2014 was a great year for me. I've helped organization to effectively deploy Agile and Lean and improve their ways of working, my first book became a bestseller and I've inspired professionals all around the world by sharing useful knowledge and experience on my blog and via InfoQ. Let's reflect on what 2014 has brought and do a futurespective to visualize the opportunities of 2015.
When you are working with an agile team where people are not co-located you still want to do valuable agile retrospectives. As gathering everybody in one location for the retrospective is not feasible, you need to take a different approach. The dispersed team questions retrospective exercise is a variant of the questions-based retrospective for teams consisting of members working from different locations, for example team members working from home or working in different offices, countries or even continents.
Retrospective is a special time dedicated to analyse the strength and weakness of the teamwork process. There is already some well known tools used to animate this meeting and we tend to use often the same kind of exercise, which can lead to demotivation among the team members and to the feeling of not being able to improve anything anymore. We need to go back to the initial goal of the retrospective : getting better together, by using the collective intelligence and by ensuring the involvement of every team member as much in the creative process as in its application.
I'm blogging to share my learnings to help my readers to learn and become better in what they are doing. This blog is on the Top 100 agile blog list. It feels great to be among the worlds top blogs on software development, a big thanks to all my readers who made this possible! Success doesn't come for free, I've learned along the way how to become better in blogging by doing it and reflecting. If you want to get your blog on the 100+ top agile blogs list, here are 5 tips to improve your blog and get more happy readers.
In the mini-workshop Experience new exercises to spice up your agile retrospective #RetroValue that I gave at Lean Kanban France teams experienced three different retrospectives exercises. They learned how retrospectives can help them to gain deeper insight in their situation and came up with actions to deal with problems and improve their performance.
There is a danger with retrospectives that teams will end up just going through the motions and not use the valuable material to identify whether the actions agreed at the end of the retrospective are actually making an impact on the team’s capability to improve. Furthermore, the chances are that in a multi-team environment, there are common themes raised that if highlighted early, can aid a new team when starting up – learn from others misfortune! Following the Agile philosophy of transparency, here at the UK Ministry of Justice we have been using Wordles to really get the key messages across in a clear manner.
The aim of an agile retrospective is to define actions for the next iteration that will improve the way of working and help teams to deliver more value to their customers. This retrospective exercise can be used within agile frameworks like Scrum, SAFe, XP or Kanban to have teams agree upon the vital few improvement actions that they will do.
Agile werken kan je helpen om organisatiedoelen te bereiken. Agile tot een doel verheffen werkt meestal niet, het doel is om resultaten te bereiken, niet om agile te worden. Het is belangrijk om goed te weten waarom je de agility van je organisatie wilt vergroten en wat je met een agile werkwijze verwacht te bereiken.
When an organization is experiencing quality problems with their products, agile software development often isn't the first solution that comes up in people's minds. Often I see people trying to address them using classical waterfall based approaches, only to find out that it will make problems even worse. I recommend agile, not only to deliver working software faster but also with the right quality. This posts shows how empowering the team helps to increase the quality of product.
Agile Retrospectives help teams to continuously improve to become better in what they do. As they are a learning experience for the team the atmosphere in a retrospective meeting is usually positive. But when there have been major problems in an iteration, maybe even conflicts between team members, then team morale can be low and negativism can occur in the retrospective meeting. This is the story of how a reader of our book on Valuable Agile Retrospectives dealt with negative issues in his retrospective.
Op 1 september organiseren Agile Holland en het Agile Consortium de meetup Real Agile Delivers Real Value . Tijdens dit event worden twee boeken gepresenteerd: This is Agile door auteur Sander Hoogendoorn en Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives door auteur Ben Linders. Het 1e Nederlandstalige boek over Agile Retrospectives kun je nu met korting kopen!
The book Management 3.0 workout by Jurgen Appelo provides many practices, games and tools that enable organizations to improve the way they manage themselves and how they treat and support their employees. Where Management 3.0 already provides the backgrounds and insights on better management, this new book gives concrete examples on how to implement it.