The Amplio Learning Center

A Place to Learn by Yourself or With Others

Success Engineering is committed to creating awareness of what’s missing in the Agile space for those attempting to improve their methods.

Agile’s roots are at the team level and focused on innovators and early adopters. As it has spread we have found critical concepts, practices and tools have been ignored.

Our videos focus on core knowledge and what we find is missing.

Questions on any information presented here or other topics can be made at the ACE LinkedIn Group.

Join the free Amplio Community of Practice to attend live sessions almost weekly on topics of interest. 

If you want to really accelerate your learning join the Amplio Consultant Educators program where you will learn Amplio and how to use it to improve any organization and method. Member of the ACE program get access to all of the slides and virtual collaboration boards you see on this page while they are in the program.  The intention is to provide consultants with all of the information they need to be effective with their clients and/or companies. 

Value Streams

Learn about value streams with these videos on our YouTube Channel

Here are some selected videos that can get you started:

The Importance of Actionable Models

Amplio is based on a scientific / engineering approach. An understanding of the physics of flow enables the following:

  • The ability to accurately predict which practices will work better in your situation.
  • A way to accelerate learning
  • Better collaboration in making descisions
  • Freeing oneself from frameworks that don’t fit you

How to accurately predict which practices will work better in your situation

A way to accelerate learning

These are chapters from Being an Effective Value Coach: Leading by Coaching People to Add Value to Themselves and Others that I’m writing with Paula Stewart.

  • Evidence Without Understanding Is Often Ignored. Empiricism alone is not enough. We need a theory to explain it or people will often ignore it. “Experience teaches nothing. There is no experience to record without theory. Without theory, there is no learning, and that is their downfall. People copy examples and then wonder what the trouble is. They look at examples, and without theory, they learn nothing.” Edwards Deming
  • Why You Need Theory as Well as Evidence to Enroll Management Better Methods. We think that much of the challenge with enrolling stakeholders and management in Agile is that many Agilists don’t present a model explaining why Agile works. It’s actually missing from much of Agile. Explaining why, with validated theory, can bridge this gap.
  • Teaching With Theory. You truly learn something when you experience it. But that doesn’t mean you have to start from scratch when given a new concept. People have a lot of experience related to new concepts. They just need to connect the dots between a new concept and their experience. Theory can create this bridge.

Better Colloboaration in making decisions

Agreeing on how things work helps people work together to make better decisions.

Freeing oneself from frameworks that don’t fit you

  • Factors for Effective Value Streams. Factors for effective value streams provides list the primary aspects of what makes value streams effective. While theoretically, just knowing first principles could guide people, using them is a bit abstract for many people. The factors for effective value streams provide a concrete way to see if the workflows in value streams are effective.

Virtual Collaboration Boards Used in the ACE Learning Journey

Many of the boards presented here are Lucid boards. 

Both will be available in the future but it is unlikely we’ll keep the Lucid boards up to date.

All of the boards presented here are available to license on a per-person. All of the boards presented here are licensed for individuals in the ACE Learning Journey – access them through the ACE Dropbox folder.

  1. Amplio Team Estimation. People are biased toward underestimating the time it takes to accomplish something. The “planning fallacy” is a term psychologists use to describe our tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task. Amplio Team Estimation is a relative estimation method that can create better estimates. It takes 10-25% of the time Planning Poker does while providing better results. It also works when only one or two team members know how to estimate something.Watch a video on how to use it here. 24_02_17

Coming Soon (links at this point are descriptive)

  1. The Sprint or One-Day Timeboxing board guides in deciding how a team should plan their upcoming work.
  2. The Challenges Board not only identifies challenges at all levesl (from teams to organizations) but it provides guidance on understanding the cause of the challenges and how to fix them.
  3. Two Different After-Action Review for Retrospections. These boards are useful to see hwo well you’ve done and how you can improve.
  4. A Pre-mortem takes little time and avoids many risks you may otherwise face. This is based on Gary Klein’s pre-mortem approach. It will soon be integrated with Luke Hohmann’s Remember the Future.
  5. Lean Coffees are informal meetings used to learn topics where the agenda is set by the participants.
  6. Running Cafe Conversations is a great way to get 20-50 people learning together about whatever they think is happening.
  7. The Clean Slate Exercise is a way of clearing the air so people can work better together.