The retrospective prime directive is a sentence that is used by facilitators to establish safety in a retrospective meeting. Safety is crucial if you want people to speak up and be open, which is an important precondition to reflect and learn which is what agile retrospectives are all about. Since our book is being translated into many languages we now have translations of this unique and important statement.
People are often afraid to make mistakes. They do things to prevent that something might go wrong and avoid doing things that might fail. And if it does go wrong then they don't talk about it. Is it really bad if once in a while something goes wrong? If something can go wrong, let arrange for it to happen as soon as possible, because then you can quickly learn from it. Create a culture where failure is allowed so that we can all learn from it and find ways to make fewer mistakes!
Here's a story of a team that had a serious problem which it didn't recognize at first. The story shows that sometimes doing nothing can be the best thing that you can do to implement lasting change in organizations.
Many agile teams are doing retrospectives at the end of their iterations to reflect on their way of working and find things that can be improved. But what if teams are starting up and trying to figure out how to do their work? A futurespective exercise can help teams teams to find ways to reach their goals, agree upon their way of working and define a Definition of Done.
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.
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.
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.
This is a story of how I coach people by "just being there". It describes how I worked with a customers to improve the interworking and communication between people working in different departments.
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.
Op 5 juni 2014 is het boek Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives gepubliceerd, het 1e Nederlandstalige boek met oefeningen voor Retrospectives. Je kunt de Nederlandse uitgave downloaden via Leanpub en Amazon.nl. Het Nederlandstalige boek is ook te koop op benlinders.com als Paperback en op bol.com (paperback/ebook).