Working with remote teams is becoming a common thing. Where there are clear advantages to this it also has its challenges. One of them is building a relationship with people in remote teams, which is very important to make it work. Here are some ideas how you can do this.
The presentation from the keynote that I gave on February 15 at 1stConf about The Need for Continuous Improvement in Agile is now available. It has been published on my presentations page.
Retrium published the ebook Become a Retrospective Rockstar in which 21 experts share tips on how to make retrospectives successful. My tip is this book is about Getting Things Done with Retrospectives. It describes the Vital Few Actions exercise which helps to make you retrospective more actionable and thus valuable.
At the start of an agile retrospective you can do a safety check by asking people to write down how safe they feel in the retrospective. If the score indicates that people feel unsafe, then that will have serious impact on the retrospective. Here are some suggestions how you can deal with this when facilitating retrospectives.
Although the steps described in the series of posts on dealing with impediments sound rather straightforward and easy, solving impediments is often perceived as stressful and difficult by many people. In the previous posts I described how you can recognize and understand impediments, find effective solutions, and decide what to do to solve them. This last post explores what you can do to become more effective in dealing with impediments.
People often ask me what to do to prevent that teams get bored when doing agile retrospectives for a longer period. The short answer is: Make sure that you are getting value from doing your retrospectives. 5 practical tips that will assure that you keep getting value from your agile retrospectives.
After you've come up with several solutions to deal with an impediment, the next step is to decide which actions you will do with your team to solve it. Let's dive into who decides to take action and explore different approaches for how agile teams can decide.
I will be doing two more workshops in Sydney during my Australian tour in February: Workshop Increasing Organisational Agility with Retrospectives on February 11 Workshop Getting More out of Agile and Lean on February 12 Next to Sydney I'm also visiting Melbourne on my Australian tour. I will give a keynote at 1stConf about The Need for Continuous Improvement in Agile and three workshops in Melbourne: Workshop Getting more out of Agile and Lean on February 16 Workshop Valuable Agile Retrospectives for Teams on February 18 Workshop Increasing Organisational Agility with Retrospectives on February 19 The workshops are done in collaboration with Elabor8. You can enter “thinksharp” at checkout to receive a discount on my workshops :-). Your can register yourself for the 1stConf and sign up for the workshops on eventbrite. If you want to know more about this workshop or any other workshops or training sessions, feel free to contact me. +31 6 2901 3863 [email protected] Ben Linders
Do you want multiple copies of our ebook Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives? For every member of your team, the whole department or company? Or to use it at school or at your university for students to learn about doing valuable retrospectives. You can now get multiple copies by buying an ebook package on Leanpub. (more…)
A chapter about Sustainable Pace has been added to my new book Continuous Improvement – Doing whatever helps to become better and thus more valuable: Agile promotes that teams work in a sustainable pace to deliver value to their customers. When teams are working under too much pressure, technical debt will increase and velocity of teams will go down. Under such circumstances it will be almost impossible to do any improvement. A sustainable pace is an essential condition to enable team to improve continuously. This book is about increasing the awareness of continuous improvement and about how to improve in a sustainable way. It explores how improvement is engrained in agile, and provides suggestions that you can use in your daily work to improve continuously and increase your agility. Continuous Improvement is my third book. Earlier I published the books What Drives Quality and Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives. All of my books are available on Ben Linders’…
2016 has started, my wish for everybody is to make it a great year. So let’s focus on doing real improvement to make it happen!
Several workshops on agile retrospectives and increasing agile value have been planned in 2016. (more…)
In the previous posts in the series on handling impediments I explored why agile teams need to be able to deal with impediments, how you can recognize problems and what you can do to get a shared understanding of a problem in the team. This post will explain how you can find effective solution for solving impediments.