World Retrospectives Day
Help to define the World Retrospective Day you want to attend. Take the WRD survey. #retrospectives
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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.
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.
Recently, I read an interview between Bernie DeKoven (who has aliases as varied as: Major Fun, The Shaman of Play, and more) and Barry Joseph (Associate Director For Digital Learning, Youth Initiatives, at the American Museum of Natural History). While the whole interview is delightful, and I recommend it, I was particularly struck by the game called “The Out Blessing Game” or “Endless Blessings.”
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.
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.
We’re happy to announce that FutureWorks Consulting staff, Willem Larsen and Diana Larsen, have published a new book through the innovative, interactive publishing service Leanpub. The Leanpub story is interesting in itself, and we hope you will check it out. But more about the book!
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.
A question recently came up about how to effectively disband a team – and more to the point, what steps to take to ensure a smooth closure of the team and how to help team members adjust if assigned to another team that did not operate according to agile values and principles.
This is a great question. First off, one must pay attention to the "adjourning" phase of the "-orming" cycle. It helps people move on to their next work assignment and gives team members a chance to say "farewell" to each other in a good way.
Bruce Tuckman, professor of...
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...
Every time I ask about team’s challenges with retrospectives, a recurring theme comes up: Acting on Actions. I hear, “Our team doesn’t follow through on our plans for action.” Or I hear, “Our team never identifies improvement actions.” Both are retrospective “smells.”
Diana has written previously about the Human Systems Dynamics Institute and their excellent program that provides models and methods for dealing with our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world of complex adaptive human systems. In this post she focuses on the HSD Adaptive Action model and its unexpected connection to retrospectives:
In 2006 Esther and I introduced a Flexible Framework for Agile Retrospectives, a series of stages for designing effective retrospectives: Set the Stage; Gather Data; Generate Insights; Decide What to Do; and Close the Retrospective. We recommended a recurring cycle of retrospectives after each iteration as a process for the team to "reflect, tune and adjust", as the Agile Manifesto principle decrees.