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’.

Down with the annual appraisal!

Applying agile to people management As we near the end of the year, people managers across the world will be aware of the looming, ominous shadow of a well-known nemesis – the annual appraisal process. In a vain attempt to avoid identification, this sinister entity also goes by the name ‘end of year review’. In either case, […]

Five steps to an effective sprint retrospective

In a typical agile software development process, sprint retrospectives are meetings run at the end a development iteration. In those sessions the team looks back on what they have done and how they have done it, and decides what they can do to improve. More succinctly, the team inspect and adapt. In my experience, sprint […]

Visualizing team work: Physical Taskboards vs Virtual Taskboards

I’m a project manager, so unsurprisingly I can find myself in animated conversations with other project managers regarding how best to manage the work that our team members are doing. We all have our favourite techniques and methods, but the process generally starts with making the work each member of the team is planning to […]