Practical Agilist Best Posts of 2022
During 2022, I published 18 blog posts. I continue to blog about topics I run into in my job as an Agile Coach. I write not just because I enjoy it but in hopes that it may be helpful to others. The following 6 posts are ones I’m particularly proud of, and by re-sharing, I hope it may be useful to someone who may have missed them earlier this year.
You Are The Culture
Culture is perhaps nothing more than how we treat each other, which means everyone can help change and evolve their own culture in their teams and in their companies. It also means you have some responsibility to do little things that matter; check in on teammates, make time to learn from each other, and pay attention to subtle changes in people.
The Subtle But Critical Art-form of How You Speak As A Leader
Leaders in an agile world need to focus more on building up people than leading by telling others what to do. One can start by learning to listen better and ask better questions; lead with empathy and focus on helping others solve problems on their own. Your language choices and genuinely caring as you carefully ask questions can build trust and help people grow.
The Art of Choosing Ice Breakers
If building psychological safety is the most important thing we can do to build better teams (it is) then making time to share about ourselves and bring vulnerable in front of our peers is a very important part of being on a team. Some activities can be too much for teams just getting to know each other, while other activities leave it open for participants to share a lot or a little, so choose carefully. But focus on increasing the sharing! Multiple ice breaker ideas, including my favorite Lifeline activity are in this post.
Why Split Big User Stories?
Being iterative is learning to be OK with getting to the first feedback point quickly, even if the product is imperfect, in order to assess how it’s going. Risk is inherently reduced in agile by breaking stories down to smaller pieces of value, but there as some tricks that can help you get there. The post explores a few ideas, including using spikes and examining vague verbs so we get good at saying, “What’s the smallest amount of work we can do to deliver value to the customer and get feedback?”
Why use story points? Because everyone sucks at estimating!
Estimating is a very controversial topic but I try to break it down into some practical advice about how to deliver value consistently. If you reset your story point estimation using a true anchor story, then everyone can do relative estimating. And then you can suck at estimating consistently! There is immense value and trust building opportunities in being able to say “Our team guarantees that we are working on the absolute most important outcomes for our customers at all times and will deliver incremental and demonstrable value every two weeks!”
Who Cares About OKRs!?
OKRs are a lightweight way to align key strategies from the very highest level, defining who you are as a company, down to how every single team is going to help the company achieve its short and long term objectives. They also happen to be easy to learn and very hard to master. I provide multiple links to John Doerr and Jeff Gothelf content on OKRs and 6 things you should know about writing OKRs and 4 things to avoid when you start them.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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