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...
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...
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.
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.
About a year ago, I wrote post on FRIM, a new activity for gathering data for the work of retrospectives.
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.”
Naresh Jain pledged to connect the dots between Agile practitioners around the world. Today he wrote a post about it. He's taken another step (in addition to convening the SDT conference and conferences around India) by creating a group on LinkedIn. Dear Reader, if you're an Agile Alliance member who would like to connect with other practitioners, and you have a profile on LinkedIn, you can join the group.
Just back from JAOO 2007 and I have too much to write about. What a great conference!
The latest Agile Chronicles Newsletter email edition offered me the option of downloading the second Annual “State of Agile Development” survey. Seventeen hundred individuals responded to a boatload of questions from VersionOne. In response to the question, “Which of the following practices do you employ within your Agile methods? (check all that apply)”, thirty-nine percent checked “retrospectives.” 39%!
Erik Petersen posted a note on his blog that referenced a website for, of all things, a bicycle touring group that needs to run effective meetings.
Bas Vodde posted an article on action planning in retrospectives . It’s a tough issue, and I agree with Bas’ take on it. Team members need to see clearly how the actions they choose will affect their work long term. Bas suggests each proposal for action links each near term action with the long term goal it will help the team achieve.
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