment that was and still is having the will to change the world. Changes are not easy and many times we need to stop, choose/ prioritize and these small achievements will help you to the next ones. Eventually, you can change the world.

What advice would you give to folks who are just starting their agile journey? What bad advice have you heard given?

First, truly understand, believe, embrace and breathe Agile Principles and Values. Keep in mind that there is not a single solution. It's not Scrum, Kanban, Less, Safe but what works best. Even that sometimes we need to create a hybrid and if it works or not share with the community the findings and results. After all, learning is a process that we are constantly doing.

What direction would you like to see Agile go in in the next 5-10 years?

Less concern about certifications and single frameworks and more about principles, values. More courage to test and identify hybrids that work.


Thank you Eduardo

Mentor #1: Dave Coombes

Welcome to the first Agile Tribe of Mentors post. 

It gives me great pleasure to bring you the thoughts and advice of Mr. Dave Coombes as the inaugural post for Agile Tribe of Mentors. Fittingly, Dave was one of the first people to introduce me to Agile when he worked with Thoughtworks back in the early noughties. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude for ensuring I understood the Agile & XP principles and developed an agile mindset from the outset. One of the best developers I've ever worked with he bears a large portion of responsibility for my understanding of Unit testing, TDD, DDD & Continuous integration. His finger gestures to denote dependency injection remain burned into my memory 15 years later.

About Dave 



Dave is currently Director of Engineering at Tyro Payments based in Sydney
He is an accomplished technologist with eighteen years experience of delivering mission critical enterprise applications across a range of business domains.
As a technology leader he loves to explore, learn and apply new technologies and techniques, whilst always remembering that the business value and user satisfaction delivered by a solution is the true measure of its success.

You can follow Dave on twitter: @davecoombes 

Without further ado here is Dave's advice:

Name 1-5 books you regularly recommend, or that you think all agilists should read:

• Turn the ship around
• Smart leaders, smarter teams
• Radical candor
• 37 things one architect knows
• Just enough software architecture
• How to measure anything

Name 1-5 people you recommend agilists should follow on twitter (or other social media):

• Charity majors (@mipsytipsy)
• Jim Webber (@jimwebber)
• Nat price (@natpryce ‏)
• Swardley (@swardley)
• Dan North (@tastapod )

If you could get one single message across to the entire agile community what would it be and why?

It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.

What do you do when you get frustrated with the industry? Do you have any coping mechanisms?

On an industry perspective, I try and accept that by definition we are as good as it’s ever been and our efforts are just to make it better.
On a wider front, I try to put my frustrations in perspective of people who have genuinely life-threatening issues and realise that my frustrations are within my control to address.

What is your favourite failure you have experienced in your career that set you up for future success?

Not so much a failure but as you get more experienced (ie older) you realise there are no absolutes and context is everything. ‘Agile’ is just a toolbox you pull from to optimise delivery of value

What advice would you give to folks who are just starting their agile journey? What bad advice have you heard given?

You need to understand the prevailing wisdom at the time that the agile manifesto was written. Waterfall/ RUP was the received wisdom at the time and you need to understand that to understand where agile came from.

What direction would you like to see Agile go in in the next 5-10 years?

Less about certification and methodology, more about values and pragmatism


Thank you Dave