New(s)

Courtesy of Brian Marick’s Blog, I took the "What programming language are you?" quiz. I’m delighted to discover that I’m Smalltalk…but I’m not sure I know enough to know why.

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.

Esther Derby shares wisdom about factors to consider when deciding whether to bring a distributed team together for kick-offs, planning and retrospectives. Face-to-face is best, yet leaders find it difficult to quantify the benefits as well as the costs.

Yesterday (March 13) I presented a tutorial at QCon, "Agile Leadership: From Managment that Controls to Management that Facilitates." We had quite a good time in the session which I seeded with a number of appreciative inquiry-style questions for added flavor. The universe rewarded me with an alert to an article by Brian Button in the latest AgileChronicles, The hardest part of being an Agile Project Manager. In it, he beautifully describes an instance of management that facilitates. Thank you, Brian. :-)

It’s Wednesday—the day my automated “to-do” list tells me to write a blog post, if I haven’t already posted one this week. I’m in the middle of a trip to London to speak at Qcon. Traveling to exotic (!) places distracts me from things like writing blog posts. Since the reminder came up, and I noticed I haven’t written one this week, I began to look around.

Luckily, CIO magazine has come to my rescue. Michael Hugos offers his thoughts on A Formula to Measure Business Agility in a link from this week’s CIO Insider email. In...

I started to write a blog post about designing a retrospective flow from an Appreciative Inquiry perspective. My little blog post grew into an article. It's posted on the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference site.

Click to read "An Appreciative Retrospective."

I'm presenting at AYE in November this year. I hope to see you there.

On January 25, Esther and I gave a TechTalk at Google. You can watch it here.

Today someone wrote with an inquiry, "What kinds of questions should one ask when doing a retrospective? What specific areas should a leader think about when drafting a retrospective, regardless of the rest of the format?"

I found this a difficult question to answer, yet I resisted writing back, "It depends." Though it does depend, on a number of factors, but most of all the goal. So, here's what I wrote back to him.

In Agile Retrospectives, Esther and I recommend setting a goal for each retrospective, then tailoring the activities and questions to that goal. Many teams have an...

Two open space conferences in the same week spells heaven to me.

On Tuesday and Wednesday Charlie Poole, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Patrick Logan and I hosted Agile Open Northwest at the Kennedy School in Portland, Oregon .

We had great support from our sponsors the Agile Alliance, InfoQ, SolutionsIQ, PNSQC, Corillian, Net Objectives, Instantiations, Esther Derby Associates, ExtremePlanner, Innovation Frameworks and Jens Ostergaard. We held it at the same hotel where Esther and I have our “Secrets of Agile Teamwork” workshop twice each year. It’s a fun and funky place that stimulates everyone’s creative thinking flow.

Agile practitioners from...

I'm just back from a wonderful time in Taos NM and ready to focus on my professional life again. It's time to send a reminder about a terrific conference coming up later this month.

Agile Open Northwest, an alliance of agile practitioners in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, presents "Agile Open Northwest 2007: Agile for Real" January 30-31, 2007 in Portland, Oregon at McMenamins'

Kennedy School, one of my favorite places.

This conference is for you. We invite 100 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest and beyond to join us in tackling issues around the theme of agile development in the...

As someone who thinks and writes about retrospectives, I sometimes find myself musing on the other half of the bookend...what about at the beginning of things? I think about chartering projects, and project kickoffs and iteration/release planning activities. How can we use what we've learned in our retrospectives to get the next project or increment of work off to the best start.

Today I saw a post on the Open Space mailing list that pointed me to the Anecdote blog from a group in Australia. Shawn writes about Pre-Mortems. It's an unfortunate name ("before death"), but the intent...