How to coach a colleague in three steps

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.

How LeanKit helps it’s teams make effective decisions

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.

Goldilocks Goals: How to keep Retrospectives fresh and engaging

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’.

Making time for Personal Development: Gold Cards

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.

Encouraging convergence: Our project management working agreements

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.

Encouraging convergence: Putting a framework around agile team autonomy

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.

When the going gets tough, don’t cancel the Retro

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.