What is Agile Leadershiip?

Agile Leadership is the approach we take for managing projects and teams where there are many unknowns. The key principles are to create the right environment for everyone to do their best work, and to learn quickly from the work we are doing so that we can do the next section of work even better than the one we are working on now.

To do this we need:

• A vision of where we are going
• A view of what can be accomplished short term, medium term and long term
• A planning technique that allows us to:
  • review our progress easily and frequently
  • make improvements as we go
• Technical practices that support making improvements as we identify them
• A focus on collaboration rather than competition

Planning: Deliberate Discovery (approach) and Personal Kanban (tool) Technical Practices: XP practices and DevOps Leadership: Collaboration and Continuous Improvement

The codeX approach to Agile Leadership

Collaboration, not Competition

Software teams need to be able to work together to build their products. Yet most of our education and workplace incentives are based on individual success and competition. To learn to work together cooperativey, software teams need to embrace new kinds of leadership structures and practices, based on collaboration. Over the course of the year, codeX coders are immersed in agile collaboration and leadership practices that helps them to answer these questions: — What is Leadership? How can we have leadership when nobody is the designated leader? How do we hold ourselves and each other accountable? How can we create cross-team cooperation rather than personal competition?—

Team Collaboration Skills and Principles

• Accept and Build
• Focus On / Focus Off
• Servant Leadership
• Team Development (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing)

Facilitation Skills:

• Silent Writing
• Small group discussion
• Large group integration

The Scrum Master Role

After two sprints, the candidates are familiar with the scrum cycle. From this time we introduce the Scrum Master role. Each team member takes the role of the Scrum Master for their team, for one week at a time. The team members are elected by the group.

The Scrum Master responsibilities evolve over time.

For the first rotation the focus is timekeeping:

• Everyone on the team is ready at Standup time
• Everyone on the team knows their Sprint Review time, and is ready at that time
• Everyone on the team knows their Retrospective time, and is ready at that time

From the second rotation, the Scrum Master focus incorporates individual accountability:

• Everyone on the team discusses their team commitment for the week, and
• Anyone who has other commitments emails the details to the mentors

Later the following responsibilities are introduced:

• Everyone on the team completes planning for the sprint before they start coding
• A different person starts Standup each day; everyone on the team starts (this will be go over 1 sprint)
• Everyone on the team brings their improvement goal to the Retrospective