FRIM: Another Way to Gather Data

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...

Agile Retrospectives

HBR and the “E” Word

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...

Agile

Pleasing review

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.

Agile

Secrets Redux

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!

Agile

Working Time

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.

Agile

F2F

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.

Agile

Facilitative Managing

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. :-)

Agile

Agility in Business

It’s Wednesday—the day my automated “to-do” list tells me to write a blog post, if I haven’t already posted one this week. I’m in the middle of a trip to London to speak at Qcon. Traveling to exotic (!) places distracts me from things like writing blog posts. Since the reminder came up, and I noticed I haven’t written one this week, I began to look around.

Luckily, CIO magazine has come to my rescue. Michael Hugos offers his thoughts on A Formula to Measure Business Agility in a link from this week’s CIO Insider email. In...

Agile

Retrospective Questions

Today someone wrote with an inquiry, "What kinds of questions should one ask when doing a retrospective? What specific areas should a leader think about when drafting a retrospective, regardless of the rest of the format?"

I found this a difficult question to answer, yet I resisted writing back, "It depends." Though it does depend, on a number of factors, but most of all the goal. So, here's what I wrote back to him.

In Agile Retrospectives, Esther and I recommend setting a goal for each retrospective, then tailoring the activities and questions to that goal. Many teams have an...

Agile Retrospectives

Wide Open Spaces

Two open space conferences in the same week spells heaven to me.

On Tuesday and Wednesday Charlie Poole, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Patrick Logan and I hosted Agile Open Northwest at the Kennedy School in Portland, Oregon .

We had great support from our sponsors the Agile Alliance, InfoQ, SolutionsIQ, PNSQC, Corillian, Net Objectives, Instantiations, Esther Derby Associates, ExtremePlanner, Innovation Frameworks and Jens Ostergaard. We held it at the same hotel where Esther and I have our “Secrets of Agile Teamwork” workshop twice each year. It’s a fun and funky place that stimulates everyone’s creative thinking flow.

Agile practitioners from...

Agile

Agile for Real! reminder

I'm just back from a wonderful time in Taos NM and ready to focus on my professional life again. It's time to send a reminder about a terrific conference coming up later this month.

Agile Open Northwest, an alliance of agile practitioners in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, presents "Agile Open Northwest 2007: Agile for Real" January 30-31, 2007 in Portland, Oregon at McMenamins'

Kennedy School, one of my favorite places.

This conference is for you. We invite 100 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest and beyond to join us in tackling issues around the theme of agile development in the...

Agile

Pre-Mortems

As someone who thinks and writes about retrospectives, I sometimes find myself musing on the other half of the bookend...what about at the beginning of things? I think about chartering projects, and project kickoffs and iteration/release planning activities. How can we use what we've learned in our retrospectives to get the next project or increment of work off to the best start.

Today I saw a post on the Open Space mailing list that pointed me to the Anecdote blog from a group in Australia. Shawn writes about Pre-Mortems. It's an unfortunate name ("before death"), but the intent...

Agile

Amazon "Best of 2006"

I must admit, it's exciting to wake up one day and find our book on the Best of 2006 books list.

Esther and I had a great time this evening fielding questions about retrospectives at the Richmond Virginia APLN chapter meeting. We asked those present to create a backlog of their burning questions, then we answered those that table groups said were their highest priorities. The questions ranged from best/worst retrospectives to how to convince managers of ROI to how to handle "prisoner" participants. We had a lot of fun, renewed acquaintances, and met interesting new people. I hope...

Agile