From Kickoff to Liftoff: Don't Forget Context!

A good Agile Charter has three components – Purpose, Alignment, and Context. But many Agile teams are never able to develop the basic understanding of their project's management context. That missing context is often the missing key to unlocking the team's power to manage themselves in a way that creates big project wins—the project wins that you were promised with Agile Software Development.

Contextual awareness helps the team make better product decisions for your Drupal development efforts since the whole team will understand how their work fits into the greater whole.

Perhaps we missed Context because we've taken the time to teach Product Owners a little bit about Purpose, and Scrum Masters a little bit about Alignment. But then we ignored the Project Managers—the experts who will help the team understand context—because there is no official Project Manager role on a Scrum Team.

This is a hands-on "lab" session for Project Managers, and anyone else, who want to help an Agile delivery team set up for success. I'll give you hands-on practice with three concrete tools used in chartering sessions. You can take them home and use them with your teams to help build awareness of their Agile project's management context.

Learning Outcomes:

• Describe the importance of chartering context to support systems thinking in your project / product teams
• Facilitate team discussions around boundaries and interactions, dependencies, and risks and opportunities
• Create lightweight documentation to capture context elements within an Agile charter

I'm passionate about creating better Agile Chartering in the world, since this is a practice I believe all Agile teams must do for the best results. (I've seen Drupal web agencies struggle with doing this just like most other development teams. And I've watched Drupal teams begin to thrive after starting to practice Agile Chartering.) This session is based on the book Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams (The Pragmatic Bookshelf) by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies. I've worked side by side with Diana and Ainsley on several liftoffs, served as an editorial reviewer for the book, and contributed the "putting it all together" "Practice Chapter" featured in the book's summary section. My chapter in the book is a practical story about a self-destructing team that saved themselve after we spent a day of Agile Chatering so that they could understand their project's management context. It's full of real-world examples of how chartering works in very challenging situations. I'll tell you the story while we do several of the chartering activities together—and I'll show you how to do them with your teams—for this hands-on "lab" session.