Presenter: Damon Poole If you’ve been patiently waiting to be part of an Agile team or wishing that your organization was more Agile than it is, it’s time to become an unofficial Agile Transformation catalyst. There’s no reason to wait for somebody else to decide to add more Agile to your life, you can start right now. All you need is passion, patience, and a gentle nudge to get you started. You’ll have to provide the passion and patience, this webinar will provide the nudge in the form of tips and tricks on how to increase your organizations Agility without an official Agile program. Learn how to work in an Agile way within a non-Agile environment, educate others on Agile without the jargon, and encourage the spread of increased Agility without a mandate.

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Acquired by
800 Team Transformation
• Chief Agilist
• Enterprise Transformation
• Built Agile Delivery team
@DamonPoole Highlights
Independent Agile Consulting and Software Startup
Founder, CEO, CTO
Past President

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Nexxle
• Free for users
• Businesses pay for business-oriented features
• Personal todos
• Work projects
• Share by list or individual items
• View everything from your perspective
• Web app, works on PC, Android, Apple, major
browsers
“Add-hoc Priority Management”
https://nexxle.com

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“That’s How Things Work Here”

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“Too Busy to Make Changes Right Now”

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First, Understand
• Spend time observing and gently inquiring
• Discover what others see as the challenges
and solutions

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Start Small

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Be the Change You Want to See
Personal Kanban
• Let others see your change in behavior and results
• Personal Kanban can help you be more effective
• It can also help you organize your change efforts

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Explaining Agile Without Jargon
OVERALL PROJECT GOAL
CROSS FUNCTIONAL TEAMWhat is the
highest value
deliverable software
that
this team
can produce in
two weeks
for
this goal?
At end of each cycle
• Review results with customer(s)
• Incorporate feedback
• Repeat cycle
Team only works on work planned for
the timebox and all work must be
deliverable at the end of the timebox,
no work in progress at the end.

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Write Your Own User Stories
2.3.1.15 The system shall…
2.3.1.16 The system shall…
2.3.1.17 The system shall…
2.3.1.18 The system shall…
2.3.1.19 The system shall…
2.3.1.20 The system shall…
2.3.1.21 The system shall…
2.3.1.22 The system shall…
2.3.1.23 The system shall…
2.3.1.24 The system shall…
Android user wants to
save/restore notes data
for simple backup
Admin wants automated
daily reports on storage
usage to help spot
trends
iOS user wants
redundant copy of data
on device in case of
accidental changes
• Whatever work you are going to do, describe it in
user stories
• Ask questions, get clarification to help you write
better stories
• Involve other project members to get their
opinion
• Use the stories to aid learning, understanding,
and communication
• Encourage product people to use stories

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Influencing with User Stories
Example 1: you show a new feature to the product
person, they say it should respond faster, you ask
“how fast is good enough?” They say “1 second”. You
show them that you are adding an acceptance
criteria for that story.
Example 2: you show a new feature to the product
person and they say it should also do something that
wasn’t asked for. You show them the user story and
ask if it fulfills the story. If they say yes, you write a
new user story for their new request, show them the
other stories you are working on and ask if you
should work on this next or something else.
Example 3: a QA person says that a new feature isn’t
working right, but the right behavior isn’t clear from
the spec and the spec writer isn’t available. The dev
and QA decide what makes sense to them and
update the user story. Later, if a product person
disagrees, explain the value of being available and
better user stories.

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Promote Interaction and Feedback
Encourage project members to
get together several times a week
informally to touch base. If you
can’t do it in person, consider one
of the many free options.
Make it easy for others to see your
user stories, enter their own, and
collaborate more easily. You can just
use sticky notes, or consider one of
the many free options
There are many fun ways to get a
group together to talk about how
things are going and look for ways
to make things better.
“Retromat”

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Influencing Change

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Catalyst

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Change Agent “Super Vision”
What they seeWhat you see

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The Butterfly Effect

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ADKAR
Awareness Desire Knowledge Ability Reinforcement

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Using Adkar
• Survey people to find out what sorts of things they are aware of and
have a desire to try.
• Look for items that have a high degree of overlap on awareness and
desire. High levels of knowledge and ability are nice to haves.
• Pick one or two things and work with the interested parties to
implement the change(s).
• Get management support if you can.

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It Takes a Community

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Find and Build an Internal Agile Community of Practice
Invite People to Local Agile Meetups Organize lunch and learnsCreate a Book Club
• Provides educational opportunities
• Helps to find and connect other folk interested in Agile

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Additional Tactics
• Break user stories down, advocate for best parts
• Create a working agreement
• Try to figure out order/backlog
• Pair up with another discipline, eg: Dev and QA person
• Demo to somebody for feedback
• Many technical practices don’t require anybody else, can just start
doing them

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Suggested Resources
User Story Game
https://nexxle.com/agile/downloads/

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Q&A

23. Subu Sankara
subu@synerzip.com
+1. 469.374.0500
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24. Your trusted outsourcing partner for
Agile software product development.
Synerzip
• Accelerate the delivery of your product roadmap
• Address technology skill gaps
• Save at least 50% with offshore software development
• Augment your team with optional on-site professionals
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Synerzip Clients
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Connect with Synerzip
@Synerzip
linkedin.com/company/synerzip
facebook.com/Synerzip

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Next Webinar
Continuous Delivery Pipeline
To Build an Engaging UX
Presented by
Vinayak Joglekar,
CTO, Synerzip
Thursday, November 16, 2017
10am CT | 8am PT