Agile retrospectives help teams to learn from how they are doing and find ways to improve themselves. In stead of learning from what went wrong, from problems, mistakes or failures, teams can also learn from things that went well, by asking strength-based questions in their retrospectives. Such questions will help them to use their existing skills and experience to become great in doing things that they are already good at.
To make Agile work organizations have to establish and develop self organizing teams. In many organizations, "command and control" management is a common practice when they start implementing agile practices. Coaching a team to become self organized can be a challenge for Scrum masters. Here are some tips for doing it.
Teams can improve their way of working by exploring their strengths using a core qualities exercise in their agile retrospectives. The exercise described in this blog post, which is based on ideas from positive psychology and Solution Focused, helps team to become even better in things that they are great at. It enables them to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.
When a client asks for a training session, most often the full content of the training is discussed and defined up front. With one client that wanted a week of training I took a different approach. The client an I used a backlog to prioritize training sessions and workshops. We only planned the first days, and reflected and adjusted the training every day of the week. This is a story of how I collaborated with a client in an agile way to ensure that they would get the biggest possible benefit out of a training week that I delivered to them.
One of the principles from agile and lean software development is transparency. Making things visible helps teams to decide what to do and to collaborate effectively with their stakeholders. It can also help to increase the quality of software. This post provides ideas how you can do that.
Agile verandertrajecten worden veelal top down uitgevoerd in organisaties. Zulke trajecten kosten veel tijd en energie van het management en de medewerkers, duren lang, en leveren vaak niet de verwachte voordelen op: de organisatie wordt er niet echt agile van. Een bottom up aanpak, gedreven vanuit de medewerkers, kan ervoor zorgen dat een organisatie sneller en blijvend hun agility verhoogt.
More and more organizations are implementing agile with Scrum. They define teams and assign Scrum masters to the teams to start working agile and become self-organized. Although agile looks easy, to implement the Scrum master role often turns out to be problematic. Let's discuss what makes it so difficult to work with full-time Scrum masters and explore the alternative of having technical people taking the Scrum master role.
In this guest blog post on BenLinders.com David Horowitz, CEO and Co-Founder of Retrium, explores why you should do continuous agile retrospectives and how you can do them to establish continuous improvement.
Do you have the same person acting as a Scrum master for every iteration in your team(s)? Or do different team members take the role on turns? I'd like to hear how you do it, what works for you, and why.
The Leanpub bundle Agile Retrospectives offers great books to do amazing Agile Retrospectives. Together these books will make your Agile retrospectives rock! Teams will love to do them :-) And now you can get these books with a significant discount :-).
I sometimes hear of teams that have stopped doing retrospectives because they didn't see any improvements. When I talk with them it often turns out that they didn't have good actions coming out of the retrospectives, or that the actions weren't done and kept coming back in the retrospective. No actions leads to no improvement. Here are some suggestions on what you can do to assure that you will have actions from retrospectives that are doable and that those actions get done.
The retrospective prime directive is a sentence that is used by facilitators to establish safety in a retrospective meeting. Safety is crucial if you want people to speak up and be open, which is an important precondition to reflect and learn which is what agile retrospectives are all about. Since our book is being translated into many languages we now have translations of this unique and important statement.