Just because your team members feel shy about expressing (or receiving) appreciations in public, doesn’t mean you should stop doing them. Tami Flowers told me about her solution to making sure team members know what they’ve done that helps their co-workers and to encourage them to keep doing those things. She called it “Card Pass with Appreciations.”
Here’s how it goes:
Arrange chairs so that team members sit in a circle of chairs or around a table. Make sure that every person has a pen. Pass out large index cards, one per team member, and ask each person to write...
I was at a party much too late last night (after the Agile2008 banquet), and it's good I was there. Just as I was getting ready to leave, two people walked over to me and told me a story about their retrospectives.
One of them thanked me for the book and said that it had helped in their retrospectives. Then he told me that the activities in the book had inspired him to create activities on his own. I asked if he would share an example with me.
He described how interpersonal conflicts and friction had plagued his team....
Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World, writes about scenius (a.k.a., "the communal form of genius").
Which made me think about skunk works in general and, inevitably, Agile teams and their open workspaces.
An Agile coach contacted me to discuss an issue on his team. One of the critical contractors on his team had left the project for another assignment, unexpectedly, on two week’s notice, just before an important release. Oh my! The coach described his initial shock and dismay. He wanted ideas for how to handle the unexpected loss of a team member with his team. Together we developed a list of five actions that would help deal with this impediment.
1. The Agile coach could contact the contracting agency to give them feedback on the impact on the project of...
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 group takes no more than eight to ten minutes to brainstorm all the issues (or ideas for action) facing the team and write each one on a separate sticky note. The retrospective leader challenges the sub-groups to go for quantity of issues over quality. Every...