Agile Minds

Check out our latest blog post on organisational design approach http://agileminds.lv/tpost/2aa3tg3yd1-designing-agile-or-adaptable-organisatio

Designing Agile or Adaptable organisation I recently started to call myself a Scrum Master with organisational focus. In other words Organisational Scrum Master. ;What does it really mean? ;Let's take a look into Scrum Guide: Scrum Master Service to the Organization The Scrum Master se

This week I had a pleasure to facilitate together with Maria Nurminskaya and Maxim Y. Yemelyanov first ever online Agile Latvia meet-up on remote working: https://www.facebook.com/events/1011838945883729/

Now I would like to share the event video recording with you: https://zoom.us/rec/play/vMAudeqsqj43H4HB4QSDA_Z4W43pe66shnIc__EEy03kAHgDNFajMrATa-JJgo2CqfUc6mRn9mv9zTNH?autoplay=true

Presentation: https://drive.google.com/open?id=10YLFJC01KTZ7wymzZFXqx5gWSXFeggEs and mind map is attached to the post here - created thanks to Maria Nurminskaya.

I'm planning to run another event on the topic with a deeper dive into the topic of remote working (2 hours) already Today on Friday 20th of March this week. You can register for it here: http://agileminds.lv/

Thank you for joining and contributing!

What is Scrum for you?

Scrum is a framework to address complex adaptive problems 1 minutes read. It was an eye opener for me that Scrum is a path to a better organisational design: https://less.

I’m a fan of simple structures that help people collaborate. The structure that I want to talk about today is called: Open Space. The idea is as simple as it gets: invite people to create agenda together and for each individual to decide where and when to contribute.

I have just facilitated Open Space this weekend for the first ever Scrum Master Camp in Latvia: https://www.meetup.com/Agile-Latvia/events/268634448/

The results... Well, I think it was an awesome event! We had a lot of fun and worked on serious topics too. The energy and engagement level was always high.

Employing “law of two feet” and principles, such as “whatever happens is the only thing that could have”, Open Space creates a safer environment. And we all know that safety is one of the main factors towards better results.

Are you using Open Space to collaborate?

https://openspaceworld.org/wp2/explore/facilitator-resources/

1 minutes read. Engagement is everything
One of the big challenges for me as a Scrum Master is to find ways to engage people to think together. Build on top of each other ideas.

Create just enough constrains to reach meaningful outcomes.
Not too many to restrict creativity. Not too little not to reach a result.

Balance involvement, track discussion towards a goal.
Facilitate space for people to hear each other.
For me an eye opener was a book called: Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making from Sam Kaner. Do not let the name of the book confuse you. This book is all about the things I have mentioned above and much more. I use it every day.

What do you use to engage people to work even more productively together?

I'm always curious to find better ways to create understanding, make sense of things. How to create an AHA! moment.

For example, lately I'm repeatedly challenged with how to explain Scrum in short amount of time to someone that never heard of it before.

Which got me thinking: how do I summarise all 19 pages of Scrum Guide? And then: someone must have done this already!

So I have started looking and turns out a colleague of mine Roland Flemm has already done an excellent job: http://www.scrumcards.org

I think it hits bulls eye on Scrum’s spirit of the game.

How do you: summarise, store, access and transfer knowledge? Any tips and tricks you want to share?

Simple things that I did not think enough about.
Preamble: this January I was invited to do a one day Scrum refresh training. That got me thinking how do I make it the best I can? I brought this up with my friend Irishka Skrypnik from AgiliX and she suggested to do a Go-see - a practice from LeSS - Large Scale Scrum. That boils down to go and see (duh) on what is really going on in the company where I'm about to do a training.

The moral of the story is that it is important to understand the context in whatever that you do.
Context is the King! (c) Star Trek Discovery

So I went and I did the training after I observed people in the organisation working together on three separate occasions. And the results where profound. This simple understanding of context helped me to deliver one of the best trainings of my life - tailored to the real needs organisation has at this moment.

Here is some feedback collected after the training I wanted to share with you:
"I really liked how the course was presented, teacher was amazing. Every aspect was important and I liked the practical ways of presenting some cases like battleship game."
"I liked how seamless the whole course was - all topics of the course seemed related and there was just the right balance between lecturing and working in groups. It was an eye-opener from the company's perspective!"
"Discussion about how to use it in your work daily and how it relates to our own company."

Do you know your context?

Since we Agile Minds are a trilingual company, up until now we have wrote all our posts in LV🇱🇻/EN🇬🇧/RU🇷🇺. Do you think we should continue to do so? Or EN is enough? Tell us, please.

We got feedback that it is not a good idea to try to put multiple languages in single language post as then FB will auto translate it to the language that is defined by user and the post will look like it has duplicated text! So, we discovered that FB supports multi language posts. If you are interested in how to do it, please tell us in comments and we will be glad to share this info.

Dear friends! We - Agile Minds with your help have reached the goal🚀 of our first sprint - together we have found a company PayBis.com that is now getting free 8 hours of our services🎁. Thank you for trusting us guys! We will share the results of our collaboration going further.

However, we have more capacity and offer you to participate in Sprint Review🤹‍♂️ to help us to understand where to go from here and to choose a Goal🚀 for Sprint two. We invite you to like and use different kind of likes to indicate what you think we should focus on during the next two weeks:

👍 - Organize and run a paid public training on the topic of 👨‍💼how to make every meeting effective: facilitation and participatory decision making (https://bit.ly/2k9hle5) to help people in creating organisations where they feel engaged and included to produce better results.
❤️ - Find a company that would like to hire us to run an 📋effective planning session - September is a good time to do it after summer vacation season. Let’s plan together!
🤪 - Conduct a ✅retrospective for a company that is willing to learn from their past experiences to improve. Retrospective is an event where we look forward while learning from our previous experience.
😆 - Organize and run a free training/meet-up on 👯‍♀️Liberating Structures (https://bit.ly/1e9kxXy) to help people in creating organisations where they feel engaged and included to produce better results.

Please vote(like) until Wednesday evening.

The winner of Agile Minds Contest is...

Konstantin Vasilenko from PayBis.com!🤩
Congratulations!

We would like to share some awesome news with you. We have just completed the first workshop as Agile Minds for Start it - a two-hour awareness session for school teachers from all the corners of Latvia on the topic: “what is Agile and how it can be used in schools”. Start(IT) is a social education project with an awesome Mission: increase IT knowledge of people in Latvia.

The goal of the workshop was to increase teachers' awareness about Agile and give them tips on how they can use it in their job. As for the results of the workshop… Well, see the picture attached to the post :)

It was a tough challenge to organise a 4C structured https://www.infoq.com/articles/4cmap-enhance-team/ workshop packed with Liberating Structures http://www.liberatingstructures.com to cover basis of the topic to fit two hour window we had.

We kicked off with True / False exercise where people would go around the room in pairs and discuss if the statement on a Flipchart(s) is true or false and why. This gives instant feedback for us and more importantly harvest knowledge already in the room and gets people thinking on the topic - creates 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 (the 1st element of 4C model) to it and to each other.

The next thing we did was 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘀 explanation (the 2nd element of 4C). In this case we invited people to walk around the room with us and check out what other pairs produced as Why for True/False. We have also commented on things we found important to emphasize. This way we really engage people to learn from each other and also give them new knowledge in a structured, engaging format.

The next block is 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲 (the 3rd element of 4C) - typically an exercise for people to try out new knowledge in a practical exercise. In this case we opted for simple LS 1-2-4-All http://www.liberatingstructures.com/1-1-2-4-all/ to engage participants thinking in a structured manner. The question we asked participants to work on is to find examples in their lives that they think are covered by Agile Mindset.

I always find this last part most important because 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 (the 4th element of 4C) is what people will take with them and also another feedback loop for me as a trainer to see what people have actually learned. There are many different ways to do this, I find that simple tools work the best most of the time. So what we did was: http://www.liberatingstructures.com/2-impromptu-networking/ on question what is your main takeaway. However, I added a variation or Riff on it by asking participants to exchange their takeaways after each round of discussion so that they would bring each othersʼ takeaways to the next round. This way people listen to each other more and get more takeaways than just their own. When done, I asked them to bring post-its they had used to write takeaways during the discussions to the Flipchart and stay for a minute or two in silence to review what takeaway are already on it.

This was just one third of the workshop with 30+ IT teachers that day. Going further we covered Agile Manifesto and principles and how Agile Mindset can be applied to a teacherʼs work.

At the end of the two hours we closed the workshop with: What do you think about the session and how do you feel. Browse through the post-its on the Flipchart to see the results yourself.

We would like to thank Zane Dudare and Evija Goluba a for trusting us with this adventure!

We hope that we’ve inspired you, our dear readers. Go beyond limits and try new formats of education!

Ladies and gentlemen: Company Leaders, Scrum Masters, Team Members and anyone interested!

We are starting our first sprint and our Sprint Goal is to find a company, team or a person who needs help and is willing to give us a chance to help.

For this purpose we need as many people as possible to learn about us. That is why we have launched a competition:

Prize🎁 — 1 day of Agile coaching and consulting from the company Agile Minds.

✦What does it mean?✦

Together with you we will spend one full day in your company with a focus on the following result:
— Your company diagnostic, what helps you to move forward and achieve the result you want and what slows you down.
— Will answer your questions about Agile, Scrum, Kanban and other approaches towards creating the products, effective teamwork and decision making.
— Together with you design a series of experiments that can help increase effectiveness of your company or team.

✦What do you need to do to win?✦

1. Visit our page https://www.facebook.com/agileminds.lv/ and click “Like” and “Follow”.
2. Fill in this form: https://forms.gle/hY6pMzVEawzU2gnJA
3. Think about anyone else who might want/need to participate. Share this post with them by mentioning their names in comments or just share it with all your friends.

✦Who can participate?✦

Anyone - a person, a team or a company who is interested. Your location does not matter, we can do this online too. Industry is also not that important as what we do is not connected to a specific field and works everywhere where you have people and interactions over processes and tools.

✦Winner selection process✦

We will review all the requests and decide whom to help based on multiple criteria, such as impact we can have, how difficult is the current situation, how ambitious is your goal (more challenging is always more interesting).

We will announce the winner on the 3rd of September 🥳

Dāmas un Kungi - uzņēmumu vadītāji, scrum masters, komandu dalībnieki un jebkurš, kuram nav vienalga.

Mēs uzsākam savu pirmo sprintu un tā mērķis🚀 ir atrast uzņēmumu, komandu vai cilvēku, kam ir nepieciešama palīdzība un kurš būtu gatavs dot mums iespēju tam palīdzēt.

Šim nolūkam mums ir nepieciešams, lai par mums uzzinātu pēc iespējas vairāk cilvēku. Tāpēc mēs esam izveidojuši šo konkursu:

Balva🎁 — vienas dienas Agile koučings un konsultācijas, ko piedāvā uzņēmums Agile Minds.

✦Ko tas nozīmē?✦

Kopā ar Jums mēs pavadīsim vienu pilnu dienu Jūsu uzņēmumā, kuras laikā:
— Diagnosticēsim Jūsu uzņēmumu vai komandu, kas ir tā stiprās puses, kas tuvina Jūs mērķu sasniegšanai un kas attālina;
— Atbildēsim uz Jūsu jautājumiem par Agile, Scrum, Kanban un citām pieejām produktu izveidē, efektīvā komandas darbā un lēmumu pieņemšanā;
— Kopā ar Jums radīsim eksperimentu sēriju, kas var palielināt Jūsu uzņēmuma vai komandas efektivitāti.

✦Kas jādara, lai iegūtu balvu?✦

1. Apmeklējiet mūsu lapu https://www.facebook.com/agileminds.lv/ un
nospiediet “Like” and “Follow”.
2. Aizpildīt anketu: https://forms.gle/hY6pMzVEawzU2gnJA
3. Padomāt, kurš vēl varētu gribēt/ kam būtu nepieciešamība piedalīties šajā
konkursā. Dalieties ar šo ierakstu pieminot viņu vārdus komentāros vai arī
vienkārši dalieties ar šo ierakstu ar visiem saviem draugiem.

✦Kurš var piedalīties?✦

Jebkurš — cilvēks, komanda vai uzņēmums, kas ir ieinteresēts. Jūsu atrašanās vietai nav nozīmes, jo konsultācijas varam sniegt arī attālināti. Arī industrijai nav nozīmes, jo mūsu darbība nav saistīta ar konkrētu jomu un strādā visur, kur cilvēki un to mijiedarbība ir svarīgāka par procesiem un rīkiem.

✦Uzvarētāja izvēles process✦

Mēs izskatīsim visus pieteikumus un nolemsism, kuram palīdzēt, balstoties uz vairākiem kritērijiem, kā piemēram, cik lielu pienesumu varam dot, cik sarežģīta ir pašreizējā situācija, cik ambiciozs ir Jūsu mērķis (jo izaicinošāks uzdevums, jo interesantāk).

Mēs paziņosim uzvarētāju 3.septembrī 🥳

(RU, EN versions below)

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(LV) Dāmas un Kungi!

Mēs - Leonid Uljankin un Maria Nurminskaya esam priecīgi padalīties ar Jums mūsu priecīgajā ziņā! Esam atvēruši uzņēmumu - Agile Minds, kas bāzēts Rīgā, Latvijā.

Daudziem no Jums mēs esam zināmi kā “Agile Latvia” aktīvi biedri, kā arī visticamāk esat apmeklējuši mūsu regulāros “meet-up”, kā arī “Agile Day Riga” konferenci. Ar dažiem no Jums jau esam sadarbojušies un strādājuši kopā. Mēs jau kādu laiku esam domājuši par savas kompānijas atvēršanu, un beidzot esam atraduši iedvesmu un drosmi to darīt. Jums atkal ir iespēja strādāt pie mums, tagad tieši kā ar uzņēmuma īpašniekiem.

Mūsu uzņēmums - Agile Minds ir un nav par Agile vienlaikus - mēs dalāmies Agile vērtībās savā starpā, sekojam tām ikdienā un esam samērā pieredzējuši šajā jomā. Tomēr mēs vienmēr cenšamies domāt plašāk.

Agile Minds - ir par elastīgiem un atvērtiem prātiem. Mēs esam izvēlējušies sev ambiciozu mērķi - palīdzētu komandām un uzņēmumiem, kas ir iestrēguši, lai tie varētu atgriezties pie efektīvas darbības.

Vai jūs strādājat uzņēmumā, kur cilvēki strādā kā mašīnas, nesaprotot, kāpēc viņi dara to, ko dara? Vai varbūt jūsu kalendārs ir pilns ar mītiņiem un jūs vairs necīnieties, lai pajautātu, kāpēc man ir vajadzīga šī tikšanās? Tā sajūta, ka nav ko elpot. Ja nav gaisa, nav enerģijas un bez enerģijas - kā mēs varam sagaidīt vērtību?

Mūsu misija ir reanimēt uzņēmumus - dot skābekli, lai atkal sāktu elpot. Mēs esam kaislīgi, enerģiski, mēs esam ziņkārīgi par visu, mēs mīlam būt savienoti ar pārmaiņām. Mēs mīlam iedrošināt un iedvesmot. Mums patīk redzēt, ka mūsu jautājumi liek cilvēkiem domāt atkal un atkal. Šie sarežģītie jautājumi liek cilvēkiem un komandām atdzīvoties.

Esam sakrājuši daudz zināšanu, pieredzes un prasmju un vēlamies ar tām dalīties. Mums ir vajadzīgi cilvēki un uzņēmumi, kuriem ir drosme mums uzticēties. Attīstīsim un pilnveidosim kopā!

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(RU) Дорогие друзья!

Мы - Леонид Ульянкин и Мария Нурминская, с радостью вам сообщаем, что открыли свою компанию Agile Minds в Латвии.

Многие нас знают как часть команды Agile Latvia - приходили на митапы, участвовали в конференции Agile Riga Days. Некоторые из вас с нами работали. Мы долго обдумывали этот шаг и наконец решились. Теперь у вас есть возможность познакомиться с нами как с владельцами бизнеса.
Компания Agile Minds про Agile и не про Agile одновременно. Мы искренне разделяем ценности Agile, ежедневно им следуем и имеем уже достаточно обширный опыт и знания в этом направлении. Но мы мыслим шире.

Agile Minds - это про гибкие, живые умы. Мы выбрали для себя амбициозную миссию - помогать застывшим, закостеневшим командам и компаниям оживать.

Вы встречали компании, где сотрудники работают на автомате, не понимая, зачем они выполняют ту или иную задачу? А компании, где у сотрудников календарь заполнен с 8 утра до 8 вечера в три ряда и они уже даже не задают вопрос, зачем они нужны на всех этих встречах? Ощущение, как будто нечем дышать. Там где нет воздуха - нет энергии.

Мы готовы реанимировать компании и подавать кислород. Мы неугомонные, энергичные, нам всё надо и всё интересно, мы неравнодушные, очень любим быть причастными к изменениям. Мы любим воодушевлять и вдохновлять. Мы любим, когда наши вопросы озадачивают - сотрудники не находят быстрого ответа. И такие вопросы оживляют.

Мы накопили много знаний, умений и опыта и хотим делиться. Нам нужны люди и компании, которые готовы нам довериться. Давайте совершенствоваться вместе!

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(EN) Ladies and gentlemen!

We - Leonid Uljankin and Maria Nurminskaya are glad to tell you that we are opening our own company Agile Minds based in Riga, Latvia.

Many of you know us as a part of Agile Latvia team, you have visited our meetup-ups or Agile Day Riga conference. With some of you we had a chance to work together. We have spent quite a bit of time thinking about opening our own business and finally we have gained the courage to do it. You have a chance to work with us again, now directly as business owners.

Our company Agile Minds is and not about Agile at the same time. We do share Agile values between us, follow those daily and have relatively vast experience in that area. However we always strive to think wider.

Agile Minds - is about flexible, open minds. We have selected an ambitious target for ourselves, to help teams and companies that are stuck, to get back to being alive again.

Are you working in the company where people work as machines, without understanding why they do what they do? Or maybe your calendar is full with back to back meetings and you no longer fight to ask why am I needed at this meeting? This feeling that there is nothing to breathe. If there is no air there is no energy and without energy, how can we expect value?

Our mission is to reanimate companies - give oxygen to start breathing again. We are passionate, energetic, we are curious about everything, we love to be connected to change. We love to encourage and inspire. We like to see that our questions make people think again and again. This kind of difficult questions is what makes people and teams come alive.

We have collected a lot of knowledge, experience and skills and we want to share. We need people and companies that have the courage to trust us. Let’s develop and improve together!