Justin York – Simdesk

“Del's leadership was instrumental in bringing agile methodologies to our development team. While transitioning to scrum, I often consulted with Del about how to handle things in the scrum framework. Once our team was fully running on scrum, I felt that we were at least twice as productive as we had been in the past.”

Matt Willson – Pervasive Software

“As Delmar's manager for over a year, I was very impressed with the simplicity of his designs, the quality of his software, and the tenacity he brought to problem solving, especially customer issues. Delmar provided strong leadership for the developers who worked under his tutelage.”

Steve Mook – Pervasive Software and Simdesk

"Del is experienced,enthusiastic and tenacious - an excellent team lead with expertise in UI design and development and Scrum project management. He is willing to learn new technologies, challenge assumptions, take risks, and be accountable for results. His skill and leadership would benefit any team that seeks to improve its ability to deliver value to customers and to the business."

My Agile Experience

What was really exciting was to see the Scrum methodology adopted company wide at Simdesk. Because of the success of our team I was able to train and mentor other team leads, managers and corporate executives to use Scrum. This lead to increased productivity and better communication among the teams, support, product managers and upper management. Goals are well defined and consistently meet.

Tags

adoption architecture books build change collaboration deploy design integratoin learning management performing productivity quality release safety sprint team Team Member team safety training user stories

My Reading List

Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)) by Lyssa Adkins (Paperback - June 14, 2010)

Available on safaribooksonline.com as a Rough Cut.

Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum [Book] by Mike Cohn - Addison Wesley

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott

Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders - Paperback (Jan. 16, 2006) by Jean Tabaka

Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) Roman Pichler

Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt - Pragmatic Book Shelf

Jun
02

In the flow

By Delmar Hager

I was reading an article by Michael Swaine on multitasking. What really caught my attention was this quote:

Free your mind to focus on a single activity and you can achieve flow.

Flow, being in the zone, whatever you call it, should be your mind’s goal. When you’re in that state, you’re totally focused and performing at your peak. Like Pete Townshend’s Pinball Wizard you “ain’t got no distractions, can’t hear those buzzers and bells.” You become one with the game.

So it’s not just daydreaming and limerick writing. It’s gaming. And that means it’s coding, too, because coding, when you’re in the zone, can absolutely be like playing a video game.

Many of us as developers have experienced times when we were in the flow. We were so concentrated on the task that we our productivity was amazing.

What would happen if the team was in the flow? I have seen this happen in the past and it has been amazing to watch. It like watch a professional basketball team in the NBA finals. Each player knows their role and for 60 minutes they are absolutely in tune with each other.

Now I realize that it is impossible to be in the flow all of the time but we should try to limit distractions as much as possible. This flow gets interrupted by the random meetings on our schedule that seem to be a must. Team members have remarked that just when they really get into the flow they have to go to a meeting. It would be nice to time box these meetings so that they occur during set times during the day.

We as a team have decided that we are going create a timebox to get into the flow. We are going to reserve the mornings in our next sprint for development tasks as a team and limit other meeting to the afternoon.

Categories : Agile