 to Scrum Mastery Challenge. This is episode four, and this challenge is a little bit different to the others. Let's see what our contestants have in store for them this week. Take a photograph of an inanimate object that somehow reflects an aspect of agile delivery. The best photograph wins, you have 30 minutes, your time starts now. Yes, so they need to get out and about to find something they can take a photograph of that will represent an aspect of agile delivery. What's great about this episode is that I don't need to do a lot of explaining. Our contestants will do it for me. Let's see how Christina got on first. So how did you find the photo challenge? Quite tough. Yeah. The thing that I was trying to capture was around the evolution of what agile is all about for me. The first picture I took was of the daffodils because, you know, flowers grow and they bloom and they, okay, eventually might die, but so do some products. I thought that was a nice start to the walk. Then I saw this, I saw a really cool sign which, initially I took a picture of it because it had the seven written on it and then I thought I'll send wastes, but then I saw the two arrows that were pointing and I thought that's quite nice in terms of feedback loops. And then we walked past the church and there was a... Could it be anything? Absolutely anything. So I'm just an evangelical and just for me, some people are very evangelical about agile and they're very pure and it can be detrimental, I think. Oh, and then another one I liked was there was a poster which said report it now and that reminded me of when things are not going in the right direction and we need to stop, we stop, whether it's, we don't want to spend any more money on the department's product or whether you need to stop because we haven't understood it. I kind of like that sort of call it as you see it, pull the call almost. But I think the one that's probably the winner for me was the credit card sign which said discover because for me, agile, agile ways of working it's all about discovery, it's all about evolution. That's the picture I'm going to pick as my picture for the challenge. Brilliant. So many different aspects of agile delivery there and she's picked her entry to be judged. Let's get an insight into what Helen sees when wandering around looking for inanimate agile objects. Waste, waste on this. Waste, yeah. So I'm thinking we want to grow people, we want to grow teams so we've got new flowers poking through growth. Oh yeah, I'm loving this one. So this is a windy path, here's a journey and so this kind of path represents a kind of journey that you're probably going to have to go to. Collaboration, getting around the table and working together. So this probably represents better ideas and there's bird feeders so you've got to feed the good ideas so feed your team pizza and good stuff around. But I think the one that I'm going to go for is the house. Looking at that picture there's a number of different things that I could have pulled out but I think one of the biggest things about agile delivery for me is it's about collaboration and when I step back and looked at the house again I think that this house belongs to husband and wife who own a business and so when I reflect upon that this kind of whole area, this place that I'm in is one big collaboration. People having to work together with people that they don't know, people come into their homes and so it's collaboration for me. So a number of different aspects of agility there from waste to ideas, from visibility to growth but the overall theme for Helen was one of collaboration and she decided to illustrate that with a picture of the house. Very creative. Next up is Freya. I didn't have that many ideas when I first found the challenge but then when I was walking around I found and picked up quite a few things that thought were pretty good. First thing that I thought of was a string of fairy lights because it's like a light bulb idea, light bulb moment. There's a book called Small Great Things and I thought that you can have lots of little good things to make one really good thing. It's a picture of a dance school door because all the students have to work in the teams and they have to be very agile to be able to perform well but then most of the time they're being told what to do by a teacher so it's not very self-organising. But then my final choice was Jenga because everyone's ideas get piled up to make one big project and then the sticks are the people in the team and when one gets taken out or it's like somebody putting out or giving up on the idea then everything falls apart and you need the team to work together to get it to be like the best, like the highest it can get. Freya picked up on the ideas theme and how team members ideas can come together in the same way that lots of small pieces of delivery can create something great. She looked at the somewhat literal aspect of agility in terms of flexible dancers before settling on the analogy of Jenga with the building blocks of ideas and team members and how the sense of team can be easily destabilised by one person withdrawing or not participating constructively. Interesting. Let's see what Sam found when he went out on his Agile photograph hunt. Take a photograph of an inanimate object that somehow reflects an aspect of agile delivery. Best photograph wins. You have 30 minutes. Agile delivery. It's not agile delivery but that's so many shoes that are just outside. I just felt I needed to share that with other people. It's a dream catcher. That's for some companies. That's what agile is. We're a scrum team. Now all our dreams have come true. I mean, in some respects the jukebox is a continuous delivery of value, right? It doesn't play more at the same time either. You get one good song after the other. You know, sometimes you don't get value but that's kind of agile as well, right? You know what? I think I'm failing a principle here as well which is maximising the amount of work not done. Maybe. Because the beer pump is an excellent example of a value delivery system. Continuous delivery. Value. Flow, yeah, beautiful. Also, the same mechanism. It could be reused for any beer. Reusability. It's the dream. Cheers. I think I've done that today as well. Thank you very much. That's it. Simplicity, maximising the amount of work not done. Continuous delivery or value. Flow. Reusability. Classic Sam, you might say. From iterative delivery of value while acknowledging that you don't always get what you want to appreciating that some see agile as a dream, a silver bullet, before setting his mind to the simplest thing that would work and going to the pub. For many it would be hard to argue his rationale for the beer pump's analogy to agile delivery but later on we'll see if our judges agree with him. And finally, we have Paul. It seems a shame to spoil these beautiful seals. Take a photograph of an inanimate object that somehow reflects an aspect of agile delivery best photograph wins. You have 30 minutes, your time starts now. Started with a clock. The idea was looping time box loops. Picture of a rugby ball. It's on the parallels with Scrum at the day of rugby union. Now I've got a picture of, I assume it was a milk urn, churn, milk urn, what do we call them? Anyhow, I was drawn to it by the markings on the side as some kind of indication of capacity that made me think about team capacity. I've got a picture of some ivy crawling up a brick pillar. The idea of kind of more emergent growth. And we've got a town notice board. Teams, Scrum boards are very much the same type of things sharing information radiators. Again, some more plants growing through, finding their way through brick work. Tree roots growing through or pushing out bricks in a wall. A mirror for ease of access and visibility of traffic to increase the transparency of information. And I've got a patched in piece of brick work. It's a little bit like trying to patch something together to remind me a little bit of some technical debt or something like that. So which one are you going to go for? I can only choose one. Now I'm going to go for the town notice board. Again, a mixture of analogies from time boxing to capacity to the game of rugby, emergent growth and technical debt. Before settling on the idea of visibility, community and team communication. So there we have our five photographs. Just like in episode one. To avoid any disharmony between myself and the contestants and any claim of bias, I've taken myself out of the judging process. This time, I've asked some independent and world famous agile coaches from around the globe to judge this challenge. They had no idea who took the photographs. So let's see what they thought. First up is Karen Greaves, formerly of South Africa, but now based in New Zealand. Hi. So I'm judging the photo competition for Jeff and I think my first choice would be for the photo of the Discover sign. I think it's a great idea that agile really is about discovery and learning rather than a fixed destination where once we're agile, check, we mark that box. And so I really like that as an idea. Second up, I would say the notice board. I really like the idea of visibility and also community, that having a kind of community notice board. So I think teams are also about that. I would say the Django one, I like that idea. So I put it at number three. I like that everybody contributes, but having built Django, I know it's a little fragile and so I don't really like the idea of agile teams being that fragile that one person can completely disrupt them. Although maybe that is true. And then I think I put the bear as number four and then the house is number five. I don't know, that one didn't really speak to me. Yeah, that's it. Next up, we have Howard Sublett from the good old US of A. This is the agile photograph challenge and my rankings from number five to number one would be Jenga is number five. Yes, it's about being together, but the object of this game is to pull pieces apart. So that's my number five. Number four is the house. Yes, we are together, but there's still some parts in that I'm not real happy about. I love the picture of Discover from my number three. So because we are all about self-learning and continuous learning, anything that involves beer gets a higher rating with me. Just FYI on the future, but the beer tap continuous flow and it flows happiness. And my number one is what I would call an information radiator at a housing project or whatever the photograph was, but big visible radiators are really, really crucial for an agile development. Hi, my name is Ashlyn Green. I'm an agile coach based in Ireland. Okay, for the challenge about taking a photograph of an inanimate object that somehow reflects an aspect of agile delivery. The one that I've picked to go first is the beer pumps. If you know me, you probably know why I picked that. I think the flow and continuous delivery of value to the core concepts that we have within agile is really resonating at the minute with me and resonates a lot with the teams that I'm working with because that's where some of their challenges are, is how we actually get what is value and how do we deliver that value frequently throughout the project. The second one that I chose was the community notice board. One concept of agility is all about making everything visible. So putting everything up there so everybody can see it. There's a place where people can go to find out the information that they need. It's in a common spot that people understand where to go to and this idea of that you build a community around that. So that everybody is part of something. And then the third place picture that I chose was the discover card because I think agile is a journey. There is no single right answer. It's all about discover what's your journey and how should you go on it. Hi everyone, this is Jo and I'm here to give my results for the photograph challenge. In first place I have got the community board with visibility and community. For me visibility is one of the most important aspects of agility. Even just the small step of creating visibility of our work and where our work is in the system can dramatically help to improve things. For number two I had the Jenga game which I thought was a really really good metaphor for collaboration and for co-creation. Building on ideas, building on each other's skills and working together. In third place I had the beer taps which was a great metaphor for me for flow. I really enjoyed that. After that I really liked the discover picture. It was a very tough decision between the two of those. Discovery is a very big part of software delivery specifically in complex environments. And finally there was the photograph of the house. I really liked the value and the aspect of collaboration. I guess I didn't really get the metaphor. Hi this is John Gedge live in sunny Melbourne and I've got my results here for the agile photo challenge. So for me there's a clear winner this time and that is the Jenga photo. I think this is a really great metaphor for an effective team. I love the fact it represents the way that members of an effective team depend on each other and the way that they can build on each other's ideas. I also like the fact that it represents so if you mess around with a team too much if you try to take big out of the team and replace them with new people at some point it's all going to come crashing down and you're going to be left to clear up the mess. So yeah that's my winner. See you soon. So after the five judges submitted their scores Paul came out on top with Christina and Sam in joint second then Freya and finally Helen. So that means we've got another change at the top of the leaderboard with Paul taking over by half a point from Sam who's also just half a point of Helen who's also just half a point ahead of Christina. So close. Anyway that brings us to the end of our time box for episode four of Scrum Mastery Challenge and we're almost done. I'd like to thank our judges for participating and now we're halfway through our challenges. Or are we? Keep an eye out this week is all I'll say. In the meantime maybe keep an eye out for what inanimate objects might speak to you about agile values and principles. If nothing else you might get a fresh perspective of the world around you. Until next time good luck with your own Scrum Mastery challenges and to get us to done done here are the credits.