Root Cause Analysis

Read more about the article What if we fail?

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!

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Guest blog: Classifying Retrospectives to get the best of it

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.

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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.

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Designing Valuable Agile Retrospectives

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.

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Success Factors for Root Cause Analysis in Software Development

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.

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Asking why?

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.

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Read more about the article Getting to the Root Causes of Problems in a Retrospective: five times why exercise

Getting to the Root Causes of Problems in a Retrospective: five times why exercise

When you have problems that keep coming back in your sprints, you can try the five times why technique. It helps you to get to the root causes of the problems, and to define effective actions that prevent them from happening in future sprints. This is one of the retrospective technique that will be included in the Pocket Book on Agile Retrospectives, your feedback can help us to improve it!

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Read more about the article Do Soft Skills Really Matter in IT?

Do Soft Skills Really Matter in IT?

IT is viewed by many people as being something technical. They have a vision of managers with lot's of plans, documents and spreadsheets, and nerds that are sitting behind their computer doing the "real work". It may be out there, but I don't see it that often. What I see are people working together to deliver software solutions that work, which help their customers in their daily work, and deliver business value to the company. Communication and collaboration are essential to make people and teams successful. So for me, soft skills really matter in IT!

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