This is the first blog post of a series on handling impediments in agile teams. It explores why being able to deal with impediments matters for agile teams and provides a basic "process" for effectively dealing with them.
Effective agile teams are able to decide how to do their work, and to continuously learn and improve their way of working. Team working enables them to deliver high quality software that satisfies the needs of their customers.
Continuous improvement requires that people reflect and find ways to do their work in a better way. Having diversity in agile teams makes it possible to discover and explore new ways of working, where uniform teams with identical kinds of people would aim for steadiness and don't want things to change. Let's explore how you diversity can enable continuous improvement using agile retrospectives.
In February 2016 I will be giving three workshops in Melbourne Australia, one on continuous improvement and two on agile retrospectives. The workshop are organized by Elabor8 who invited me to come to Australia: We are extremely excited to have Ben Linders over from Europe for a series of workshops in February. Ben is the co-author of "Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives"and is a regular keynote conference speaker (including Agile Greece Summit 2015 and QCon Beijing 2015). I will give the following workshops: Getting More out of Agile and Lean on Tuesday February 16 Valuable Agile Retrospectives (beginners) on Thursday February 18 Valuable Agile Retrospectives (advanced) on Friday February 19 The workshops are held in the Elabor8 offices at 455 Bourke Street. Level 7 , Melbourne, VIC 3000 AU, Australia. Ticket sale has started, you can register yourself at the Elabor8 Eventbrite events page.
In this workshop you will learn how to scale agile retrospectives, doing them with multiple teams from a project, product or organization, practice facilitation skills with different retrospective exercises, and learn how you can introduce and improve retrospectives. You will also learn to do agile self-assessments and readiness checks and to design and facilitate retrospectives that help organizations to increase their agility.
In this workshop you will learn different exercises that you can use to facilitate retrospectives, supported with the “what” and “why” of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they can bring you.
Attend my workshop Getting More out of Agile & Lean in Melbourne, Australia to learn practices for teams and their stakeholders to develop the right products, deliver faster, increase quality, and create happy high performing teams.
In 1980 Philip Crosby wrote the book Quality is Free. In the book he explained how investing time and energy in building the right products with good quality will save money and time. Many agile teams know how important software quality is, but they need to convince their managers and other stakeholders to get there. It will help them to self-organize and do their work in a good way. Let's explore how you can sell that "quality is free" and build a business case for quality.
The successful book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives is being translated to many languages. We are starting up new teams and looking for people who want to help us translating our book to Turkish, Greek or Romanian. Will you help us?
The book No Estimates - How to measure project progress without estimating by Vasco Duarte from Oikosofy has been released. Three different packages are available: Only the book, the book with additional video interviews with #NoEstimates pioneers and an "all you can eat digital edition".
We can learn from failures, from our mistakes; that is something we all know. But we can also learn from things that go well. Here's an example of a team that explored how they succeeded in delivering their project on time against their expectation and used their learnings to improve, and a couple of techniques and exercises that you can use in retrospectives to learn from things that go well.
Een sterk punt van een agile aanpak is dat dat er in korte cycli, z.g. iteraties of sprints (Scrum) gewerkt wordt, en er steeds feedback momenten zijn. Het cyclisch werken met feedback zorgt ervoor dat het proces bewaakt kan worden, en informatie uit de feedback helpt om continue de agile werkwijze te verbeteren. Dit artikel beschrijft welke feedback er in agile is en hoe je die feedback effectief kunt benutten.