How do you foster, grow and facilitate innovation? It’s a question that plaques many but few have found the answer. We appear at work at 8 and leave before 17, so that we don’t exceed the golden constant pace of 80% of our performance. But how can one feel free to innovate within such a tight container? From PO’s perspective we work in a black box where he or she throws some stories for us to chew and once in a while we spit out something that satisfies the stakeholders. But can anyone realistically say that it hatches creativity?
It does not. That is best described as work. Just the kind of work that makes Jack a dull boy. But how do you break that incapability to innovate? How empower team members to let them brains breath for a while, to smell the smells of the vast technological spaces where no-one has gone before? Well, at least they have not.
You allow creative slack. You specifically allow the team members to spend time at work on issues that interest them. It may be reading a technical magazine, looking at the latest technologies, starting to learn new languages and so forth. You let them coast within lax boundaries, boundaries that say “slack must somehow relate to your work, may it be skill, tools, technology and what not”. In other words, it is not about avoiding work.
With creative slack you may get
- innovations
- sense of empowerment
- regeneration at work
- greater technical skills
- quicker adaptability with new technologies
- improved morale
- fresh viewpoints
and much more. While you may not see immediate improvement in your team velocity these gains are worth it alone! All of them will have a positive effect on velocity.
I am currently in a lucky situation that after introducing this idea to my team (after 1,5 years of hibernation) we all agreed that we want this and we presented this to our superiors and the initial response was a solid GO! We just need to figure out the nitty gritty details so that creative slack fits and syncs nicely into our multi-team environment.
Do not try to force creativity, embrace it and let it grow naturally by giving time!
I am yellow :-)
Not very surprising though as I consider my self quite an extrovert person. This one day training was a good one and it revealed couple of interesting insights of myself at work. Although it is based on my own perception of myself at work I found wisdom in it. It was a good tool to learn more about myself and my team members preferred ways of working and what are the most efficient ways of communication with them. I found couple of weak spots from my ways of working and I will be concentrating on finding a cure for them.
Talking about Kaizen!
Within last week I have seen more sprint cancellations than ever before :)
It’s a good thing. Canceling a sprint is responding to change. If things change enough you need to adjust and what a better way than starting all over. We may have some problems because we have to synchronize our sprints with so many teams in order to enable stakeholders to attend as many sprint endings as possible.
Canceling sprints obviously has effect on our history data and we have to be careful when reflecting on the past.
I had a pleasant experience in our last retrospective. My current team, which has been together for 7 two weeks sprints, has been successful right from the beginning. We are not yet hyperproductive, but we are a good team which has gelled properly. Despite the success we’ve had we still have a feeling that we can do better.
Our Scrummaster facilitated a role playing game in our last retro. Pretty simple exercise but the outcome was great. The task was to imagine a sprint that had just ended and which was exremely successfull and then write to an A4 paper a story how the sprint went.
After aggregating the writings we now have a very good skeleton of a successful sprint. Now we know the ingredients and we just have to find the correct measures!
I am now starting to feel normal after all the traveling. The training went extremely well and I think we left a positive mark and enhanced their trust in Scrum as a process. With live examples from their own problem domain we were able to assure them that Scrum can and will work for them too.
Note, from their own problem domain. For an outsider the trust building is a tremendously bigger issue. It is much harder if you can not give examples of how other people in their problem domain have solved or approached problems. But for an insider, for someone who has been working with the exact same problems, for example within the same organization, it is simple. See, I am a living proof that it can work :-)
It’s already day two of our training. After surviving the jet lag (at least I am hoping I have survived) and a good night sleep the first day seems to be a success.
On day one we went through Scrum as a process on a more theoretical level. We had quite many exercises and as a result the teams (all 6 of them) now have ways of working an definition of done agreements done. They also groomed and defined acceptance criteria for few preselected user stories. We also emphasized some of our good practices and experiences how problems can be tackled. The teams seem to be taking well the idea that they can affect their own work. They seem enabled to question their Product owners in a constructive manner and some teams have already done that. Good progress.
We started the second day with backlog estimations and had lively discussion about story points and how you can reach a consensus within a team. Sprint planning was next and we are about to start an exercise which will produce few stories with detailed tasks defined. Just waiting for everyone to return from their lunch!
Heading to bed, taxi to airport leaves in 6 hours. I’m so excited :-). I just hope my luggage clears Charles De Gaulle airport so that I have clothes when I arrive in Kuala Lumpur.
I’ll try to update my blog with my feelings during my stay in KL. Stay tuned!
It will be different, it will be an experience! Scan-Agile 2010 will offer something new that will overwhelm you.
Darn.
My pet project got delayed. Mainly for two reasons. I got the flu (responsible employees get sick only on holidays) and our dog is suffering from diarrhea. That means I have spent majority of my time taking care of the dog and cleaning after her.
Well, I will continue someday and will keep you updated :-)
Agile, Kaizen | Jussi Mononen | 
29/04/2010 21:53 | 
Comments (0) 
Subscribe