Why I live in Portland Oregon, part 1
This story on yahoo shows one reason I live in Portland: nicer drivers. :-)
Like many humans, I have a few topics about which I can become passionate. My hot topics include:
This month something came along that pokes at several of my hot topics at once. Business Week wrote an article on the growing popularity of "unconferences". At first, I was delighted to see collaborative processes getting more visibility in the press.
Then I read further and found a broader, underlying story. Chris Messina wrote
Courtesy of Brian Marick’s Blog, I took the "What programming language are you?" quiz. I’m delighted to discover that I’m Smalltalk…but I’m not sure I know enough to know why.
I continually look for new ways to gather data in iteration retrospectives. My goal is to find activities that encourage team members to think deeply about the story of their project while keeping an eye on the time budget. Timelines are a great tool for data gathering, yet they may take longer than many teams can afford in a 60-90 minute retrospective. The standard “what worked well/what shall we do differently” is short, but really takes the team directly into analysis, bypassing data gathering. Here’s an idea for a new activity I call FRIM (FRequency/IMpact).
In FRIM, the team writes...
While skimming through some old files in my office the other day, I came upon a reprint of a Harvard Business Review article from January 1999, titled, “Organizing for Empowerment: An Interview with AES's Roger Sant and Dennis Bakke”. Sant and Bakke ran AES, a global power company. The article discusses the unusual way the two men viewed their business (Sant has since retired and Bakke has opened a consulting firm).
In the article, a number of Sant’s remarks relate to retrospectives, empowered work and agile projects. Two of my favorites:
“People always say they don’t have time to...