Standups offer the most benefit when they are kept brief (30-60 seconds per team member) and to the point––sustaining communication about the state of the work. It helps when team members know the questions ahead of time and come prepared to answer them succinctly
Help to define the World Retrospective Day you want to attend. Take the WRD survey. #retrospectives
Agile Fluency™ Game available to take home to your own teams. Attend the workshop April 3 in Portland.
For OrgDesign, OrgDev, & Agile Center of Excellence practitioners who want to gain more depth in organization design, the Organization Design Forum conference is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this year, April 24-27.
In December, Debbie Madden, from Stride Tech, interviewed Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies, the co-authors of Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams. Debbie called Liftoff (the first edition), “one of my all-time favorite reads.”
Calling all testers and QA focused team members! Have you wondered about how your work and perspectives fit in James Shore and Diana Larsen’s Agile Fluency Model?
Listen in as Diana talks with Mandy Ross of Sococo about the learning process. Part of the Agile Amped: Inspiring Conversation series.
“Agile just isn’t working for my team,” Arno said. “My company decided to go Agile six months ago because we needed faster delivery, and now my team won’t even tell me when they’ll be done with the new application. They say they can’t because now they are ‘Agile’.” We could hear his air-quotes over the speaker phone connection. As we listened to our friend Arno complain about his workplace, we looked at each other. We were mentally tallying all the misunderstandings about Agile that his comments reflected. There were so many, we wondered where to start in helping him get a better handle on his situation.
There’s this thing…as Jim (James Shore) and I have mentioned before, in the early days of Agile we would visit teams and hear, “This is the best job I’ve ever had. I love this work.” People who were doing Agile (usually Extreme Programming) were excited about it, they shared it with others, who did it, and got excited. But at some point, someone shared it with someone who got excited about it and shared it but didn’t DO it, so their sharing lost a bit of fidelity, like a copy of a copy.
This an update for the Agile Fluency Project on Kickstarter. I’m very excited about the project and its implications for team learning and the world of Agility. Since it’s the culmination of our thinking about fluent proficiency and has implications for the Agile community, I’m including it on the FutureWorks blog.
How do you set conditions for organizations to become “learning organizations” and how do you support the self-organizing teams that emerge from this transformation?
Are you managing Agile teams? Are you wondering how to offer the best guidance so teams reach their highest possible performance? Is maximum team productivity on your mind? Are your team members telling you they need additional support to deliver the most productivity?
Here at FutureWorks Consulting, Sharon, Diana, and our network of experienced colleagues continually look for ways to help leaders like you. We offer ideas, services and opportunities to strengthen business agility, build resilience for yourself and others, and improve how you work with Agile teams and organizations. We’ve written before about the Agile Fluency™ model developed by Diana and James Shore, and now we bring you the chance to move the model from idea to implementation, through the Agile Fluency Project.
As a leader in your organization, you want to do everything you can to ensure the successful results of your work groups and project teams. You know that investing in a great beginning pays dividends as the work continues.
Steve Berczuk writes a short and succinct article on TechWell describing, “Why Agile Retrospectives are Important in Software Development.” I’m looking forward to reading the comments and responses he gets. More and more I think of Agile Retrospectives as an opportunity for the kind of learning that leads to real adaptive action in complex situations.
Many leaders focus on improving productivity and performance. Leaders who support regular retrospectives gain an effective organizational learning tool that guides project teams (and ongoing work groups) to reflect on their technical, human and organizational systems that affect performance. A well-facilitated retrospective gathers together significant project stakeholders (including the development team members and other critical players) to review their project experience, learn from the experience, and take action to improve - in the next iteration, the next release, and for all future projects.
Does your organization utilize retrospectives as part of its project management goals? If not, here are some simple...