Ever been sat in a 1 to 1 meeting with one of your team and felt like you were struggling to concentrate on them - unable to really listen to what they had to say or explore their problem with them? Well, I have. So, I’ve experimented with going for a walk during these "catch-up" sessions. It’s been great.
The need to inspect and adapt is the fundamental concept at the centre of the agile software development movement. However, it often seems that the drive to inspect and adapt is only deliberately applied to what we build and not how we build. This means how a team works together, how they use the technologies at their disposal and how they apply processes can go unimproved.
Everyone in the workplace would benefit from having coaching techniques in their toolbox. Coaching is a great practice to apply when a colleague is stuck or struggling with a task, problem or new challenge. Here's how to coach a colleague in three simple steps.
I attended an excellent talk by Jon Terry, the CEO of LeanKit, who talked about the approach LeanKit took to help their teams stay lean and make good decisions as they grew from a small start-up to a medium-sized enterprise.
One way to keep Retrospectives fresh is to set explicit goals for each session. However, just choosing a goal isn’t quite enough. You want to choose a Goldilocks Goal that opens up the discussion 'just right'.
At the beginning of 2015 I got the development teams in my corner of Redgate together to explore the results of an annual company health survey. Amongst the feedback we’d received in the survey was a clear consensus that team members found it difficult to make time for person development activities.
We've created a set of "working agreements", which call out best practices and common aims we have, with a view to embedding these in all projects in the division and encouraging consistency.
Over the years, our development teams have evolved, disbanded and been created. Most of the time, each team has been given full autonomy over how they work. We have ended up with is a collection of teams with disparate approaches to the same mission - creating great software.
If times are tough on an agile project, whatever you do, don't cancel the Retrospective meeting. If you think that having the team in a meeting room for one hour every two weeks is going to make your project fail, then it's going to fail anyway.
This Wednesday, one of the teams I work with shipped a new version of their product - the DLM Dashboard - for the 10th Wednesday in a row. That's 10 releases in the 10 weeks we've had of 2015 so far. Which is pretty cool.
Leading Agile Teams 