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I was invited to the Interfaith Symposium 2015, a parallel event at the 14th Annual MAS ICNA Convention held at this time every year.    The convention draws over 15,000 of the Muslim faith, and this year was the first time the convention reached out and created an Interfaith Symposium.    Leaders 0f the interfaith movement from various faith communities around the Chicagoland area were invited to be speakers, and I was invited as a Board member of the UUCC Park Forest Church.

At the luncheon, Dr. Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, who teaches at the Oxford Faculty of Theology, spoke on the importance of the interfaith movement.

Then, in the main hall, 9 members of the interfaith religious movement in the Chicagoland area were given the platform to talk about what importance they placed in the interfaith movement.   These speakers were:

1. Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid–President of Sound Vision and Radio Islam, selected 5 times as one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world.    He is the board chair of the Parliament of the World’s Religions.   Imam Mujahid also chairs the Burma Task Force USA to stop the genocide of Rohingyas.
2. The Very Reverend Thomas Baima–Vicar for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the Archdiocese of Chicago.   He served as editorial advisor for the journal Chicago Studies which published the Spring 2008 issue:  “Catholic-Muslim Dialogue:  Reflections and Perspectives.”
3. Rabbi Michael Davis–Founding member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council.
4. Rev. Dr. Stanley Davis, Jr.–Co-Executive Director of the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago (CRLMC), as well as Executive Director Emeritus of the Chicago and Northern Illinois region of the National Conference for Community and Justice.
5. Dr. Robert Henderson–serves on the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States.   His initiation and direction of the study “Models of Unity” resulted in a landmark analysis of intergroup unity in the Chicago metropolitan area.
6. Jasvir Kaur–Board member of Sikh Outreach Services, which serves local Sikh youth and seniors and coordinates efforts to feed the needy.   She is co-founder of the Sikh Healing Collective and she volunteers globally and locally in disaster relief efforts and on medical missions with various organizations.
7. Rev. Jay Moses–Pastor at Hope Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, IL.  Serves the committee for Interfaith relations and as the Muslim Relations Coordinator for Chicagoland at the Presbytery of Chicago.
8. Dr. Marcenia Richard–Pastor at Life Center Ministries.  Formally the Executive Director of the Peace Coalition against Violence at St. Sabina, Marcenia is also the founder of Fierce Women of Faith, an interfaith coalition of women advocating for peace.
9. Rev. Dr. Mark Swanson–The Harold S. Vogelaar Professor of Christian-Muslim Studies and Interfaith Relations and Associate Director of Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice.  He is an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

As you can tell by the bios of the speakers, they combine ferocious learning with a passion for reaching out to others of different faiths, including those of the Muslim faith.

There were several themes that came up in Dr. Ramadan’s talk at lunch and the interfaith speaker panel afterwards.

1. Getting involved in interfaith work first requires knowledge.   If you say you tolerate those of a difference faith, that means you are passively (or perhaps passive-aggressively) disengaging yourself from them.    Positive acceptance  comes from approaching those of another faith not in the spirit of proselytizing, but of wanting to learn more about the other’s faith.
2. Getting involved in interfaith work requires a vision, a plan and resources.   The vision comes from the faith of each individual, but a plan requires that the group come up with pragmatic goals that can be achieved.    And the resources need to be sought locally, in the community, first before trying to get resources from outside the community.
3. Interfaith work means effective communication, which in this day and age means social media.   The traditional media are loathe to change the “traditional wisdom” with regards to any given topic, which sometimes means ignoring stories that don’t fit the established narrative, but they are often forced to cover topics that have created a stir on social media.

I was pleased to have been invited as an attendee, due to my position as Board member of UUCC Park Forest.   I hope the stimulating conversation and connections made at this event will bear fruit in 2016 to have the different faith communities work together for social justice.

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The last post covered process 3.6 Iteration Backlog, where negotiating is done between the customer-proxy and the team as to what user stories the team is committed to completing by the end of the iteration.

Part of that negotiating exactly contains the process that is the subject of this post, 3.7 Definition of Done,

Okay, let’s say that the team completes all of the user stories to its satisfaction by the end of the iteration.   All’s well, right?   Well, not if the customer looks at the work and declares that it isn’t done to the customer’s satisfaction.   That’s where the Definition of Done comes in.

It lists all of the specific activities to be finished and all the tests to be done so that a specific user story can be said to be complete.   It’s important to list this out in an explicit and concrete manner so that they can be misunderstanding at the end of the iteration between the team and the customer/proxy.

Sometimes creating an appropriate definition of what “done” means can be a lot of work, but cannot be avoided or done sloppily, because it will create the potential for results that are disappointing and frustrating for both parties.   This means that there will have to be rework done, which wastes time and personnel resources, but it also damages the relationship of trust between the parties, and that is the real “currency” that the project rests upon.

After a brief break tomorrow for a post on another topic, I will return two days from now with a series of posts on processes 3.8 and 3.9 Estimation and Sizing.  These processes are at the heart of agile estimating and I look forward to tackling them, which may take several days worth of posts.

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Unitarians and Universalists combined in 1961 to form Unitarian-Universalism, a liberal Christian religion that holds several principles in common, among those being social justice, and an appreciation of the diversity of religious practices of other religions.

Today it is Christmas, and I wanted to share with readers the 12 gifts that Unitarians or Universalists have given to the Christmas tradition, at least as it is practiced in the United States.    These gifts reflect the principles I mentioned above.    These historical footnotes were taken from a sermon given by Rev. Denise Tracy, who was the celebrant for our Christmas Eve service last year.

1. In the American colonies in the 1700s, while the Pilgrims were against the celebration of Christmas, Unitarians began celebrating Christmas by serving others on that day, particular the poor and less fortunate.   A narrative description of this can be found in the beginning of the story “Little Women” written by Unitarian Louisa May Alcott.
2. In 1798, a British Unitarian, Samuel Coleridge, wrote in an article for the Christian Register, a British Unitarian newspaper, about the German tradition of giving gifts on Christmas.    As a result, the idea of gift giving began in Unitarian homes in England and then spread across the ocean to the USA shortly afterwards.
3. In 1821, a baby girl named Clara Barton was born in the early hours of Christmas day.   She became known as the “Other Christmas Baby.”  She grew up as a Universalist, became a nurse during the Civil War and later founded the Red Cross.   (This is more of a gift from Christmas to the Unitarian-Universalist tradition.)
4. In 1823, Clement Clark Moore, a Unitarian, wrote a poem called “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”   By that time, Christmas was a religious celebration, but he wanted to have Christmas as a holiday to be enjoyed by children as well.    The poem became well-known as “The Night Before Christmas.”
5. In 1825, a Unitarian scholar named John Bowering, wrote the Christmas song “Watchman, Tell us of the Night,” which advocates the values of peace and truth.
6. In 1833, a Unitarian Minister named Charles Follen placed a Christmas tree in a public building for the first time in America, at the Unitarian Church in Lexington, MA.
7. In 1843, the British Unitarian Charles Dickens wrote the Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three spirits that try to make him repent for his selfishness and hard-heartedness.   In the end of the story, Tiny Tim proclaims the Universalist sentiment “God bless us every one!”
8. In 1847, a Catholic named Placide Cappeau was commissioned to write a poem entitled “Cantique Noel.”   He asked his colleague, Adolph Charles Adams, to write the music.   When it was discovered that the music was written by a Jew, the music was forbidden to be performed in the Catholic Church.   In the USA in 1855, an ardent Unitarian abolitionist named John Sullivan Dwight, translated Cantique Noel into English, and we know it now by the title “O Holy Night.”
9. In 1857, an abolitionist named James Pierpont, who was a Unitarian minister in the Savannah Unitarian Church in Georgia, was missing his home in Massachusetts in the wintertime when he wrote the song “Jingle Bells.”
10. In 1849, Europe was embroiled in war and the USA invaded Mexico.  Unitarian W. P. Hunt wanted a hymn with a vision of Peace for the World, and since he didn’t find any that he liked, he wrote “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear.”
11. In 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s only son was severely wounded in the Civil War.    His wife was in the midst of melting sealing wax, when she accidentally set fire to her own gauzy clothing and was enveloped in flames.   She died the next day.   On Christmas morning, Longfellow heard the bells from the church and wrote the song “I Heard the Bells On Christmas Day”, as a way of saying that despite his personal tragedy, he would not lose faith.
12. In 1962 at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Unitarian Universalist couple from Connecticut, Gloria Shayne and Noel Regny, wrote the words and music to “Do You Hear What I Hear?”.  They wrote it as a prayer for peace on behalf of the world’s children.

So no matter what spiritual tradition you belong to, I wanted to present you with this post showing the gifts that Unitarians and Universalists have given to the celebration of Christmas here in the United States.

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In this series of posts, I’m discussing those processes that are related to the “Adaptive Planning” knowledge area.   The last process was 3.5 User Stories and today’s post is 3.6 Iteration Backlog.

The goal of iteration planning is to take the group of user stories in the product backlog and choose a subset that the team can complete by the end of the iteration.

Who makes the decision about what’s going to go into the iteration?  That’s the result of negotiation between the team and the customer/proxy.   The customer/proxy will be arguing for the largest number of user stories to be put in the iteration, whereas the team will more conservative in their estimation of the number of user stories for the obvious reason that they will be doing the work.

Once the result of the negotiation is complete, however, a reciprocal commitment is made:   the team commits to completing the user stories specified in the iteration backlog, and the customer/proxy commits to not adding new stories or changing the priority of the stories in the current iteration.

For the user stories to be complete, the customer/proxy and the team have to agree upon what the “definition of done” is so that they is no room for ambiguity.   That is the subject of the next post.

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The process of using user stories is the first process in the Planning Process Group and the Adaptive Planning knowledge area in John Stenbeck’s “Agile PM Process Grid”.   The “3” in the “3.5” refers to the fact that it is a process in the third knowledge area of Adaptive Planning.   The “5” refers to the fact that, of the processes in that third knowledge area, it is the 5th process to be done in Agile PM.   The first four were done in the Initiating Process Group.

With that orientation of where we are in the agile process grid, let’s now discuss why user stories is the first process in agile planning.    A user story is a tool or technique used to capture an important piece of functionality that the customer feels is valuable.   The word story denotes that it describes something that the customer wants to do, enabled by the functionality that the team will be creating.

The customer/proxy is primarily responsible for writing user stories on cards that include important details like the acceptance criteria, tests for that functionality, and a definition of what it will look like when it’s done.

On the card you can leave an empty space in the upper corners to designate the relative “priority” of the user story and the “size” of the user story (how long it will take to develop).

The top half will contain something along the lines of:

• As a (role), I want (something; function) so that (goal, benefit).

The second part is the acceptance criteria, the format of which is usually something like:

• Given (a condition) when (a trigger) occurs then (an outcome) is produced.

As mentioned above, the user stories are put on sticky notes or index cards, and then they can be arranged in order or priority and or size.  This facilitates discussion and planning focused on the end user’s view of the feature.

There are two advantages of user stories.

1. They emphasize face-to-face communication, which reduces the time and cost of idea transfer.
2. They contribute to the continuous replanning of the product backlog, as adjustments may need to be made if the priority or size of a user story changes.

User stories are action oriented and so is the participatory decision-making process which utilizes them.

The next post covers the nest process 3.6 Iteration Backlog.

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John Stenbeck, in his book “PMI-ACP and Certified Scrum Pr0fessional Exam Prep and Desk Reference” has set forth an Agile Project Management Processes Grid.

Today I’m doing a post on the process 2.6 Decomposition, which breaks down features into small items called user stories.   Process 2.7 Progressive Elaboration is a process which users story maps to arrange the user stories in a way that aligns with the goals of a market and development plan, and simultaneously organizes the user stories accordingly to their complexity.

The first purpose of a story map is to identify the highest priority features for development.   Stories are arranged vertically according to their importance, and so the stories at the top of each column are the ones that are destined for release first.

So the user stories that make up the first release are then grouped together, followed by the ones that make up the second release, and so on.   They are divided by natural fracture lines, which occur where a potentially shippable product becomes an actual shippable product, or release.

The second purpose of a story map is to help determine how fast the solution development can be expected to progress and to set a baseline schedule.   Stories are arranged horizontally according to the size of the user story, from smallest to the largest.

Once the user stories are grouped together by natural fracture lines into those that belong to release #1, release #2, and so forth, then the total number of user stories in each release can be summed up.   Then, with an estimate of the team velocity (the amount of user stories that can be reliably completed in an iteration), the number of iterations required for each release can be calculated.

The next process is in the Adaptive Planning knowledge area, and it is the tool of 3.5 User Stories.

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John Stenbeck in his book “PMI-ACP Exam Prep PLUS Desk Reference”, he creates an agile project management process grid with 87 processes divided into 5 process groups and 7 knowledge areas.

The block of processes I am covering now are those in the Planning process group and the “Value-Driven Delivery” knowledge area.   The first process is the creation of Release and Iteration Plans, and the second process is the one covered in this post, 2.5 Planning Activities.

John Stenbeck lists 5 planning activities that can be used to get teams to work together to generate new ideas.

1. Brainstorming

This is used to generate a large number of ideas which are later whittled down to a smaller set after being analyzed through a set of criteria.    The most important thing to remember is that the brainstorming activity and the filtering activity need to be done separately, because they involved two different modes of thinking, open mode vs. closed mode.

Open mode thinking is about generating ideas creatively by turning off the critical voices which say “oh, that’s no good”, or “oh, that won’t work.”

Many typical approaches to brainstorming are:

1. Free-for-all, where participants randomly call out any idea that crosses their mind
2. Silent idea generation, where participants write down silently their individual ideas, which are then shared with the group
3. Round-robin, where participants call out an idea one by one in a circle (as opposed to randomly as in the free-for-all)

2. Ishikawa (fishbone) diagrams

This is used for identifying potential causes of errors or defects, or the potential source of problems.   The problem to be addressed goes at the “head” of the fishbone diagram, and the “spines” along the fish skeleton represent the primary categories of causes, and the bones along each spine represent specific potential causes or symptoms of the problem that belong to each category.

3. Force field analysis

Force field analysis was developed in the 1940s by an American social psychologist named Kurt Lewin.  But the more I read about the technique, it reminded me of a technique Ben Franklin described in his autobiography whenever it came time to make a tough decision.  He described it as follows:

.. my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four Days Consideration I put down under the different Heads short Hints of the different Motives that at different Times occur to me for or against the Measure. When I have thus got them all together in one View, I endeavour to estimate their respective Weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two Reasons con equal to some three Reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies; and if after a Day or two of farther Consideration nothing new that is of Importance occurs on either side, I come to a Determination accordingly.

The issue or problem is listed at the top of the diagram, and then the desired state or solution to the issue or problem is listed underneath it.  Then those factors which would drive the team towards a solution are listed on one side, whereas those factors which would restrain the team from that solution are listed on the other.   Those factors which the team is able to influence, either to enhance the driving forces or reduce the inhibiting forces, are listed and plans made for the team to implement them.

4.  Prioritize with dots

When there is a backlog and a decision must be made which items need to be done first and which need to be dropped altogether, a good exercise to do is to prioritize with dots.

Each participant is given a supply of dots and instructions on how to allocate them.   For example, the procedure could be that if you give everyone 10 dots, and instructions that if they give an item 4 dots, then that item should get top priority.   3 dots means second highest priority, and so on.   Everybody goes to the list and makes his or her vote on which items have the top four levels of priority.

If clear winners emerge, then the group proceeds with processing those items that got the top votes for priority.   If there is not a clear winner, then a secondary round of voting may be needed.    But in the end, a priority will emerge that is agreed upon by the group democratically by virtue of this process.

5.  Learning Matrix

This is used in retrospective meetings to generate lessons learned.   Here a diagram with four quadrants is drawn up with each quadrant representing a different theme such as:

• What went well
• What to improve
• What to find out
• Who to thank

That is just one scheme; others are possible.   After everyone in the meeting understands the heading of each of the quadrants, the team adds ideas under each category with sticky notes until the flow of ideas slows down or the time limit for the exercise is reached.   Like the Ishikawa diagram, this is way to generate ideas that have a pre-set structure to them.

These are just some of the ideas for team meetings, but again I want to emphasize that it must be done in the spirit of the open mode of communication.   For an entertaining demonstration of what this open mode of communication requires, look up the video by John Cleese on YouTube entitled “John Cleese on Creativity”

The next post will cover the next process 2.6 decomposition.

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John Stenbeck in his book “PMI-ACP Exam Prep PLUS Desk Reference”, he creates an agile project management process grid with 87 processes divided into 5 process groups and 7 knowledge areas.

The block of processes I am covering now are those in the Planning process group and the “Value-Driven Delivery” knowledge area.   The first process is the creation of Release and Iteration Plans, and the second part of the process, creating Iteration Plans.   This post goes into the fact that not all iterations are created equal.

Standard Iteration

This is a single cycle of development with a fixed length that delivers new development work that has been subject to quality assurance and user acceptance testing.

Sometimes the standard iterations are preceded by a planning iteration called Iteration 0 (zero).

Iteration 0

This is use to perform foundational work for the project and usually lasts only one week.    This foundational work could include logistics, high-level analysis of options, and communicating with other departments or vendors.

Hardening Iteration

This is the iteration that is performed before the product is released and is used to complete all final acceptance testing.

Handoff Iteration

This is the iteration are used when formal or regulatory documentation must be prepared, particularly when deliverables are being submitted to an external agency such as OSHA or the FDA.

QA/Testing Iteration

This is an iteration that focuses on QA and testing (as the name implies) if these procedures cannot be done during the standard iterations.

Defect Repair Iteration

These iterations focus on fixing defects and bugs before new development work can continue.

Hybrid Iteration

These are standard iterations that reserve a percentage of development capacity for non-developmental work, such as bug fixing.   Such an iteration should be the exception to the rule, and used for unplanned emergencies.

In the next post, I will cover the next process in the process grid, 2.5 Planning Activities.

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John Stenbeck in his book “PMI-ACP Exam Prep PLUS Desk Reference”, he creates an agile project management process grid with 87 processes divided into 5 process groups and 7 knowledge areas.

The block of processes I am covering now are those in the Planning process group and the “Value-Driven Delivery” knowledge area.   The first process is the creation of Release and Iteration Plans, and this post covers the second part of the process, creating Iteration Plans.

Recap

Okay, here’s the process flow so far.   In process 1.5, the Product Roadmap (equivalent to a program in traditional PM) is defined.   The central feature list on that roadmap is created, and then the release plan (equivalent to a project in traditional PM) is outlined.    Once the team velocity is estimated (the amount of work in terms of user stories that can be reliably done during a single iteration), the estimate of the number of iterations is done.

Iteration

The purpose of iteration planning is to identify a highly probable path for completing the required tasks within the duration of the iteration.

The first step in this process is that the duration of the iteration is determined–this can be typically as two, three, or four weeks.

Then there is a soft commitment by the team to what user stories are proposed to be completed during a given iteration.   After a comprehensive analysis of this initial commitment, the team then goes on to a hard commitment.    This is where the team builds confidence in being able to succeed.

This comprehensive analysis includes the following:

• decomposition of the user stories into tasks
• decision of who on the team will handle which tasks
• assessment of availability of team members to handle tasks
• clarification of how the work will fulfill the acceptance criteria

These steps create the confidence that the team will be able to succeed in completing the work set forth in the iteration.

The next post discusses some of the types of iterations that can exist.

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John Stenbeck in his book “PMI-ACP Exam Prep PLUS Desk Reference”, he creates an agile project management process grid with 87 processes divided into 5 process groups and 7 knowledge areas.

The block of processes I am covering now are those in the Planning process group and the “Value-Driven Delivery” knowledge area.   The first process is the creation of Release and Iteration Plans, and this post covers the first part of the process, creating Release Plans.

Release Plan

Just a little terminology first–the program level in traditional PM corresponds to the product roadmap, the project level in traditional PM corresponds to the release plan, and the iteration one step forward in any particular release plan.

So after the product roadmap has been established in process 1.5, and the central feature list created (see last post for details), you can then start on process 2.4 Release Plans.   A release plan generally corresponds to the point at which deliverables can be used or implemented by customers.

The key to effective release planning is estimating the team velocity, which is a measure of how many user stories on average the team can complete in one iteration.    So if the scope is well-defined (i.e., the number of user stories can be accurately estimated), and the team velocity is predictable, then calculating the number of iterations it will take to complete the project is pretty straightforward.

However, during the early part of the project, it may take a couple of iterations for the velocity to stabilize, but there should be a point at which the team velocity is a reliable metric.

Two Key Variables

Having a release plan broken down into iterations allows the team to optimize two key variables:

1. Delivering customer value as rapidly and completely as possible.
2. Getting the product to the customer, and thereby to the market, quickly.

The next post will talk about the next part of this process, planning iteration plans from the release plans.   The post after that will discuss the various types of iterations.

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