Some folks (past self included) claim tactical, story-level estimates are a waste. I’ve come to reject this opinion. Estimation is a valuable and necessary part of an agile development workflow.

First off: estimates provide a communication event between customer and developer. Customers either present stories to or, even better, write stories with developers, and developers bring expertise and solution knowledge about to compute the relative size, complexity and/or difficulty of these stories. Without this – hopefully continuous and just in time process – there can be no basis to a plan; there is only wishing and hoping and praying and wild speculation. If developers don’t get the chance to estimate stories, essential communication isn’t happing… back to wishing and hoping and I hope your luck is better than mine.

I’ve been a member of an XP team (Xclaim) where we claimed to not estimate. In reality we engaged in a kind of estimation that ensured stories we’d work on were defined well enough to be completed in a reasonable amount of time. For us a reasonable amount of time was a few days or so, a metric we developed over a period of time. This experience resonates as I listen to my contemporaries leading teams at a similar level of maturity and commitment.

I call this binary estimation outcome yestimation. Developers either accept the story with a “we can do it” or reject it with a “looks nebulous or too large.” The key thing is that there’s a well known range of time for pulling a story through the development system, e.g. you finish stories in less than a week.

The customer role now has an explicit mission: get developer agreement. This tends to focus customer-side processes on developing a shared mental model of who a story is serving, why we’re bothering with a story and what the end user actually needs.

What’s a reasonable amount of time? The longer a story remains in play, the more inherit risk that story will run long and perhaps spiral out of control. For example, two-point stories at VersionOne can range from four days to two weeks, whereas single pointers typically close within a couple of days. There’s a much greater ability to reason about a drop date in a backlog containing one-point stories.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools is an Agile value I believe in with a special fervor. Process is a servant to people. The right process is what makes a gestalt out of what was once a mere workgroup with product or project affinity.

There is a significant and qualitative difference between (1) teams who leverage one another to discover then achieve known objectives they believe in and (2) individuals who find commonality only in job description and, if they’re lucky, camaraderie in lamenting pointless busy work.

I’ll take option (1), thank you very much. Let’s work together. Let’s amplify and feed off one another. Let’s make our process…

… support creativity by removing busy, boring, tedious work.
… ambient, simple and usable.
… involve our users, accepting their feedback.
… well known and explicit.
… open to scrutiny, subtraction and addition.

As a coach, you’ll likely find yourself doing a lot of facilitation when introducing practices. Examples include getting retrospectives up and running or sparking creativity during product design sessions when you’re putting together a release plan. Having the right equipment can be invaluable.

The Contents

I do a workshop from time to time, called “Leading Design.” In essence it’s for coaches who lead design-intensive software teams. A lot of the equipment in my bag is aimed at getting the innovation out, breaking the damn logjams that dam our creative juices. This is an exploded view of the gear I bring as of today:

1. Post-Its. Lots and lots of post-its. I like the really big, really bright ones, but I also bring your standard 3″x3″ ones. Having a variety of sizes helps in some of the exercises I do like activity modeling.
2. A tomato kitchen timer. I use the Pomodoro Technique in my workshop (try to, anyway). Dave Hussman brought this idea into my world. Hell, he gave me the timer!
3. Five sets of six-sided dice. I do an exercise to demonstrate the effects of variation. You can buy The Red Bead Experiment for ~$200.00 USD or you can buy a bunch of dice at a southern flea market for $1.00 USD.
4. Objectified, a documentary about product design. I use this to reinforce some of my assertions that since software is a kind of design, we can borrow a lot from the design community.
5. Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. This is the handbook for organizing change. I call it out a couple of times in my workshop, and like to re-read a couple of key passages to get fired up.
6. A Ball of Whacks toy. I’m kind of considering how to use this in my workshop. If nothing else, I can leave a couple on the tables for people to kill time in a creative way between exercises and mini-talks.
7. Several decks of cards. On the top is Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” deck. He uses this in the production studio to unjam creative blocks. An example strategy: honour thy error as a hidden intention. The bottom two decks, “The Creative Whack Pack” and “The Innovative Whack Pack” are from Roger van Oech. Each card give you is a tool for unlocking creativity and innovation, thinking from different perspectives, etc. I love them and have written about them before.
8. A bunch of different-colored sharpies and a good dry erase marker. More-or-less self-explanatory.
9. A slide whistle. Rather than go with the typical Tibetan store equipment (chimes, bowls, gongs) favored by most Agilists, I went with something slightly more absurd.

The Container

Select a bag that can take a beating, something that will protect its insides. Mine is really just a tool bag, made of super durable Cordura nylon (meaning that it is nigh indestructible). It fits in my travel backpack and the shoulder strap is convenient for toting my gear back and forth (both useful features for mobile coaching and workshop delivery).

One really awesome thing is that there are tons of pockets, inside and out. I don’t keep anything in the outer pockets while traveling, but do use them to get setup and put things I’ll need in a handy area for quick access while facilitating a session.

Drop Ship the Rest

The rest of the stuff (projector, whiteboards, index cards, butcher paper, tape) I source locally. A little recon is helpful here. Where is the nearest office supply store, or, if you’re in London, stationary shop? I tend to rely on the locals and beneficence of my hosts.

Now a Word on the Unimportance of Gear

Coaching, unlike camping, isn’t all about the gear. Your most important tools are your ability to get the context of a situation (listening) and to think on your feet (adaptation). Sometimes gear can be a distraction. Even so, having a basic supplies and thought toys can help get the ball rolling. Simple tools that help people unleash creativity in complicated situations or explain ideas where words fail are super handy. Coming prepared? Well, that’s just indispensable.

I forgot my laptop the other day. By the time I realized my mistake I was at what I’d call the point of no return on a 35-mile commute in a city known for horrible traffic. No way was I going back. No laptop drive of shame for me.

I’ve done this before, but this last time I felt a particular and explicit freedom from entanglement. Not having what we often consider the primary tool of our trade forced me to observe and listen more, to turn up the intensity of my collaboration and involvement.

Interestingly, the “abandon it” phenomenon has applied to my personal space at work as well. While I have my own desk, I rarely occupy it. (It now serves a dual purpose as both a convenient place to arrange team lunch fixings and a hangar for micro-scale RC helicopters.)

So, folks, here’s a coaching challenge: leave your personal machine at home for a day.

Treat this “personal computer-free” day as a chance to pair with someone you haven’t worked with in a while. Look around the team room: what’s new? Listen to the sounds of people working through problems and solutions. Can you help? Drag your mates away from their workstations and engage them in a little lightweight whiteboard modeling.