I continually look for new ways to gather data in iteration retrospectives. My goal is to find activities that encourage team members to think deeply about the story of their project while keeping an eye on the time budget. Timelines are a great tool for data gathering, yet they may take longer than many teams can afford in a 60-90 minute retrospective. The standard “what worked well/what shall we do differently” is short, but really takes the team directly into analysis, bypassing data gathering. Here’s an idea for a new activity I call FRIM (FRequency/IMpact).
In FRIM, the team writes...
While skimming through some old files in my office the other day, I came upon a reprint of a Harvard Business Review article from January 1999, titled, “Organizing for Empowerment: An Interview with AES's Roger Sant and Dennis Bakke”. Sant and Bakke ran AES, a global power company. The article discusses the unusual way the two men viewed their business (Sant has since retired and Bakke has opened a consulting firm).
In the article, a number of Sant’s remarks relate to retrospectives, empowered work and agile projects. Two of my favorites:
“People always say they don’t have time to...
Brad Appleton wrote a pleasing review of Agile Retrospectives in the April 7 issue of Agile Journal online. Thanks, Brad! :-)
When I hear or read someone say they find the book useful or that they have it sitting on their desk and the pages have become dog-eared, I get a little frisson of joy. Luckily, that's happening fairly often these days.
June is only two months away and with it comes the next edition of our Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills workshop. For more information, see the link in the Events section just to the right of this post.
Esther Derby and I continue to inspect and adapt this workshop with each public and private group. It gets better every time, so you have the chance to attend the best one so far!
June Kim posted a message on the extremeprogramming list which included a graph about work hours and productivity. She created the graph from data she found in two wikipedia articles about work.