A Charity Day of Agile Coaching

The magnificent Grand Central swept me to London last week for my first charity day.

Thanks to Rob Dyke for inviting me to visit Tactix4 and for generously pledging £250 to The Woodland Trust, and to the NeovaHealth team for such a warm welcome in this cold weather.

Tactix4 sustains the eHealthOpenSource community, so we share interests in the open source health space (as well as Agile). Rob and I met through the oss-uk-health group. Exciting times, with doors starting to open.

The Hub, King's Cross is a funky space, a stones throw from the famous station.

We were booked into the board room — an interesting space with plenty of glass for drawing on.

The board table filled most of the space, imposing some physical limits on our activities. We improvised and adapted to this physicality.

The NeovaHealth team are just starting Scrum. Our morning focused on building skills and knowledge. The inaugural planning meeting followed, after lunch.

An Agile Pick-N-Mix

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For the morning, I brought along pick-n-mix. Before each session, we played decision poker to pick one from five themes:

• process, featuring scrum and lean;
• design and architecture;
• planning and estimation, featuring story points, velocity and planning poker;
• ecosystem with open design and continuous delivery; and
• tests.

Thumb voting then picked one activity from the themed mix. One red card session on user stories was included.

We hit our timeboxes, squeezing in five sessions each structured as {5m plan, 20m do, 5m reflect}, with time for breaks. The physicality of my ladybird timer proved popular: personal, quirky and fun.

After lunch, I observed the meeting, and offered some feedback, before we all left tied but happy.