Working Agreements

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 us? (e.g., type, number, frequency, duration, attendance expectations, decision-making, etc.)

What Agile engineering and project management practices and methods will we incorporate?

What interactions, teamwork and collaboration will best support our work? (e.g., communication flows, conflict, feedback, continuous learning, social time, fun!)

Effective teams regularly take stock...

Agile

Impact and Energy

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.

Retrospectives

Kaizen Stories

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.

Retrospectives

FRIM-redux

About a year ago, I wrote post on FRIM, a new activity for gathering data for the work of retrospectives.

Retrospectives

Agile Camps

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 a rotation schedule of activities for the campers. Bn Monday, I felt miserable. We were missing the kids and staff expectations for the kind of freedom and accountability we want for our camps.”

Agile Retrospectives

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