Brad Appleton wrote a pleasing review of Agile Retrospectives in the April 7 issue of Agile Journal online. Thanks, Brad! :-)
When I hear or read someone say they find the book useful or that they have it sitting on their desk and the pages have become dog-eared, I get a little frisson of joy. Luckily, that's happening fairly often these days.
June is only two months away and with it comes the next edition of our Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills workshop. For more information, see the link in the Events section just to the right of this post.
Esther Derby and I continue to inspect and adapt this workshop with each public and private group. It gets better every time, so you have the chance to attend the best one so far!
June Kim posted a message on the extremeprogramming list which included a graph about work hours and productivity. She created the graph from data she found in two wikipedia articles about work.
Esther Derby shares wisdom about factors to consider when deciding whether to bring a distributed team together for kick-offs, planning and retrospectives. Face-to-face is best, yet leaders find it difficult to quantify the benefits as well as the costs.
Yesterday (March 13) I presented a tutorial at QCon, "Agile Leadership: From Managment that Controls to Management that Facilitates." We had quite a good time in the session which I seeded with a number of appreciative inquiry-style questions for added flavor. The universe rewarded me with an alert to an article by Brian Button in the latest AgileChronicles, The hardest part of being an Agile Project Manager. In it, he beautifully describes an instance of management that facilitates. Thank you, Brian. :-)