Valuable Agile Retrospectives at Agile Tour Lille
I will give a talk at Agile Tour Lille 2015 on the Why, What and How of Agile Retrospectives. Agile Tour Lille is a part of the Global Agile Tour.
The Need for Continuous Improvement in Agile
I gave a well received keynote at the QCon Beijing conference, in which I explained why continuous improvement is essential to deliver value with agile. QCon Beijing was the largest QCon conference so far with over 1600 attendants.
What if we fail?
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!
Guest blog: Retrospective Doughnut! A fun way to measure team’s response to Retrospectives.
Retrospective Doughnuts can be used to make the adoption rate of retrospectives and the value that they deliver visible. This support organizations in using retrospectives to establish a routine feedback loop leading to continuous improvement. A guest blog post from Mukyul Vyas.
A Retrospective of 2014 and Futurespective of 2015
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.
Spice up your Agile Retrospectives
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.
Retrospective Exercise: Vital Few Actions
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.
We Want Agile Processes
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.
Self-assessing How Agile You Are
Do your teams want to know how agile they are? And what could be the possible next steps for them to become more agile and lean? In an open space session about Agile Self-Assessments organized by nlScrum we discussed why self-assessments matter and how teams can self-assess their agility to become better in what they do.
Agile Veranderen door sterktes te gebruiken
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!
Wat brengt 2014 ons? Agile en Lean!
Een nieuw jaar is begonnen. 2013 was een jaar met mooie resultaten met Agile, verbetering, workshops, advies en de publicatie van mijn 1e boek over retrospectives. Wat gaat 2014 ons brengen? Voorspellen is lastig, vooral als het om de toekomst gaat :-) Daarom geen voorspellingen, we gaan het gewoon doen: Meer resultaten met Agile en Lean!
Working in a Sustainable Pace
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.