Author: Merrill III

Social Supply and Demand

Stop seeking external validation by buying disposable crap made overseas, with its sub-optimal working conditions and carbon footprint from manufacture & transportation & distribution.

How?

Start acting out your truer self and continually making your world a tiny bit better, meaningfully deepening connections with the communities of which you’re already a part.

HOW?

Please steal this idea. It could save the world. I’m serious. And I call it: Social Supply and Demand. Continue reading Social Supply and Demand

How to Measure a Scrum Master: Effort as Meta-Metric

CONGRATS! You have Agile metrics that are ‘good’, or even improving: cycle time, code coverage, heck, even Sprint velocity. Now, how do you know if the Scrum Master had a part in that ‘success’? YOU DON’T. These metrics track team performance, not Scrum Master performance, thus I’m proposing “new process experiments over time” as the meta-metric uniquely aligned with the Scrum Master role, which can be a leading indicator for the other metrics. Continue reading How to Measure a Scrum Master: Effort as Meta-Metric

The Last Metric

Once, I dreamt I had cancer. Conversations quickly turned to what I wanted to do in life. And then I woke up. It was literally a… wake-up call. Yet what I wanted to do in life was… a lot. How would I prioritize my bucket list? How would you prioritize? I’m using what I consider the last metric: deathbed regret. I had one clear thing. And then I did it! (And it sucked!) More on that in a sec… Continue reading The Last Metric

How to Measure Agile Coaching

Carrying on from the “value is sustained change in behaviour” opinion I shared previously, allow me to humbly submit my idea (a strong opinion, loosely held) for how to measure how we are doing as Agile Coaches.

Agile Coaches (plural!) are usually brought on because some company (BIG!!) wants to go through an Agile Transformation (ZOINKS!!!). The word “transformation” means, to me, a change in state, thus this company has made a determination:

change to a better state… an “Agile” one, whatever the heck that means.

Continue reading How to Measure Agile Coaching

What is Value?

“What is value?” A boss once asked this, and an answer that I’ve run across that I’m drawn to is, “Value is change in behaviour,” where I would modify to the following:

Value is sustained change in behaviour.

I recently finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, wherein he draws a connection between Aristotle, who’s credited with “We are what we frequently do”, and his thesis, where habits are, uhhh, what we frequently do 🙂 , so… Continue reading What is Value?