People First was going to radically change the way people developed software!
Sure, I knew it was going to hurt, but wasn't it worth it?
I dove in and smacked my face straight into six months of no work. Not another famine! How would I endure it?
With thankfulness.
On January 1, 2015, I wrote:
"Thank you, Lord.
Thank you for this smile on my face. Thank you for the joy in my heart.
Thank you for the joy that comes with my salvation. On this day we (You and me) will not allow anything to steal my joy.
Thank You, Lord for Your peace. On this day we (You and me) will not allow this peace to be disrupted.
I trust You, Lord on this day, the first day of the year to keep my heart at peace and to fill my countenance with joy.
Why? Because my circumstances have changed? No. Because You are my Lord and my Savior, and You love me. And as You have done for me in the past—You work all things for my good :-)"
I wrote similar thank you notes in my journal throughout January. If there was anything possible a person could be thankful for, I was.
I was thankful for my husband, my mom, my sisters, my daughter, and my son.
I was thankful for my home, filled with God's presence. And I was grateful that I had help to keep it clean.
I was thankful for People First and my consulting partners, though they were dragging their feet concerning the pilot opportunity they promised.
I was thankful for my church. I was grateful for my service in the Sunday School.
I was thankful for my Bible school.
I was thankful for God's indwelling spirit. His mercy, love, word, and grace. I was grateful for prayer.
I was even thankful for the color purple!
Finally, on March 2, 2015, the Project Management Office (PMO) for a logistics company reached out to me concerning an agile coach contract. Unfortunately, the companies they did business with needed to be on their procurement list. Salt Consulting was not on that list, but my consulting partners were, so I asked to subcontract. They agreed, seeing it as an opportunity to get their testers on my team. However, the contract was mine, which meant I got to use People First. Not the web application, though.
Since I was subcontracting, use of the web application would have added complexity to our standard contract. Instead, I used paper forms, entered the data myself, and discovered I had a perfect motivated team!
As soon as we completed the agile team training, we sketched out the project and started Sprinting. They put their strengths to work in the agile activities, and we focused process improvement on good feelings (resonance: Blue and Green) and bad feelings (dissonance: Red and Orange).
After only three sprints, the dissonance subsided in all but one activity with the corresponding rise in resonance being something to brag about. These were not random feel-good measures. They directly reflected the positive outcomes at the end of each sprint—there is a big difference between promising five stories in sprint one and getting one done, and six stories in sprint three and finishing five.
I continued as their agile coach until November 2015 (with much prayer), and each week, I gave the PMO leader a resonance/dissonance report showing how feelings correlated to project outcomes. This convinced him (and me) that emotional resonance (ER) was useful for monitoring agile teams.
Unfortunately, after continually pressuring me to find positions for their staff, tensions came to a head with my consulting partners.1 Even though the People First Empowerment Platform was proving to be a reliable tool, they told me it was not a good fit for them or their clients.
On June 26, 2015, I wrote:
Father God. Daddy … My heart is broken again. [Consulting Partners] is going ahead with a software development management (SDM) portal (web-based) and services without me. This is not how this story was supposed to end!!!
I am so angry with them that I am thinking vengeful thoughts that I know I have no business doing. “Vengeance is mine says the Lord” But even so, when my anger subsides... what am I supposed to do now Lord? What am I supposed to do now?
Be still and know that I am God.
When my contract and subcontract ended in November, one of their senior executives resigned and offered to help me, as a business consultant, to spread the message of People First empowerment.
If you have just joined us and are wondering what this story is about, start from the beginning and use the next button at the bottom of the post to move forward through the story. I promise it will all make sense.
Agile teams are small (5 to 7 people); I did not need more testers.