Boooksprint: boarding the Agile Rocket

During a discussion over a drink, Christophe Keromen shared with me his desire to do something for the holiday season.

5 people, 4 days, 50 pages…

This is how he introduced me to the concept of the Booksprint, which he had already experimented with when writing the A Short Guide to Lean Management a few years ago. Even if it was difficult to know if I was up to the challenge, the idea seduced me immediately. All that remained was to find our traveling companions. Julien Porot, Arnaud Gervais and Gregory Alexander are the brave ones who finally answered the call: the Boooksquetaires were trained! 🙂

I will share the details of this adventure with you through 4 articles:

• Boooksprint – boarding the Agile Rocket
• Boooksprint – inside PI #1 (Part 1)
• Boooksprint – inside PI #1 (Part 2)
• Booksprint: The Distributed Team Experience
• Booksprint: end of the adventure

If you are ready, go ahead! 😉

Departure for adventure

Friday December 16, 2016, it's off to join Christophe in Carnac. Direction Auray by train for Parisians and Nantes by plane for our Lyonnais. And all this in a good mood! 😉

After a few hours of travel, we arrived at our destination.

We will use the morning of the next day to prepare ourselves well before takeoff: this will be our sprint period 0.

But for the moment, it's rest, to be able to restart in shape! 😉

The Agile Rocket

We start at 9am with a presentation of the Agile Rocket by Christophe. We discover that the initiative comes initially from a desire to propose a modular and lighter transformation process, for the teams as well as for the coach.

This short support would:

• to better anticipate the workload for the coach, the teams and the managers,
• to evaluate the maturity of the team at the end of the module to decide whether to continue or not
• to communicate around a simple visual metaphor to share

We were thus able to have a more global vision of the project, describing:

• THE main modules corresponding to the heart of the support process: Visual management, Continuous improvement, Flow,
• THE stabilizers allowing you not to pick up and fall back to the ground, they support and reinforce the approach: Agile Management, Personal Mastery,
• THE heat shields helping to limit risks and protect the crew by ensuring that the right thing is produced in the right way: Product Culture, Engineering Excellence,
• There North Star representing the goal that the entire ecosystem around the rocket wishes to achieve,
• I'remote control antenna to probe the environment to gather feedback and adapt: Systemic, Complexity.

All this fueled by the fuel of Agile Culture.

How are we going to operate?

Methodical as usual, Christophe had prepared an initial battle plan for us for these 4 days.

Functional breakdown

Our work would therefore be divided into 2 increments of 2 days that we called IP For Program Increment :

• THE PI #1 had to include the core modules of the rocket: Visual management, continuous improvement, flows to which we would add the North Star and an introduction.

• THE PI #2 had to include the stabilizers and heat shields: Agile Management, Personal Mastery, Product Culture and Engineering Excellence.

Program of day 1

Level method, we are going to start with Scrum events: Sprint Planning, Stand-up meeting, Sprint Review and Retrospective. The idea is to perform at least 2 sprints per day with an average of 2 chapters per sprint. All this keeping in mind that at the end of each PI, we will have to deliver an “integrated” increment of product!

At first, we started on a basis of 3 hour sprints, which led us to the following time division:

• 30′ to do our sprint planning
• 15′ of Stand-up in the middle of a sprint
• 30′ to perform sprint review and retrospective

The framework of our product

Like any Agile team, we also went through the perilous Definition of Done stage to align with the shape and structure of our final product.

We have then defined 2 storyotypes – in no real order of importance:

For the book

• artwork
• Contents
• A word from the authors
• Cover visual
• 4th cover
• Glossary

For a chapter

• Bibliography
• To go further: additional links and articles
• Examples of workshops
• A story: a dose of narrative for the content
• 5 tips for missing out
• Implementation templates: a typical process
• The essential: a summary in a few bullet points
• Scottish Toolkit: A list of typical hardware items
• Quotes

We were well aware that all these elements were not all mandatory, but time being short of us, we may have unconsciously made the choice of empiricism to adapt to the need.

Who are we writing for?

From the perspective of building a suitable product, centered on user needs, it was inevitable to define these famous “users”. So we got down to the exercise of personas! The most creative among us were thus able to give free rein to their imagination tinged with humor as well as their artistic talents 🙂

I present them to you:

Kouigna Man: Gooodien

I am part of society Good! and I would like to be able to rely on a simple and structured approach to be able to improve my skills. Moreover, if it allows me to develop a know-how and a culture shared with my colleagues, it will contribute to strengthening our entrepreneurial spirit!

Jean-Noël: Decision maker

I have transformation needs but I am lost in all the offers on the market. I want to understand how this approach unfolds and how it can be useful to me. Moreover, I don't want to get into a gear that I wouldn't master. On the contrary, I would prefer to have the possibility of being able to adapt the approach according to my needs!

Ernestette: Team Member

It's not the first time I've been asked to change. I need to understand where I am being taken, how I will be impacted and above all what I have to gain! If I could know in advance what I will be asked to do and understand why it is important, that would reassure me!

Cathy: Manager

Despite all the interest I see in the transformation process, they take time. I need to know the effort and the time that will be required of my teams as well as myself. I often hear about agility and self-organization, but what is my role in all of this?

Milouz: Coach / Consultant

I am an Agile Coach and I would like to have a lighter support alternative. I'm a little tired of doing Scrum or Kanban, what matters to me is to bring a real learning process to teams and organizations to help them become actors in their transformation.

Note: In view of the difficulty of the selection, we unfortunately had to set aside Jean-René, cook.

Now that we have defined the rules, the scope and the targets, let's build the Visual Management to follow our progress! 😉

Construction of our Obeya

It is Christophe's room which will become our Obeya room, where all the information concerning the project will be centralized and where we will perform our synchronization points also called “feedback loops” by some. This is also where we will install our Visual Management.

Note: Christophe made a short video to show the transformation of the room.

Visual Management

We opted for a process comprising the following steps:

• To Do : space to display our backlog
• Writing : the parts on which we are actually working
• Awaiting proofreading : flag items ready for review
• Proofreading : the tasks being read back
• Reviewed by 2 people : status indicating that an element has been reviewed by at least 2 people
• In the process of integration
• Integrated : status indicating that we have successfully packaged the elements in our deliverable
• Done

Having defined earlier the perimeter of the PI #1, we simply defined the swimming lines corresponding to each module treated which will quickly give us a visual on the progress of each of them.

Module structure

Now we needed to visualize the content structure of the different modules.

We then started from the Definition of Done of a chapter and extracted a subgroup from it. The elements selected corresponded to what we considered should be our minimum product. Here is what we picked up:

• The question : summarizes the issue(s) addressed in the module
• A story before : introduction of the problem in the form of a story
• Content : description of the support proposal corresponding to the module
• artwork
• A story after : description of the benefits obtained after the accompaniment
• Implementation Templates : typical support process
• Examples of workshops : links to external sources describing the workshops offered

A symbolic done

To keep an overview and to be able to celebrate our successes (yes it is important!), we have built the skeleton of the Agile Rocket which will fill in as we progress.

It's a key artifact that will allow us to keep an eye on our end goal and refocus if necessary.

Our avatars

Now, to know who will work on what, we built our avatars on mini post-its. As we can ask in the teams, they must be sufficiently explicit to be unequivocal: I find that we did not come out so badly! 😛

Forward for the PI #1

After establishing our working base, we are ready to start the PI #1 and launch our first Sprint! 😉

More in the next article: Boooksprint – inside PI #1 (Part 1)