20 Questions from “Agile Conversations”- Part-1

Book review of “Agile Conversations” by Douglas Squirrel & Jeffrey Fredrick

Thanks a ton to IT Revolution for sharing me the free copy of the copy and I was super excited to review it. But when I started to read this book, I found it so relevant that I feel lucky to be reviewing it 😌

We all have been hearing about the “Agile methodology”, dos and don’ts. I spent past 3 years reading loads of blogs & books just to bring more clarity about how I practice Agile and how I can keep the experience better for my team.

I understood Agile is not just a methodology but more of a mindset shift where you start thinking from a perspective of making everything work in an agile manner. You make your team think of problems and not directly jump over solutions instead find the most agile way to solve a problem.

I believe you might also have some wonderful stories to tell about “why you learned agile”, “how you got to know about agile” and so on. Most of us just wanted to implement agile because we wanted to get our work done, while saving our resources as well. We started to measure the effort being put, made work granular, estimated everything, even time boxed our meetings but we forgot to think about the most crucial player in this overall journey. 😐

We forgot to rethink about our communication. It can be verbal, written or recordings but we forgot to estimate it. We forgot to measure the efficiency of our communication. Communication plays the lead role behind every piece of work, success of a task depends on how the work is conveyed. But we forgot to measure it!

The “Agile Conversations” by Douglas Squirrel & Jeffrey Fredrick talks about how to do your conversations or communication in an agile manner. Each page that I turned within this book made me think about what I did wrong in my past years and what could I have done instead. 😌

20 questions I asked myself while reading “Agile Conversations”

1. Why don’t we talk more often?

The primary focus for all of us is to get the work done and so we tried to reduce the time of “Talking” and spent more on executing. But this lead to increase in the time of execution because of missing clarity within members of a team.

2. Are we just “feature factories”?

Delivering more and more features based on the defined scope is just making us feature factories and we moved away from solving a problem and finding solution. We also limited ourselves to the fact that the problems can be solved only by adding features.

3. Can documentation reduce the “Scope of failure”?

In the light of agile, we started defining our documents in a manner which is granular and the person implementing the requirement can just follow it without thinking outside of it. Reread the last sentence to find the problem. 😅 The scope of failure can be effected by documentation but not always reduce the impact.

4. Should Collaboration be put on hold by the processes?

We tend to “go by process” in the uncertain times, so that we can also make someone accountable for the upcoming failures but we don’t choose to sit together and collaborate more often from the very beginning. We stay away from the other people on the team in the name of “process” and create loopholes by ourselves.

5. Why we keep so much work in progress at an instant?

We tend to start alot of tasks together, thinking we can complete them parallely but that just means starting alot of work together which just reduces the chances of atleast one of them to get completed.

6. Why conversations are still controlled in corporates?

Controlling conversations in order to save time of team doesn’t do any good for them. It just damages the collaboration, relationships & team productivity.

7. Why things change within a team when the situations are potentially threatening or embarrassing?

When almost everyone claims to adopt the approaches & behaviors of productive reasoning, it is unreasonable for the team to change its behavior in threatening situations. But it still happens, always!

8. Is our communication having the required clarity?

The book explained an amazing model to gauge if your communication has the required clarity.

The four ‘R’s formula:

• Record: Storing your communication so that it can be revisted. If it is verbal, you can record it. If written then the documentation itself can be revisted.
• Reflect: Pay attention to the tool & technique you are trying to use at that time.
• Revise: Revise your communication to try & produce a better result.
• Role play: Find a friend & try saying your dialogue aloud.

Continue Reading in part-2

Liked what you read? I deserve a clap then.😁