Thankful For More Change - A 3 month retrospective.

My mouth causes a lot of problems, the filtering system doesn't work well between my brain. Thankfully lately everything that has been coming out has in some way been helpful to myself and others.

Thankfully what is coming out of me i'm confident in, in that i can achieve the vision i want. At the moment people are starting to see it, it's way too hard to have a 10 minute discussion about a topic that i've spent nearly two years studying (agile/scrum/lean/productivity) and for the other party to pick up all the backstory on my rantings.

Thankfully the little droppings i've been planting over the last year are sprouting in people's brains.

In conjuction with a 'task force' of one representative from each internal department we put together a paper to begin the discussion with managers about what is going on, and what we want to move us forward together. It was about 10 pages and 4000 words, thats the quick version. draft version was double that.

From that paper, we planted the seeds of Scrum. It was difficult from the beginning of the taskforce to not just say 'i have the solution already', we spent a whole lot of time talking about the problems we all had.. all the time thinking 'i know how to fix this'. The good thing was that my colleagues were already suggesting small artifacts of scrum, so when you present a paper like Sutherland's "The Scrum Guide" (find the link) people are already convinced to look further into it.

When meeting with our Group Manager, after he had read the whole paper, he picked out the idea of the standup and said 'Do That. Do that for a month'. I was shocked. I have spent months drilling this idea into him. Spent months drilling into him that we can only change when he throws the gauntlet down and challenges us all to improve. We need his backing and support. We need his authority to wake people up. We got it.

We presented it to the Department last Wednesday and I believe it was successful. People were asking the right questions. The expected people were raising the 'it won't work' flags.

It's going to be real challenge to get people to engage. I want people to work out how to fix their own problems, and then tell others what they did to do it.

SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE!

Thanks to Jason Yip of thoughtworks for providing his slides... especially the one entitled 'No Problems is a Problem'.