So you explained to your team how to do X – where X is a certain agile practice you believe it will be very helpful for them – and they learned and implemented it quite well and you were so proud of the way you convinced them to change their habits until… they don’t! And … Read more
So you’re out in the field trying to change companies by “coaching them to agile”, do you? Are you sure this is possible at all? If yes, then this article is not for you yet: please come back when you are doubting. The assumption this article is based on is that we’re not sure whether … Read more
While reflecting on my recent activities, I started to recognise an interesting pattern regarding the role of the Product Owner. I’ve seen many of them coming from different parts of the organisations: form product management, from various levels of management, from system architecture or senior programmers. Because of the different skill sets they have, the … Read more
In my work very often I stress the role of the observer: it’s a vital one when practicing coaching techniques and it’s an incredibly useful tool to use in every coaching activity. In the workshop I delivered at the Turku Agile Day together with Mike Sutton, we stressed the importance of the Observer role in … Read more
I reckon on the subject of games I am at the border of the agile community: agile games are very spread among my colleague coaches, more than what I use them, and, from a purely informal and statistically not relevant poll I made, it seems that many agile coaches… run games with their teams on … Read more
At the Scandinavian Developer Conference I presented today some concepts useful for coaching at the organisational level. The basic idea behind this presentation is that thinking about agile at the team level is a necessary step, but not the only one needed in order to create an agile organisation. In a parallel presentation I argued … Read more
Here another “service post” to distribute the slides of the Soft Skills Essentials presentation, this time in the form Yves Hanoulle (twitter: @YvesHanoulle) and I presented it at the Mini-XP Days Benelux in Mechelen, a summary of the best presentations of last year’s XP Days Benelux. The presentation is basically as the Turku Agile Day, … Read more
Here are the slides of today’s keynote I delivered together with Mike Sutton (@mhsutton) at the Turku Agile Day to a very engaged audience: thank you for the fun! Click on the button to load the content from de.slideshare.net. Load content For the bibliography, please refer to this post…
Today, together with Mike Sutton (Twitter: @mhsutton), I ran a workshop called “New Tools of the Craft” at the Turku Agile Day. Here are the slides we showed and a selected bibliography… Click on the button to load the content from de.slideshare.net. Load content Yes And… This is a concept coming from the Improvisation Theatre. … Read more
Suppose you need to choose the ScrumMaster for your team and there is no “natural” candidate available. Suppose you have two alternatives who could do the job, but you are not sure who fits best? I got a similar question proposed some time ago by one of my customers. Instead of giving my answer, I … Read more
If you have followed my blog, you know that I am somewhat critic of root cause analysis like the “5 Whys“, especially when applied to non-purely-technical issues. On the other hand I am actually pretty much in favour of more systemic tools like the Cause-Effect Diagrams and the Thinking Process, despite the risk of using … Read more
Last week, together with Yves Hanoulle (twitter: @YvesHanoulle), I presented again “Soft Skills Essentials for Software Craftsmen”, this time at XPDays Benelux. Here are the slides: Click on the button to load the content from de.slideshare.net. Load content As usual at XPDays Benelux, the audience was very mature and interested in these topics (in the … Read more
Agile has been a refreshing wind of change in the software development world. A very much needed one, actually. Yet, I believe these days a big part of the agile community is stuck in a cul-de-sac called the teams! What’s wrong with teams? Nothing really. Except that… they are just a model! A team is … Read more
Here’s a short post just to publish the slides I presented today at the WebExpo in Prague. Click on the button to load the content from de.slideshare.net. Load content If you weren’t there and, as such, you haven’t the audio that comes with these, the presentation has been video recorded and will be available on … Read more
As you have probably noticed – in case you did not fall asleep while reading these pages – I am a strong believer in the solution focused approach and I wrote already several articles about it (see this and this and this). The approach generated interest in many of my peers, so over time I … Read more