By Christopher Curley, CSM, CSPO
“Kinetic” describes something moving. Kinetic is motion. Kinetic energy is the energy of a body in motion. It’s the work needed to move a body at rest to a certain velocity.
Kinetic (or “kinesthetic”) is also a method of teaching. Kinetic learning teaches students using physical activities. As learners, we are more familiar with auditory learning and visual learning, but many of us are kinesthetic learners and all of us benefit from kinetic teaching.
Moving To Learn
Kinetic students learn through motion. Scrum4HW (Scrum for Hardware), offered by Big Orange Square, LLC is kinetic in both senses, making the Certified Scrum Master® and Certified Product Owner® programs they offer stand out. Scrum4HW challenges students to apply Scrum in a practical class activity. Students build a car based on the WIKISPEED design.
Increasingly, hardware teams need practical expertise in Scrum. As enterprises compete to bring innovations to market faster and with higher quality, Agile teams will get to market sooner and with higher quality. Agile teams identify which capabilities in the prototypes under development will drive early adoption of a product, spark rapid sales in the revenue stream, and brand the enterprise as leaders in the market space. To go faster with higher quality, hardware engineers need to prototype early and incrementally. Product development needs to get data quickly. Will the architecture support the interfaces between components? Will components meet the real-world needs of the customer? Are we focused on the right priorities at the right times? The fundamental question of Scrum — When do you want to know you are wrong? – is as critical to hardware development as software development. Teams that prototype and design hardware using Scrum powerfully put the Agile organization at a competitive advantage. They are better able to address the power of buyers, adjust to the power of suppliers. They are able drive innovation into the market space. They are able get to market first, ahead of competitors vying for dominance in a limited profit pool.
BOS will not put you to sleep
Big Orange Square training will not do this to you. Despite the criticality of Scrum for hardware teams, there is skepticism that Scrum works for hardware. Some believe that Scrum can only be applied to software development. At Big Orange Square, they dispel this myth. They teach us, “If you can kick it, you can Scrum it.” The thing you kick in Scrum4HW is the WIKISPEED car. The car build – the kinetic exercise that applies Scrum to hardware development – is an essential element necessary to demonstrate how effectively Scrum can be applied to the rapid development of quality hardware. As an Agile practitioner in a strategic program office, I’ve sat through numerous CSM and CSPO training classes, as the enterprise incrementally transitioned teams from waterfall delivery to continuous innovation through Agile. That means I’ve sat in numerous Scrum simulations. These simulations, in my opinion, were mostly useless. Groggy participants half-heartedly go through the motions. They put in just enough energy to check off a box that indicates the exercise happened. In the end, I found a lot of poster paper with yellow sticky notes taped to the wall, but very little learning occurring.
The car build stands in stark contrast.
The Big Orange Square Car Build Class
This is no tabletop exercise involving Legos™ or a fictitious software company releasing an imaginary product. There’s no sleeping through the car build. You’re on your feet, using your hands, engaging your mind. Stories on the progress board represent actual work being done. Completed work is evident on the frame. The data is real and in real-time. The product owner accepts a real world product. Success is experienced, not discussed. Students must self-organize around the roles, events, artifacts and the binding rules of Scrum if they are going to achieve a common goal: build a car that a student can sit in, that will roll, that the students can steer. Students must put lessons into motion each afternoon. They plan, stand up, and reflect on time-boxed iterations. They deliver product increments to real demonstrations. Data collected is applied to the next steps in the build. They must organize a Scrum of Scrums to share details about component interfaces and architectural decisions. They have to cooperate, communicate, and focus on what really matters in the product. Individuals and interactions, working products, close collaboration, responsiveness to change: these aren’t abstraction notions. These are critical behaviors the students must embrace to reach the goal. And, they do.
During the car build, I observed:
Scrum teams quickly learn how to self organize around the priority stories in the backlog.
Teams cycle from forming to performing in three or four sprints, about an hour or so of practical working time.
Teams apply lessons from retrospectives to improving their velocity, quality, and definition of done.
Teams realize the criticality of quickly getting data from a working product – data they could not get from time spent on a design document.
Teams learn quickly the cost of improperly documenting the definition of done – having to relearn the parts list and assembly sequences after a tear down
Teams voluntarily swarming on an issue over their lunch to resolve a blocker that threatened the build goal by release.
The whole of the class align on the power of sharing information early and communicating continuously.
A Better Way to Learn Scrum
After participating in so many CSM® and CSPO™ training classes, I was astonished to see the class embrace Scrum so readily and apply it so powerfully to a common purpose. The physical build tied it all together: the application of classroom learning, case studies, and collaborative conversation are reinforced each afternoon as teams interactively cycle through the daily Scrums. This kinetic learning exercise put the class in motion. Once in motion, witnessing the car coming together accelerated the velocity of the class. The class exited the program not only with an understanding of Scrum sufficient for certification in the ScrumAlliance™, but also with a working understanding of how to apply that knowledge in the workplace.
“Kinetic” is the reason I recommend Scrum4HW. I recommend Scrum4HW not only for manufacturing R&D and hardware development teams, but all teams. Software teams will benefit from the practical car build as much as hardware teams. The training offered through Big Orange Square will get any team moving. And, once in motion, the training through Big Oranges Square will accelerate the team to mastery faster than any other program I am aware of.
If you think about it, “If you can kick, you can Scrum it,” is a great “kinetic” way to sum up a great “kinetic” program.
Christopher Curley, CSM, CSPO
Christopher Curley is a project and operations professional with more than twenty years of experience in R&D, Information Technology, and Business Process Management.
An Agile practitioner since 2004, Christopher has coached small teams, coordinated Scrum of Scrums, and implemented Agile at scale across global enterprises. He has enabled project delivery and DevOps improvements business ranging from small concerns to Fortune 100 organizations.
Christopher’s professional research focuses on Agile and epistemology, developing and applying meta-languages to improve how teams think to purpose before taking purposeful action. His goal is to continuously advance the understanding of cognition in the practical empiricism of Agile practices.
Christopher is a graduate of the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, with BAs in Political Science and History. He holds PMP, CSM, CSPO, and SAFe SA certifications. He is an active member of the Research Triangle Park Agile Leadership Network (ALN). He lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife, Kelly, and an ever-changing number of dogs they rescue.
With the subtitle of the article (Twice the Product in Half the Time) as a generic goal for industry, what is going wrong in today’s industrial environment? What stops or delays improvements in product delivery, despite embracing practices from Lean and Six Sigma? Why does it take years to get a new product out of the manufacturing plant? This article explores the “why” of this question and deep-dives into the solution.
What is the speed with which product launches really happen? The Tesla Model S was announced and prototypes were shown in 2007, and production started in 2012. Is 7 or 10 years a good estimate for the idea-to-launch time? Boeing’s Dreamliner was announced in 2003 and entered production in 2011, estimating the full cycle at 12 to 16 years. Lockheed Martin’s F35 started design in 1992 and entered production in 2018. Microsoft Xbox renews every 4 – 8 years. This long time between idea and production does not only affect new products like the Dreamliner, it also affects you when you respond to a competitor’s move: for example, when your car brand wants to launch an all-electric vehicle, you find yourself 5 – 10 years behind your competitor who has already launched such a vehicle. Shortening this time span is what the Industrial Agile Framework is all about.
by
Peter Borsella & Hubert Smits – Big Orange Square LLC
Scrum is best known as a superior framework for delivering software. It may appear Scrum is rarely used elsewhere, but the future looks different. At Big Orange Square, we bring our 30 years of Scrum and Agile experience to a new domain — industry, where Lean practices, Six Sigma analysis, and decades of experience are established ways to deliver products. A sad point: few industrial organizations get their products to market on time, if at all. Or, they do so very slowly and with many problems. The Tesla saga is well known and a good example.
This series on Industrial Agile opens with an overview:
Is
Scrum4HW really different from Scrum? (spoiler: no, it isn’t)
What
is new in industry when agile principles are applied? And,
How
do the different frameworks of Lean, Agile, Scrum, and Six Sigma fit together?
Is it really
different?
Let’s start with
Scrum – the heartbeat of the Industrial Agile Framework. At its core, it is no
different than the heartbeat of any other Scrum product delivery environment. We
both had some sore ears after being lectured by the co-creator of Scrum, Ken
Schwaber, when we talked about “next Scrum,” or “special Scrum,” or “Scrum
2.0.” There is only one Scrum framework, and it is defined in the Scrum Guide. Ken
is right, and that same Scrum framework is true in an industrial setting.
So what then is
new in industry?
Scrum is upheld by
two principles: empiricism and teamwork, so let’s hold these principles against
industrial products. For example, we are working with a team that builds single
board computers. However, it takes well over a year to develop this product. These
boards end up in satellites or airplanes, so replacement of a faulty board is
not an option. And, thousands of hours of burn-in tests are just one part of
development. This is quite different from a software product! But, we can still
apply empiricism and teamwork.
Under empiricism,
knowledge is derived from experience. When something is too complex to plan in
great detail with confidence, we begin with a high-level plan, execute a short
cycle of delivery as soon as possible, and use the knowledge gained from that
experience to course-correct the plan and determine what to execute next. Does
this sound familiar? It should, since this is another way of describing a
Sprint.
The crux of the
definition of empiricism lies in the word “experience.” We learn by
“experiencing” the work of the Sprint. By the end of the Sprint the customer
should “experience” a “potentially releasable product increment.” How can
the customer possibly experience something releasable in industry, for a single
board computer?
This is where
teamwork gets added to the mix. Small, cross-functional teams are responsible
to deliver the product increment — the real thing, not a design or a document. If
we were building a complex banking software system we’d proceed incrementally,
delivering a function at a time: first the mortgage rate calculation, then
mortgage risk assessment, etc. If we are building a circuit board, we deliver
one piece of functioning product at a time: first the power lines, then the
data lines, etc.
A circuit board
designer we worked with didn’t understand that a board with just power lines
can reveal very important information to colleagues. A board supplying power to
a device gave others vital information about part placement, heat displacement,
and other important aspects. Delivering something real allows us to learn more
about the product as we proceed.
A high level view of the Industrial Agile Framework.
Compared to
software, industrial delivery takes longer, is more complex, and requires a
broader set of skills. These include: Designing the multiple parts of the
machine (electronics, mechanics, enclosure, software, cooling, heating,
plumbing, hydraulics); continuously physically integrating the parts; testing
the parts and the whole; order the components (on time for
manufacturing); design the manufacturing process; tool up for manufacturing;
train people; optimize manufacturing; develop and equip service teams; and,
supply them with the right spare parts while managing inventory. This is quite
a challenge when thinking of the 7 +/- 2 team size recommendation!
However, by having
the right team composition at the right time across the product development
timespan, we can ensure empirical teamwork. For example, manufacturing is at
the table from the very beginning, and product design is at the table at the
very end, even if both are not full-time dedicated team members throughout.
How do existing
frameworks fit?
How do you start
with implementing the Industrial Agile Framework? Begin with what you know and
is working for you — possibly Lean and Six Sigma, and capitalize on that. Lean
provides tools like Value Stream Mapping, an excellent way to determine who
needs to be on a team. Six Sigma helps us improve quality standards in support
of a definition of “done.” Add to this elements of the Scrum framework: work in
short cycles, meet daily, establish Product Owner and Scrum Master roles., etc.
Most important, ensure proper leadership is in place to support the movement
forward.
More to come…
So get started! In
future columns we’ll be diving deeper into specific topics and present case
studies as we proceed on this exciting journey towards industrial agility!
This is a very exciting time for Big Orange Square! We’ve now got two training centers: one in Longmont, CO, and another in Fort Lauderdale, FL (technically it’s in Dania Beach, but it’s easier to just say Fort Lauderdale).
The Longmont shop has been open for business for all of 2017, but while we’ve had our Fort Lauderdale location secured since March of 2017, our first class at that location did not take place until December 2017. While we have been through the build out process before we’re always curious about why these things take so long.
At Big Orange Square, we say we can help you deliver “Twice the Product in Half the Time™,” which means the normal cycles we see in product development is generally four times longer than what it could be. Opening our shop in Florida has taught us a few things about why it has taken us four times longer to open than we’d originally hoped for.
After an extensive and expensive plan submission/rejection/resubmission processes, we built the walls and roughed electrical and plumbing for the bathrooms. Here were the steps required for us to put up drywall:
Schedule the plumbing inspector.
If plumbing passes we can schedule the electrical inspector…
If electrical passes we can schedule the framing inspector…
If framing passes we can schedule the insulation inspector…
If insulation passes we can dry wall and then request additional inspections, etc….
Process Improvements Aren’t Just For Software Development
Does this sequential waterfall process sound familiar?
I believe civil engineering can become more agile. We can bring the team-based approach of Scrum to the Permitting and Inspections Department, too. My hope is that, in addition to commercial endeavors, public services can realize and utilize the benefits we’re promoting. Although our shop was built with a waterfall in Dania Beach, it will operate with agility!
When you need the extra edge during product development, it can be difficult to know where to turn. While there are many consulting groups out there, very few of them have the deep knowledge and experience making agile/Scrum work for many different kinds of business. There is no reason to be intimidated by agile when you have Big Orange Square on your side.
When your team visits our training facilities, you’ll quickly be immersed in the unique agile/Scrum program that we have developed to make small firms competitive, viable, and efficient. If you’re curious about how our training works, learn more about it here. Contact us today to learn how Big Orange Square can teach your team to work and think more efficiently and effectively!
Why Lean Process Improvement Is The Only Way To Stay Ahead: Part Two
In our last blog, we started discussing how lean processes will help your company stay ahead and functioning effectively. Today, we’ll examine how we can help prevent burnout on your team.
Preventing Burnout
Everyone understands how important it is to work hard to achieve goals and to make sure your product is ready to go on the deadline or before a competitor releases theirs, but one area that might be hurting your team more than you might realize it is burnout. As a business owner or manager, you might be used to working long hours and long weeks, but your team might not. Even if they are ok with working these long hours, there comes a point where they might start to feel burnt out. While you could give them time off, there is a better way to prevent burnout from slowing down your project: repeatable processes.
While “repeatable processes” might sound like repetitive, menial work, that isn’t necessarily true. In the context of software or product development, repeatable processes simply mean having a standard for development cycles that include development, testing, and collaboration with other groups.
You might be more familiar with this concept under another name: iterative development. Iterative development is an incredibly powerful, and surprisingly simple, idea. Instead of looking at your goal (a piece of software or a product) as a single, monolithic “thing” that exists somewhere in the future, a more productive way of reaching that goal is to break it down into pieces that are then worked on by small teams who will develop pieces of the larger product, then come together with the other teams, see how the pieces work together, and then return to refine or enhance their pieces before moving on to the next section.
By using these smaller developmental stages, your project benefits in many ways. First, your teams won’t have to worry about everything all at once. Instead, they focus on smaller pieces that have an ultimate goal is mind. Second, your software or product will be better than if every member of your team was working to complete the larger project instead of the components. Iterative development relies on constant testing and input based on the needs of the other teams. These “smaller” steps can end up creating a number of benefits, one of the most important of which is reduced burnout.
Always remember: without your team working as effectively and efficiently as possible, your project, your product, and maybe even your company, can fall behind and lose its ability to stay competitive. If you’re concerned that your team might be on the edge of burnout or if you are putting together a new team and you want to prevent burnout or waste from happening as you get ready to begin, contact us at Big Orange Square as soon as possible. We have decades of experience working with teams and teaching them to be as effective as possible when developing products or software. We have training facilities in Colorado and Florida, and we teach all around the country. Check out some of the classes we’re offering, here. If you have any questions please reach out to us.
Why Lean Process Improvement Is The Only Way To Stay Ahead
If you run a business, you know exactly how important it is to maximize everything you have. From brainpower to capital, you do everything you can to ensure that nothing is wasted because waste can cause you to fall behind. In order to stay out in front of your competition, you need every edge you can get.
At Big Orange Square, we have dedicated ourselves to helping your team learn how to improve processes across the board. We have decades of experience training people how to utilize Agile/scrum for everything from software to product development. Since forming this company, we have started training groups using our kinesthetic coaching methods which give your team a hands-on experience that will have them applying their new skills on the first day of training. Read on to learn about how our training can help you apply lean process principles that will keep your business moving forward.
Learn To Use What You Have
One of the best ways to ensure that you aren’t letting anything go to waste is to examine what your resources actually are and to make the most efficient use of them as is possible. This includes your employees. Maybe you hired a programmer or designer to work on one part of your current project but through interviews or tag-ups you learn that they’re also highly skilled in another area that could be beneficial to your project.
The same techniques you use to put your team’s skills to use as effectively as possible can also be used to make your budget last as long as possible. We can teach you to look for wasteful redundancies within the company by better examining how your employees work. Most redundancies are actually slowing your workers down, so they might know exactly where these problems are and how to fix them.
These processes might seem easy, but they’re not. They are simple to understand, but very difficult to master. That is where we come in. At Big Orange Square, we have trained thousands of people to improve their processes. While we come from software, we have also branched out into product delivery processes. We can show you how to maximize the power of your group to keep development cycles fast and effective.
We teach you to deliver early and deliver often in terms of tracking development processes. By checking early and often, your team will feel more accomplished and they will be able to better handle any problems that other teams noticed.
Learn more about how this helps your team stay fresh and motivated in our next blog!
In the meantime, if you have any questions about how we work or when you can come to a class, please contact us. If you need more in-depth training, we also offer coaching sessions where we come to you and work directly with your team to help you improve. We have decades of experience helping teams in software and product development reach and exceed their goals. Please contact us as soon as possible!
Maybe you’ve heard of agile product development or scrum, but you aren’t clear on the details. Maybe you’re familiar with agile/scrum in relation to software development but you aren’t sure how it can apply to your manufacturing business. These frameworks can help you be successful because of the way that they utilize iterative development to quickly and efficiently build new versions of software or a product.
At Big Orange Square, we have the experience needed to help your team learn to apply these frameworks and principles to streamline and improve product development. Whether you work in software or in an industry where you are developing physical products, Big Orange Square can push your team to improve their processes. Contact us today to learn more about how we work and read on to learn about the basics of iterative development.
What Is Iterative Development?
Simply put, iterative development is a way of breaking a project into smaller pieces where the project is brainstormed, built, and tested over and over until the project is finished. While this might not seem overly complicated, putting it into action in an efficient manner takes work and practice.
As an example, let’s think about developing a clock.
To start, you would split your team up based on their strengths. One team might be made of materials experts while another is made up of members who understand power sources while the last team is made up of designers and fabricators. Each team starts working on the most pressing issues that they know they need to overcome to achieve the end result: the best possible clock.
When each team accomplishes one goal or overcomes a problem, they reconvene with the other teams, combine the newest iterations of their tasks, and then start the process again using the newest form to build from. By returning to the smaller groups with new knowledge and new problems to be solved, the development cycle actually moves more quickly because the issues are being attacked from multiple sides and anticipated before the product is “finalized.”
Going back to the example of the clock — the materials team might determine that Material A might be the best choice because, while it may be more expensive than Material B, it weighs less and therefore requires less power to operate. This discovery allows the power source team to spend more time working on making its energy source smaller and more affordable, while the design team can use the lighter material to come up with innovative designs.
If you’re interested in helping your group improve their process and products, contact us today. We have decades of experience working with teams who are trying to improve their procedures and products by maximizing every second and every cent. At Big Orange Square, our goal is to help you build Twice the Product in Half the Time™. We accomplish this goal by teaching your team to think differently and to be able to pivot and change according to the newest and most important data available. Get in touch with us today to see how we can assist your team.
If you’ve recently decided to put together a team to develop a new product, you might be a little overwhelmed at all of the work that needs to be accomplished before you have a viable prototype that can be thoroughly tested, improved, and then produced.
At Big Orange Square, we’ve developed a method of teaching agile production in a way that makes its tenets intimately familiar to everyone who participates! Whether you’re in software or product development, this class can help your team learn to harness the power of iterative development. By approaching development in this way, not only will you be able to have a working product sooner, your product will already have many of its problems worked out before it gets into the hands of consumers. Contact us today to learn about how we can teach your team or read on to learn a little bit about our innovative process!
Our Agile/Scrum Process
In order for the ideas behind Agile/scrum to really make sense, we employ several different stages in our process to fully illuminate the ways that you can make it work for you. Because every company is different and every group of people are working with a different set of skills, we try to impart this new knowledge in ways that translate easily for everyone.
The Quick Simulation
During the quick simulation, we teach you how to make different technologies work together by having groups separately build the components of a small car. After the individual pieces have been constructed, we then bring them together to form a working model. During this stage we try to teach you how to divide a project and what each team needs in order to produce work that is not only useful on its own but as an important part of a larger project.
The Extended Simulation
This is where we kick these principles into high gear. During the extended simulation, your team will build a car! We provide some of the basic systems and then teach you how to bring them all together by working on smaller teams that work toward completing the entire project. By scaling up the processes in the quick simulation, you can see how your team works towards meeting larger goals.
The Results
Not only will your team have had the fun of completing this project together, we will also sit down with your entire team and go over YOUR process to see where these techniques can benefit your business. This simulation works well for any kind of business, not just automotive groups. We choose to teach using cars because they are complex machines that all of us understand on some basic level. This familiarity allows your team to jump into the simulations without having to learn all of the ins and outs of another kind of software or product.
This will be a quick blog, but it hits at an incredibly important principle that we all need to think about when we’re trying to make our processes as effective as possible. For this to make sense, you’ll need to know Agile Principle #10. This principle is all about simplicity: the art of maximizing the work not done.
Peter and Hubert demonstrated this principle with pictures of the solar eclipse. Each one of them used different tools to do the same thing: see the total solar eclipse that passed over the United States on August 21st, 1017 from our training center in Longmont, CO.
Peter used a cereal box. It’s simple, and it worked. Using it, Peter was able to (safely) see the moon pass in front of the sun. The projected image was small and lacked detail, but it cost basically nothing.
Hubert is more sophisticated (or so he thinks), so he used a telescope. The picture is much larger and more detailed than the one through the cereal box, though the telescope was far more expensive than a box of cereal.
Consider value: if value is defined as having an amazing experience, is Hubert’s scope (with its substantial price tag) really worth it, or was simply being close enough to the path of totality to experience an incredibly rare and strange darkening of the sky for a few minutes all that was needed? If we want to study solar prominences, Peter’s cereal box really won’t give us enough data to even start, and for that matter, if we want to take it very seriously, is Hubert’s investment of the telescope even enough? As you can see, there are several ways to look at how this agile principle is important when thinking about your business. The eclipse is a great way for us to remember to do the most simple thing that could possibly work — not anything more simple.
We hope you had a great experience with the eclipse, both Peter and Hubert did! If you’ve been searching for a way to push your team to the next level through the application of agile/Scrum principles, contact us at Big Orange Square today. With training centers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Longmont, Colorado, we are ready to help your team embrace lean process improvements in software or industrial design. We guide your group through a number of projects where everyone actually gets hands-on to develop and create something. Time and time again, our clients have seen this kinesthetic learning yield great returns in process improvement and design time. Work with us and you’ll see how we can help you get “Twice the Product in Half the Time.™”
By Christopher Curley, CSM, CSPO
“Kinetic” describes something moving. Kinetic is motion. Kinetic energy is the energy of a body in motion. It’s the work needed to move a body at rest to a certain velocity.
Kinetic (or “kinesthetic”) is also a method of teaching. Kinetic learning teaches students using physical activities. As learners, we are more familiar with auditory learning and visual learning, but many of us are kinesthetic learners and all of us benefit from kinetic teaching.
Christopher Curley, CSM, CSPO
Christopher Curley is a project and operations professional with more than twenty years of experience in R&D, Information Technology, and Business Process Management.
An Agile practitioner since 2004, Christopher has coached small teams, coordinated Scrum of Scrums, and implemented Agile at scale across global enterprises. He has enabled project delivery and DevOps improvements business ranging from small concerns to Fortune 100 organizations.
Christopher’s professional research focuses on Agile and epistemology, developing and applying meta-languages to improve how teams think to purpose before taking purposeful action. His goal is to continuously advance the understanding of cognition in the practical empiricism of Agile practices.
Christopher is a graduate of the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, with BAs in Political Science and History. He holds PMP, CSM, CSPO, and SAFe SA certifications. He is an active member of the Research Triangle Park Agile Leadership Network (ALN). He lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife, Kelly, and an ever-changing number of dogs they rescue. 
After an extensive and expensive plan submission/rejection/resubmission processes, we built the walls and roughed electrical and plumbing for the bathrooms. Here were the steps required for us to put up drywall:
Peter and Hubert demonstrated this principle with pictures of the solar eclipse. Each one of them used different tools to do the same thing: see the total solar eclipse that passed over the United States on August 21st, 1017 from our training center in Longmont, CO.
