As you run your daily grind, do you reflect and think about your Own Development? Or do you let your circumstances dictate your agenda? and drown your Development needs? As the famous woodcutters story goes, do you sharpen your Axe? Or do you keep on doing the same thing, same process, same boring steps everyday? Or Do you Take a step back, and Reflect? do you LEARN? and really ask yourself if I have sharpened my Axe or not?
Sharpening my Axe – My 2017 Learning’s
For me, I personally learnt quite a lot during 2017, and build up on my knowledge base, and interacted with peers across the industry.
1. LeSS is more!
It was a pleasure to listen and learn the thinking behind LeSS (Large Scale Scrum), straight from the creators (Bas Vodde) himself, and become one of the LeSS converts ‘officially’ [Certified LeSS Practitioner]. The discussions and the learning’s from Bas, were extremely valuable and opened the realm of Systems Thinking and the organisational inertia’s and how “DeScaling” your organization makes the real difference.
If you have not heard of Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior, then you have missed something…..
My desire for LeSS is now more than ever !!
2. FLOW rules !
The most amazing experience this year was listening to Don Reinertsen, author of FLOW, 2nd Generation Lean Product Development.
I regard Don R as the final frontier in the WHY? Scrum works and what are the pitfalls, and it was great to be able to survive the intense class (face to face) with Don early this year. Don is an inspiration to many of the agile gurus and when you have the grand master himself talking within 2 feet, it is an exhilarating experience!
The jam packed master class answered many of my misconceptions, on Cost of Delay, Cycle Time and simply opened my eyes to the science behind the various agile methodologies.
In the end FLOW has been on top of my mind ever since that class ?
3. Local Meetups
The local meet ups in Bangalore have a very vibrant buzz, and I could make myself join few AWS and Docker meet ups, which really showed how the tooling is miles ahead, while the corporate honchos are still debating – What is the definition of DevOps ?
? Sad but true!
The community showed that the younger generation has not seen the archaic desktop based applications and are pleasantly exposed to only the continuous delivery model, with continuous deployments on the cloud in matter of seconds. Microservices, MicroApps, Microbots are ensuring the death of monolith Architecture.
Breath of fresh air I must say!
My Community Contributions: using my Axe
To contribute back to the community, I had to push myself by signing up to present at 2 different forums this year, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
1. Global DevOps Summit as a Speaker
The exciting trip to Pune took me to the Global DevOps Summit as a Speaker, and allowed me to share my DevOps experiences. It was a pleasure to also learn and understand from the various speakers, how they were moving forward in their journeys.
You can find my presentation and summary notes, if you wish to know what I had presented and learned.
2. Self organizing Gamestorm as a Speaker
As a LeSS practitioner myself, the self organisation principles always bring great joy to me.
The speaker forum from Scaling Agile Institute offered me a platform to show the ‘self designing’ team formation, as a game. It was an fun filled experience for the attendees and you could feel the high energy, and the belief in them that self organisation is indeed a reality.
You can find my presentation here, and the meetup here.
In the end, 2017 has been an exciting year, full of learning’s and new observations and experiences. I have tried to Sharpen my Axe, and would love to know what have you done to Sharpen your Axe, and feel free to share your learning’s this year.
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