Standups offer the most benefit when they are kept brief (30-60 seconds per team member) and to the point––sustaining communication about the state of the work. It helps when team members know the questions ahead of time and come prepared to answer them succinctly.
In December, Debbie Madden, from Stride Tech, interviewed Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies, the co-authors of Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams. Debbie called Liftoff (the first edition), “one of my all-time favorite reads.”
Calling all testers and QA focused team members! Have you wondered about how your work and perspectives fit in James Shore and Diana Larsen’s Agile Fluency Model?
At Agile2016, Ainsley Nies and I met with Dave Prior and the LeadingAgile media crew to discuss the newly published second edition of our book, Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams.
Listen in as Diana talks with Mandy Ross of Sococo about the learning process. Part of the Agile Amped: Inspiring Conversation series.
At the Agile Open Northwest Open Space event, Diana Larsen led some discussions about the utilization and evolution of the Agile Fluency model. Afterwards, Diana spoke to InfoQ about her involvement with and contributions to the Agile community over the last 13 years and the fluency model.
Recently, I read an interview between Bernie DeKoven (who has aliases as varied as: Major Fun, The Shaman of Play, and more) and Barry Joseph (Associate Director For Digital Learning, Youth Initiatives, at the American Museum of Natural History). While the whole interview is delightful, and I recommend it, I was particularly struck by the game called “The Out Blessing Game” or “Endless Blessings.”
There’s this thing…as Jim (James Shore) and I have mentioned before, in the early days of Agile we would visit teams and hear, “This is the best job I’ve ever had. I love this work.” People who were doing Agile (usually Extreme Programming) were excited about it, they shared it with others, who did it, and got excited. But at some point, someone shared it with someone who got excited about it and shared it but didn’t DO it, so their sharing lost a bit of fidelity, like a copy of a copy.
We’re happy to announce that FutureWorks Consulting staff, Willem Larsen and Diana Larsen, have published a new book through the innovative, interactive publishing service Leanpub. The Leanpub story is interesting in itself, and we hope you will check it out. But more about the book!
As a leader in your organization, you want to do everything you can to ensure the successful results of your work groups and project teams. You know that investing in a great beginning pays dividends as the work continues.
Why do we use assessment tools?
"The bottom line is that personality matters to individuals because self-understanding allows a person to be strategic about his/her career choices and career development. Personality matters to employers because knowledge about a job applicant's personality allows them to be strategic about the hiring process."
Dr. Robert Hogan
Assessments help your organization increase productivity and maximize performance by hiring the right people, evaluating leadership potential, and developing the talents of key individuals in the specific areas that really matter for success.
Assessments help individual leaders like you understand limitations and strengths and how understanding can bring strategic awareness to...
A question recently came up about how to effectively disband a team – and more to the point, what steps to take to ensure a smooth closure of the team and how to help team members adjust if assigned to another team that did not operate according to agile values and principles.
This is a great question. First off, one must pay attention to the "adjourning" phase of the "-orming" cycle. It helps people move on to their next work assignment and gives team members a chance to say "farewell" to each other in a good way.
Bruce Tuckman, professor of...
Many leaders focus on improving productivity and performance. Leaders who support regular retrospectives gain an effective organizational learning tool that guides project teams (and ongoing work groups) to reflect on their technical, human and organizational systems that affect performance. A well-facilitated retrospective gathers together significant project stakeholders (including the development team members and other critical players) to review their project experience, learn from the experience, and take action to improve - in the next iteration, the next release, and for all future projects.
Does your organization utilize retrospectives as part of its project management goals? If not, here are some simple...
Every time I ask about team’s challenges with retrospectives, a recurring theme comes up: Acting on Actions. I hear, “Our team doesn’t follow through on our plans for action.” Or I hear, “Our team never identifies improvement actions.” Both are retrospective “smells.”
Diana has written previously about the Human Systems Dynamics Institute and their excellent program that provides models and methods for dealing with our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world of complex adaptive human systems. In this post she focuses on the HSD Adaptive Action model and its unexpected connection to retrospectives:
In 2006 Esther and I introduced a Flexible Framework for Agile Retrospectives, a series of stages for designing effective retrospectives: Set the Stage; Gather Data; Generate Insights; Decide What to Do; and Close the Retrospective. We recommended a recurring cycle of retrospectives after each iteration as a process for the team to "reflect, tune and adjust", as the Agile Manifesto principle decrees.