Last week, I was facilitated a retrospective where we focused on meeting satisfaction. While talking about the daily scrum and what could be improved, an engineer brought up the team’s use of the "parking lot”. If you’re not familiar with the “parking lot”, it’s used when a discussion is going a bit too deep, taking [...]
I really enjoy and get a lot of value out of experimentation at work. I think it’s a great way to unleash creativity, try new ideas, continuously improve, have fun, see what works/doesn't work, etc. One team that I coach has been experimenting and iterating on a retro idea for weeks. This team is small (2-3 devs) [...]
Earlier this year - after a large, stressful release - a group of Agile Coaches facilitated a retrospective involving people from over a dozen dev teams. In order to address the retro takeaways and make the progress visible, a Continuous Improvement Board was created. The goal of the Continuous Improvement Board was to provide a forum for people to promote [...]
Recently, I was preparing for a couple of speaking engagements and was thinking about how to summarize what Agile means to me. What I came up with was Empowerment, Flexibility, Communication and Collaboration, Iterating on Feedback and Continuous Improvement. Written out as an acronym, this spells EFCIC, which kind of sounds like efficacy, which means “the [...]
Last week, I (virtually) attended the Lean Startup Conference and heard Guy Kawasaki - former Chief Evangelist at Apple - speak about 10 things he learned from Steve Jobs. Below are the 5 that caught my interest, along with some of my thoughts... 1. Customers can't tell you what they need (you need to help [...]
I am a big proponent of experimentation and find it particularly useful within the Agile space. When teams are working in short time boxes, a quick experiment could add a lot of value. On the downside, if it doesn’t add value, the team can choose to end the experiment and hopefully they have learned something. [...]
Earlier this year, while consulting as an Agile Coach, I was involved with an interesting experiment. The experiment asked individuals to self-select into software development teams. Team members would be allowed to choose what products they worked on and who they worked with. The event was called Teamification Day. I had never done anything like [...]
Leadership undoubtedly plays a large role in helping Agile succeed. Here are five ways that leaders can help enable the success of an Agile program. Create the right kind of environment Creating an environment where people can take risks, experiment, fail and learn is extremely important if teams are going to continuously improve. An environment [...]
After being involved with many Agile teams across a wide range of organizations - one thing is certain: each group will have their own style and flavor. No organization - whether a startup or Fortune 50 company - or team - distributed or collocated - will be the same. And in my opinion, that is [...]
Previously, I wrote about top-down and bottom-up Agile transformations. After the organization has started their transformation, it is important to make sure that the teams and organization are not slipping back into their old habits. Especially if Agile is new, it is easy to regress. It’s critical to stick with it so the teams and [...]