Yesterday Martin Heider and I moderated a German version of The Bottleneck Game at the Java Users Group Erlangen-Nürnberg. The game simulates a production line that is improved by applying the 5 focussing steps from the Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu Goldratt. Here are the slides from the session: You are currently viewing a placeholder … Read more
So the definition of done of a Scrum team is sick and you, dear agile coach, are intervening on the team to get them to fix it. Easy, isn’t it? Either you tackle the issue during a retrospective or on in ad-hoc discussion, point out the symptoms, ask the team how they plan to fix … Read more
Here’s a metaphor I use often when coaching people. It is called the lifetree and I use it as a tool to raise awareness of the resources of the past and the possible futures and to identify strengths and weaknesses and learning paths. It has a lot of applications in career coaching and in coaching … Read more
In the previous post I was mentioning that a company culture is anyway emergent and what emerges cannot really be predicted, but can be influenced in many different ways. Here’s one way to do that, which I found very useful when working with agile teams. A big part of the agility is based on values … Read more
One thing to consider when you start your next organisational improvement campaign, be it introducing agile, improving your agile practices or, in fact, any sort of change you want: you are not in control of what happens. You never were. You never will. No matter how much the official org chart of your company claims … Read more
During my presentation about Solution Focused work in Agile at XPDays Benelux I stated that asking “why” in coaching can be dangerous and should be avoided. In a community where the Five Whys is actually one of the premier methods, I knew I was opening up for a lot of discussions. Exactly this happened and … Read more
Last week I was at the XPDays Benelux conference where I presented a session about Solution Focused work in agile. The session was attended in the morning of the first day by about 40 people and, as there was a lot of interest around it, I re-made most of it in the evening for an … Read more
For various reasons since a few years ago Benelux was more an intermediate stop on a business trip rather than a real destination, but recently this has changed: after the Agile Open Holland in Baarn, about which I already wrote, I went again to that part of the world for an agile event: XPDays Benelux … Read more
Last Friday I went for my first time to the Italian Agile Day, a day of full-immersion in the world of the Italian Agile community, even free as it’s autofinanced through donations. This event has grown significantly over the last years, peaking in 400 people attendance last year. Hosted in a very modern hotel in … Read more
Almost every day you will notice that the existing set of rules, procedures, process, etc. you normally use in your work is not enough. What do you do then? Will you add a new rule or will you delete one? Way too often we take the existing set of rules for granted, a sort of … Read more
Have you ever wondered what makes Agile so special and so productive? My guess would be because it closes loops and allows fast and useful feedback. Extreme Programming is all about feedback, openly stated: pair programming, regression testing, continuous integration are all ways of generating the right feedback. Scrum is also based on feedback loops: … Read more
Last Thursday and Friday, Sept. 10th and 11th, about 70 agile fans met in Baarn, Holland, for the Agile Open 2009 edition. The open space event was organised by Agile Holland in the premises of VxCompany: a very nice location logistically as close to perfect for this type of events as I’ve seen to date, … Read more
I was at a conference recently, following a project manager’s presentation about the project he was leading. The show was very professional, though skewed to provide a good image of both the presenter and the company he is working for. After just a few minutes into it, I felt lost in his words. I went … Read more
There are a lot of people out there calling themselves “Agile Coach”. I’m one of them as well. But what are we exactly? What is our role in an organisation? What value do we bring each day we work with software teams? Well, googling brings no further: an Agile coach is, for some, a facilitator/mentor, … Read more
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