We never win anything by just finishing on time.
~ Jeff Patton
Archives For Agile
Agile Malaysia August 2013 Meetup
Venue: MYOB Bangsar South
Back in August last year, the instalment of the Agile Malaysia meetup returned to MYOB’s office in Bangsar South. On the agenda for the night was 1) sharing of some takeaways from the Agile Lean Penang trip, and 2) introduction of Lean Coffee to the group.
QAKL is a group of QA enthusiast, started by Chong Fong Kai (2012) and they meet monthly to share anything related to Quality Assurance or Testing. Last Wed was their first gathering to kickstart 2014 and I was there to check out the crowd and explore how MYOB could contribute to this community.
The Agile Malaysia meetup group received a surprised invite from Joseph Chee about an Agile Lean Conference happening up north in Penang on the 23rd July last year. Not much details were initially forthcoming except we knew there would be a few external speakers – Michael James (Collabnet), Nagendra Kumar (McAfee) and Evan Leybourn – and a number of internal speakers from Intel all set for this event.
Agile Malaysia (Facebook) is a meetup group started by Andy Kelk back in 2011 (when he was at iProperty). It went through a hiatus in 2012 until I met up with Andy to discuss about kickstarting this meetup group again.
Our rationale and purpose behind reactivating this group is simple; as proponents of the Agile (& Lean) movement as the approach to build high performing software development team, both of us understood in order to have a talent pool of Agile developers in the local market (and to grow this talent pool), we first have to start a community of practice of likeminded individuals to engage in a process of collective sharing & learning of each other’s experience along the AGILE journey.
While “self-organized team” is a well-known Agile concept that’s very much sought after, having teams that truly self-organized do require often a mindset change from both the team members and their manager.
Usually that means getting the team to self-manage the backlog, work out the task dependencies among themselves, pull through issues together as a cross-functional team etc. I’m sure you have read enough about getting teams to self-organize in their delivery work. But what about self-organizing outside of the delivery process?
Let me share with you some recent initiatives taken with the team where they practice their own self-organization outside of an Agile delivery team.
A few years back when I was working on a project where I needed to form a team with a group of people from 5 diverse nationalities – Malaysian, Indian, Filipino, Norwegian, and Polish – to realign and standardize their localized business processes, I was searching for a tool that would enable me to keep everyone focus on a stream of work yet acts as simple info radiator to keep me abreast of everyone’s progress (without needing to micro-manage).
Been close to half a year since I took on this new job. They have a Purple theme and somehow it reminded me of Seth’s PURPLE COW book which was one fascinating read years ago.
aucheekeong 