Agile Complexification Inverter

Recess Kit I've found yet another tool for improving teams.  This is a subscription service that monthly sends you and your team a fun and engaging way to reflect upon your work and discover areas to improve.  Take a look at their site and offering and give it a try like I did. I will update this post as I get to experience Recess Kit and their monthly box of yummy with my team. See Also: Retromat - A well planned Retro Retrospectives trump Planning Collaboration Tools List

Retrospective at GameStop based upon Corinna Baldaug's Retromat. Retro process phases: Set the Stage, Gather Data, Generate Insight, Decide what to Do, Close the Retro REF: http://plans-for-retrospectives.com Set the Stage: give time to “arrive” and get into the right mood and focus upon the goal Gather Data: reflect upon what happened, create a shared pool of information Generate Insight: why did things happen this way? What patterns can we observe? Decide What to Do: Pick what to work on, plan concrete steps of action Close the Retro: reflect upon the retrospective, how could it improve? What shall we follow-up upon? Activities for this Retro: Quick Questions  In ONE word – what do you need from the retro? In ONE word – what is on your mind? In ONE word – what is you current mindset in regards to your project: are you a: Explorer – eager to dive in and research what worked Shopper – Positive, happy if 1 good thing come out Vacationer – Reluc...

Do you believe that what you measure you will get?  If so you want to start to measure team happiness.  So what techniques do we have to measure something so ephemeral? This TED Talk by Dominic Price lays out a simple and insightful guide to assess your happiness. The health care industry has studied measuring pain and have very good data on their ability to measure and administer pain drugs upon a subjective self report.  Maybe we could do the same in knowledge worker teams and work groups. Team Happiness Net Promoter Score sheet Here's a riff upon the classic Net Promoter Score for measuring team happiness.   "How likely is it that you would recommend our team to a trusted friend that is looking for a job?" To calculate the NPS - the continuum is divided into 3 groups; the detractors (1 - 6), the passive (7 & 8), the promoters (9 & 10).  The passive are ignored - they do not promote your objective.  The NET promoter score is the pe...

Wish there was an App for That! As every cycle passes back through the beginning it must first go through the ending... so let's first see if I made any progress in last year's long forgotten new year's resolution .  It was to create a learning plan and bet back into the beginner's shoes.  To become a newbie on some new tech and experience the frustration and excitement of learning a new tech skill. All in all I did very well.  I did create a learning plan.  And like all plans it was great to have one and worthless after a little bit of learning proved it to be a poor plan (almost like I created it out of ignorance - oh, yeah - I did!).  Yet, it did provide a direction and increased the motivation as I could measure the progress and see where it was directing me in the wrong direction (or a direction I no longer desired to go). I did learn the basics of RubyMotion (an iOS tool chain - development stack for iPhone apps). RubyMotion.com  Ran a f...

A fractal flower pattern I find Scrum practices to be very self-similar at various scales of granularity. For example the Sprint appears to start with a planning sessions. Yet within the flow of a sprinting team the planning sessions actually starts with a Sprint Review and Process Retrospective and only then do we look into the future. So in the big picture, planning starts with review. Just like in the Scrum Standup meeting - the 3 questions - it starts with a review. What did you get done (past tense)? Next, what will you do (future tense)? And last, what impedes your progress (current tense)? The Scrum Standup meeting has a flow of past, future, now. When laid out end to end sprints have a similar pattern: Review & Retro (past), followed by Planning (future), followed by sprinting or doing the work (every day, the now). This self similar pattern can be found in many of the Scrum practices. Practices that mature agile teams use to deliver working tested product increments...

I was in a CMMI adoption process meeting today and I might have argued that the Scrum Retrospective activity (process step) is more important than the Scrum Planning activity.  Yet, know-one took the bait.  What would be a better piece of bait? We were discussing what process steps we should define to meet CMMI something something... and the list on the board look like: Sprint planning backlog grooming release planning project planning risk mitigation planning [note - only one is a Scrum activity] I was trying to point out that as a subset of Scrum practices this list is interesting, yet not sufficient. I believe that planning is way less important that the activity of reflection (learning).  I could refer you to some wonderful quotes by US Army Generals about the uselessness of plans .  But let me skip that meme and jump to the assertion that Retrospectives are more important that planning activities. WHY? Because with just that one practice, Retr...

We were invited to Thomson Reuters for our AgileFest! 2013 planning retrospective.  Derek and Modesto did a wonderful job designing a metaphor board.  We had fun filling it in with concepts, ideas, feelings and reflecting on 3 months of work.  That work resulted in a great day of learning. Get Silverlight and view a PhotoSynth of the Retro board and space. Derek raises an eye at that comment Modesto can see with eyes shut AgileFest Lessons Learned Review