As I surf the web-o-sphere, I continually look for clues and keys to effective collaboration for teams. This morning I found Power of Two on Wray Herbert's blog We're only human .
In this post, Herbert muses on Seinfeld's Close Talker and other social skills and points us to a new book by Daniel Goldman.
At a recent users group meeting, I heard about a retrospective activity someone created. It wasn't an activity I would use as described (which is why I'm not more specific about who and where), but I thought it had possibilities. It's based on the idea of asking team members to write thoughts on index cards anonymously.
I've seen a number of variations on this theme. One I've led many times at the start of a retrospective I call "Sense of the Room" (included below).
This new activity lends itself to the Gathering Data focus of a retrospective. For want of a better...
My theory which is mine. (Thank you Monty Python.)
It's only a theory and I haven't developed a test for it yet. Though I'd like some suggestions on how to do so.
My theory is: iterative development + daily stand-up meetings + frequent retrospectives +a culture that supports learning = eventual invention of a home-grown fully Agile approach.
The extended version: IF you have a project and a project team in an organizational culture that supports learning, and IF the project team is made up of people of good will, doing their "prime directive best"* on an ongoing basis,...
Once again you have the opportunity to attend the workshop, "Secrets of Agile Teamwork: Beyond Technical Skills" in Portland, Oregon, December 5-7. For more about the workshop and a downloadable registration form, please look in the Events section of this blog. (See that sidebar over there?)
This will be the fourth time Esther and I have presented the workshop as an open-to-the-public event. It's a workshop for anyone who leads Agile teams--anytime. We work from the central premise that highly performing, agile, and/or self-organizing teams thrive on leadership that emerges on demand, which includes informal and formal leadership roles....
Yesterday I had the opportunity to lead a retrospective for the last class session of a new course at Portland State University. Jim Shore and Andrew Black put together a four week, 11 session (7 classes and 4 labs), course on Extreme Programming for twelve enthusiastic students - a few undergraduates, a few graduates students, a few students from local industry. As the last day, they hosted Ward Cunningham in the morning, showed demos of their work over a pizza lunch, and ended the course with a retrospective. Jim and Andrew craftily persuaded several local Agilistas (like Ward, Arlo Belshee...