I'm at home for a brief stop between two events that I've anticipated all year.
The Consultants' Retreat and Network (founded in 1997 by my friend Norm K.) celebrated its 10th anniversary year this week. We gathered in Newport, Oregon, USA, once again for a week of unexpected surprises, generous idea-sharing, and the kind of insights into my practice that I've come to expect from the event. Charlie Poole convened it this year.
As time passes, I will discover more benefits from attending, but so far I have a very cool new sweatshirt and a terrific quote from Rosabeth Moss Kanter, "Everything...
I read Garr Reynolds' blog, "Presentation Zen," on presentation design and skills.
Today, it features an excerpt from Bill Clinton's recent speech at Georgetown University.
Reynolds highlights two paragraphs from Clinton's speech.
"We believe in a politics...dominated by evidence and argument. There is a big difference between a philosophy and an ideology, on the right or the left. If you have a philosophy, it generally pushes you in a certain direction or another. But like all philosophers, you want to engage in discussion and argument. You are open to evidence, to new learning. And you are certainly...
Pssst! Hey, look over there. You know, just over there to the right. See the events list? The next "Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills" public workshop will happen Dec. 5-7. We have a few spaces left for folks who want to get good at this "individuals and interactions" and self-organizing teams stuff. Click over there and get more information.
While you're there, notice that the "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great!" first public workshop since we published the book is also coming up soon.
Wow! What a wealth of opportunity awaits...just over there to the right. :->
I mentioned a book in my last posting, Deep Survival by Lawrence Gonzales. I keep finding things in it that seem so relevant to teams and Agile. I wouldn't say that writing software constitutes a life or death activity for the development team, but Gonzales' two "Rules for Life" certainly apply: "Be here now" and "Everything takes eight times as long as it's supposed to" (which he also calls "the friction rule".)
"Be here now" Gonzales translates as "pay attention and keep an up-to-date mental model." In other words, accept and work according to what is, rather than following the plan,...
One of these years I'm going to attend the NASAGA conference. Until I get there, I read Willam Wake's blog to catch a bit of the flavor.
Yesterday he wrote about Bernie DeKoven's session:
"Bernie described Csikszentmihalyi's flow model; with challenge and ability on two axes - too challenging, we're anxious; too simple, it's boring; right on the edge - we may get flow. Flow is characterized by a sense of timelessness, focus, stillness, vividness, oneness.
Bernie has another model to go with it: "we" is on one axis, "me" on another. With way too much "we" or too much...
On the Gemba Panta Rei blog post, Jon Miller says, “20% celebration, 80% reflection. In order to do kaizen right you have to celebrate your victories over waste. You need to make it fun.”
In a Sept 26 blog post, Bob Sutton, co-author of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense, refers to five points he’s learned about teaching people to innovate. Point number 1?
“1. Producing smart individuals is the first step; teaching them to collaborate is the second step.”
Just a small reminder to all the smart folks :-) about our “Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills” public workshop coming up in December. (Check out the sidebar under Events.) It’s where Esther Derby and I share our focus on collaboration and the skills Agile teams need to inspect, adapt,...
As I surf the web-o-sphere, I continually look for clues and keys to effective collaboration for teams. This morning I found Power of Two on Wray Herbert's blog We're only human .
In this post, Herbert muses on Seinfeld's Close Talker and other social skills and points us to a new book by Daniel Goldman.
At a recent users group meeting, I heard about a retrospective activity someone created. It wasn't an activity I would use as described (which is why I'm not more specific about who and where), but I thought it had possibilities. It's based on the idea of asking team members to write thoughts on index cards anonymously.
I've seen a number of variations on this theme. One I've led many times at the start of a retrospective I call "Sense of the Room" (included below).
This new activity lends itself to the Gathering Data focus of a retrospective. For want of a better...
My theory which is mine. (Thank you Monty Python.)
It's only a theory and I haven't developed a test for it yet. Though I'd like some suggestions on how to do so.
My theory is: iterative development + daily stand-up meetings + frequent retrospectives +a culture that supports learning = eventual invention of a home-grown fully Agile approach.
The extended version: IF you have a project and a project team in an organizational culture that supports learning, and IF the project team is made up of people of good will, doing their "prime directive best"* on an ongoing basis,...
Once again you have the opportunity to attend the workshop, "Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills" in Portland, Oregon, December 5-7. For more about the workshop and a downloadable registration form, please look in the Events section of this blog. (See that sidebar over there?)
This will be the fourth time Esther and I have presented the workshop as an open-to-the-public event. It's a workshop for anyone who leads Agile teams--anytime. We work from the central premise that highly performing, agile, and/or self-organizing teams thrive on leadership that emerges on demand, which includes informal and formal leadership roles....
Yesterday I had the opportunity to lead a retrospective for the last class session of a new course at Portland State University. Jim Shore and Andrew Black put together a four week, 11 session (7 classes and 4 labs), course on Extreme Programming for twelve enthusiastic students - a few undergraduates, a few graduates students, a few students from local industry. As the last day, they hosted Ward Cunningham in the morning, showed demos of their work over a pizza lunch, and ended the course with a retrospective. Jim and Andrew craftily persuaded several local Agilistas (like Ward, Arlo Belshee...
I want to share this excerpt from an excerpted transcript of a July 13, 2006 audio recording. I downloaded the whole doc from Brian Robertson’s blog, “Enlightened Business” and found this jewel of a story:
“A colleague of mine spoke at a big leadership conference many years back. It was one of these big things where they had ex-presidents, Jack Welch and other big names and leaders. The people attending the conference had an evaluation sheet to determine the speaker with the most impact. The person who won, with by far the most votes, was...
A colleague who works outside the software industry asked me whether retrospectives would be good for his team and whether other Agile practices will work for them too.
Holding regular and frequent retrospectives (as well as a retrospective at the project's end) will help any project team reach its full potential. Even if your project doesn't follow an iterative life cycle, bring the team together for a retrospective at the project milestones (or monthly). Take a short "time out" for team members to recognize and consolidate what they've learned so far, and include those lessons learned in the next increment...
Please allow me a bit of a gloat.
Esther Derby and I wrote a book about retrospectives for projects using Agile methods, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf) I actually held a copy in my hands for the first time just last night. The printer shipped them on Thursday. Baby books just born. Practically still wet.
The book offers information that lots of people will find useful, and that's good. But, the most exciting thing about it--it's my first book! I'm feeling all those first time author feelings, like a proud parent.
This coming week, I'm attending the Agile...