Organizations want to have insight in the values that Agile can bring to them. They want to know if and how Agile can help to satisfy customer needs more quickly, and what they can do to increase productivity and reduce development and operations costs. It is important to know the value that Agile can deliver and to be able to measure it. At the event Impact and Value of Agile, organized by the Agile Consortium, I presented the State of Affairs in Agile Value creation.
In December 2013 we published Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives: a pocket book full of Retrospective Exercises. More than 1000 readers have downloaded this book in the first five months after publication from Leanpub and many more have downloaded it from InfoQ: there are 5000++ readers worldwide of our book on Valuable Agile Retrospectives. A big thanks to all of our readers!
As a retrospective facilitator it's important to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises which you can use to design a retrospective. Before having a retrospective meeting, you want to prepare yourself by considering which exercises would be most suitable. That depends on the team, the situation at hand, and on what the team would like to work on. Here are some tips for designing valuable agile retrospectives that help addressing specific situations.
Veranderingen zijn volop gaande in zowat elke organisatie, van kleine veranderingen in werkwijzen tot aan meer fundamentele verandering in houding en gedrag. Dergelijke veranderingen vragen om een lerende organisatie, waar wenbaarheid en aanpassing aan nieuwe omstandigheden centraal staat. In deze gastblog laat Eveline Jansen zien wat leidinggevenden kunnen doen om hun mensen makkelijker door verandering te loodsen, door slim gebruik te maken van de werking van het brein.
There are organizations which think that Agile or Scrum can be the solution to solve all IT problems that they have. Senior management has decided that their whole organization has to become agile. To realize that they demand that all existing (waterfall) processes will be replaced by Agile processes. Even if they succeed to do that (which is often not the case) they are usually not getting the expected business benefits out of Agile. Replacing processes doesn't make an organization Agile.
In an ideal world agile teams are working with one product owner or customer. But there are also teams which have more than one customer, maybe even multiple product owners. Due to that all the team members are often not working together on a daily base. Is it useful for such teams to do a retrospective together? How can they define actions that will be beneficial for the complete team?
Our book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives has reached 500 readers on Leanpub. There are also many more readers that have downloaded our book from InfoQ. Readers have rated our book 4.6 out of 5 on Goodreads. A big THANKS to all of our readers from Leanpub and from InfoQ: having so many readers interested in doing Valuable Agile Retrospectives makes use very happy!
Veel van mijn artikelen gaan over verbeteringen om sneller de juiste producten en diensten met goede kwaliteit aan klanten te leveren. Verbeteren doe je niet door een doel te stellen. Een CMMI niveau is geen effectief verbeterdoel. Wat wel werkt is regelmatig reflecteren en met de feedback continu verbeteren in kleine stapjes. Kanban en Retrospectives zijn effectieve manieren om dat te doen.
We werken steeds vaker samen en delen daarbij onze kennis en ervaringen met anderen. Effectieve samenwerken vraag om een cultuur met openheid, vertrouwen, respect en waardering en een mindset dat samenwerken kan en moet. We gaan het gewoon doen in 2014: Samen waarde aan klanten leveren!
Root Cause Analysis can be used in software development to build a shared understanding of a problem to determine the first or “root” causes. Knowing these causes helps to identify effective improvement actions to prevent similar problems in the future. You can also do Root Cause Analysis in agile to stop problems that have been bugging your team for too long.
De trend die ik in 2013 heb gezien van kleinere en snellere verbeteringen in organisaties zal zich doorzetten in 2014. Een Agile manier van veranderen, mbv Scrum, maakt het mogelijk om samen te verbeteren: medewerkers en managers. Het stimuleert zelf-organisatie en benut de kracht van de medewerkers om organisatiedoelen te bereiken. We gaan het gewoon doen in 2014: Sterktes gebruiken om op een Agile manier te veranderen!
The Perfection Game can be used to get feedback on a product or service that has been provided. It is also a retrospective exercise usable to discover strengths and define effective improvement actions. The perfection game gives power to the teams and helps them to self organize and become more agile.