Game On!
Agile Fluency™ Game available to take home to your own teams. Attend the workshop April 3 in Portland.
- FutureWorks Consulting
- +1 (503) 750-9618
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.”
Add "Project Weather" to your retrospective design to both "Set the Stage" and "Close the Retrospective". As an opening, it provides a useful segue into creating a shared story and begins the process of gathering data. As a closing, it illustrates any shifts in team members' perspectives that have occurred as a result of their collaboration in the retrospective.
To Prepare:
Create a pre-drawn flip chart with a heading at the top: Project Weather. Add hand drawn graphics across the top, like a sun coming out from behind clouds, clouds and rain, or even the occasional tornado! Divide the flip chart...
Take your Agile knowledge to the next level and learn how to effectively implement Agile methods to make ‘good’ teams brilliant.
Join industry experts, James Shore and Diana Larsen, for an in-depth immersion into real-world Agile development. Learn how to plan and deliver Agile projects and practice doing so in real teams delivering working software. The training emphasizes real-word experiences and promotes a hands-on approach for students.
As part of my commitment to my own professional development, a few months ago I attended a certification training program on effective practices in organizational change and leadership development. Although it required more time commitment than usual on my part, I found the experience well worth it. I would make the same decision again if I had it to do over. So when I heard that the Human Systems Dynamics Institute was bringing its HSDP Certification Training Program to Portland in January 2012, I wanted to share my experiences and how the HSD methodology has positively impacted my practice and my work with my clients.
Our experience thus far has been that while self-organizing teams may enable the organization to operate from day to day without active management, a more integrated organization and more productive teams make the value-add of managers highly transparent and place a premium on specific leadership skills.
From Adam Light, Chris Vike and Diana Larsen. "Teamwork Required: Managing Agile Application Delivery in a Matrix Organization", Cutter Agile Product & Project Management Executive Update, Vol. 12, No. 19. October 2011.
For a free download of the article pdf, register at the Cutter site. You can also order reprints from Cutter to use...