From Ceremonies to Events – reducing cargo cult and improving efficiency

Your agile process has become boring or ineffective?

Those discussions about user stories have become old? That burn down chart that once provided guidance has become dull? We could go on about things that might have taken a turn for worse in some agile projects and will do so in this short talk. We will not only shed some light on those practices and their place in Agile environments, but also – and more importantly – introduce some alternatives that are still absolutely in line with agile processes (e.g. Scrum) and the agile mindset.

Why the title? Well, that is a hat-tip to Scrum. One of the things that changed in the 2016 edition of the Scrum Guide was that the term "ceremony" has been replaced with "event" – reflecting a significant mind-shift and subtly hinting at the issues with cargo-cult agile.

Transcript

1. From Ceremonies to Events Reducing Cargo Cult and Improving Efficiency Michael Mahlberg Thomas Epping @mmahlberg Showrunner Organisational Management Consultant @thomasepping TCG The Consulting Guild GmbH codecentric AG
2. Cargo Cult […] an attempt to recreate successful outcomes by replicating circumstances associated with those outcomes, although those circumstances are either unrelated to the causes of outcomes or insufficient to produce them by themselves.
3. We need User Stories and Story Points to conjure the spirit of agility!
5. Peter Hebgen / pixelio.de Traditional Agile Kanbanized Agility
6. As returning visitor of the site, I want the system to recognize me unmaskingly, so that I actually can order the articles in my basket even weeks after my last visit. User Stories
7. As returning visitor of the site, I want the system to recognize me unmaskingly, so that I actually can order the articles in my basket even weeks after my last visit. User Stories Work Item Types
8. Daily Scrum Photo by Olga Guryanova on Unsplash
9. Daily Scrum
10. Daily Scrum Boardwalk
11. Iterations
12. Iterations Flow
13. Estimation
14. Estimation Forecast
15. Retrospective
16. Retrospective Operations Review
18. include and merge User Stories Work Item Types try and compare Daily Scrum Board Walk try and compare Iterations Flow include and merge Estimation Forecast include and merge Retrospective Operations Review You might want to consider to …
21. Michael Mahlberg http://www.michaelmahlberg.de TCG The Consulting Guild GmbH topconf2017@michaelmahlberg.com Thomas Epping https://www.codecentric.de codecentric AG thomas.epping@codecentric.de