Good coaching addresses the challenges many organizations face when adopting Agile ways of working, including Scrum implementation. Let's explore why you would need coaching and what it can accomplish, and what you can do to develop agile coaching in your organization. As an example, I will share how I have developed my coaching skills during the years.
I'm pleased to announce the publication of our book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives: A Toolbox of Retrospective Exercises! With plenty of exercises for your personal retrospective toolbox, Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives will help you to become more proficient in doing retrospectives and to get more out of them.
Agile promotes that teams work in a sustainable pace, delivering value for their customers. When teams are working under too much pressure, technical debt will increase and velocity of teams will go down. Agile retrospectives can help you to discover the causes of pressure, and to take actions to reach a sustainable pace with your teams.
Buy-in from professionals is crucial to make changes succeed in organizations. Many improvement programs fail when professionals are insufficiently involved during the changes. Agile retrospectives can be used to do continuous and lasting improvements in organizations.
Adopting retrospectives is an organizational change where professionals adapt their way of working, their behavior. It won't just happen, and if not properly supported it may take much time, or even fail. You have to make clear what the purpose of retrospectives, and set up a team of capable retrospective facilitators. Then start doing them with your agile teams, and reflect on how they are going. This will get retrospectives introduced and accepted by your teams, leading to continuous improvement!
Agile projecten gebruiken vaak retrospectives, waarin ze vragen stellen zoals: 'wat gaat er goed', en 'wat kan beter'? Met het eerste gebeurd vaak niet zoveel. 'Leuk om te horen' is de reactie. Een gemiste kans! Want weten wat er goed gaat en begrijpen waarom, de onderliggende sterktes, kan je helpen om dingen te verbeteren die (nog) niet goed gaan.
Software development organizations need to become more agile and lean, to deliver products that satisfy the needs of their customers. An agile approach where you change your way of working in small directed steps is often the most effective way to implement agile. Are you ready to go on an Agile trip?
Agile retrospectives can be used by teams to inspect and adapt the way of working. Here's an introduction to agile retrospectives, to help you to get started with them.
Another technique for Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives is "Asking Why?". "Why" is one of the most valuable question that I use in retrospectives. It gives insight in peoples behavior and their feelings and motives that drive them, helps to find root causes of problems, and reveal the strengths that people have. And helps teams to see common goals, and find ways to collaboratively reach them.
The book Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister has been released in a 3rd edition, and the topics addressed in it are still very important. Software development is about people: when, how and where they can work together. If you truly are concerned with people, and looking for ways to improve how you collaboratively develop and deliver software, then this book is a must read.
What can agile projects do to improve collaboration between teams, and increase their contributions in the project? Doing retrospectives of retrospectives is a way to share learnings across a project, and to solve problems that a project is facing.
Als een een probleem moet worden opgelost bedenkt men vaak zelf iets nieuws Leren van collega’s gebeurd te weinig. Waarom zijn nog steeds zoveel mensen bezig om het wiel opnieuw uit te vinden? Er zijn wielen zat, in alle soorten en maten, dus laten we ze (her)gebruiken om ermee te gaan rijden!