This article first appeared on stickyminds.com. Not long ago, I received a call from someone who wanted to hold a retrospective. “Tell me about your goals for the retrospective,” I prompted. The requestor proceeded to describe what amounted to a mini-witch hunt. If you really want to wreak havoc with a team, try having a [...]
Personal productivity systems like Getting Things Done or the Pomodoro technique are quite popular among agilists, and I’m not surprised. There are many parallels with agile practices, most of these techniques use practices resembling iterations, backlogs and frequent retrospectives to become more productive. I’ve been experimenting with a couple of these but once I started using these at work I found that these don’t automatically work in a team setting. [Learn more][1].
[1]: http://agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/mendelt/personal-productivity-agile-teams
Yesterday I talked a little about how companies focus too much on process… how they are doing their work… rather than the actual business outcomes they are trying to deliver. This is a really big problem that impacts all levels of the organization…
I’m a firm believer in retrospectives and the value that comes from a team committing to constant improvement.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been delivering Agile training to a wide range of folks from developers to testers to traditional PM’s to business folks and so on. To demonstrate the power of retrospectives, at the end [...]
I often get asked (or read posts) wondering about how to get started with Scrum. There are quite a few factors involved with coming up with an approach to switch to Scrum or Agile in general. Organization size and level of internal politics is probably the largest barrier I’ve seen based on conversations I’ve had [...]
2008 was a good year for me, great work/life balance, obtained Certified Scrum Master designation and had a great year at Q4.
InfoQ posted a great article recently on the challenges of adopting Scrum. The number one item on the list was lack of organizational learning and whether or not they had intended to rank those items in order of importance, lack of learning through retrospectives is one of 2 key issues with adopting Scrum.
I safely interchange [...]
Jeff Patton recently posted an excerpt of Alistair Cockburn’s book Crystal Clear regarding the seven properties of successful Agile development projects.
I’m sure all teams go through a bit of a lull when it comes time for the end of sprint retrospective. We’re following the same format of ‘what went well, what didn’t go well and what can we try next time’ format partially because that’s how the team did it before I started here. Everybody [...]
6% left on my battery and no power cord in site so I’ll be brief. The workshop didn’t get into tactics or execution details but it gave me and the team members a great insight into the product owner role. The biggest statement that stuck with me was that early on Jeff mentioned that it [...]