Partnership & Possibilities

In the “Generating Insights” phase of a retrospective, the “Group Mind” activity provides a way for teams to discover where their thinking converges and quickly identify common concerns.
The retrospective leader (RL) helps the team form three or four small groups of team members–pairs or triads, depending on the size of the team. Each small […]

Does your team have Working Agreements? (WA’s)
Effective teams think about how they will accomplish their work together before they begin working. They describe the levels of performance and professionalism they want to achieve, then record them in Working Agreements.
WA’s cover such areas as:
What does “done” mean for us?
What will meetings look like for […]

The Software Association of Oregon has invited Jim Shore and I to present two workshops introducing Agile methods and mindsets to companies in Oregon as part of the Oregon Training Network. Register for “The Business of Agile” and “Agile Software Development: No Silver Bullets, Just Good Sense” at these links.
BTW, if you haven’t […]

So many teams complain about the “do nothing” retrospective. Team meetings can remain results-free for many reasons (possibly the topic of another post…and anyway, I’m sure Esther Derby must have written about it ).
However, one way to stimulate team members to implement action plans is to follow the energy.
Software teams usually have little […]

Stig Efsen, Trifork Scrum coach, invented a new way to help teams move the continuous improvement ideas from retrospectives into real action. In an “Agile Retrospectives” workshop last January, he showed our workshop group how to use Planning Poker for a list of ideas for actions.
As part of the Generating Insights part of the […]

About a year ago, I wrote post on FRIM, a new activity for gathering data for the work of retrospectives.
This is an update. Over the past year, I’ve had some new ideas and participants in our “Agile Retrospectives” workshop have provided their creative thoughts.
First New FRIM idea: Now when I use the FRIM […]

I’m sitting at the Portland Bar Camp, listening to my friend Tony Deis from TrackersNW. He’s tell me about how he ran a outdoor camp for high school students using Agile practices. Tony said, “We got to the campgrounds on Sunday after a long drive. It was raining. We had an Umiak to build and […]