Pierluigi’s Agile Blog
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
I recently had a situation where two teams based in two different locations had to start working together on a project. While waiting for a planned face to face meeting between them, I used the following technique to prepare each team for the upcoming meeting. When establishing a new co-operation with another team, each team … Read more
This is a short post to share the slides of the presentation I gave today at XP 2010 in Trondheim about how to implement a community of practice in your organisation to spread the experiences about agility among teams. Here they are: Click on the button to load the content from de.slideshare.net. Load content … Read more
Here’s a short post to publish the slides and the handout for the third version of my Solution Focused approach to Agile Coaching presentation. This time I gave it at the Mini XP Days Benelux 2010, a one day conference with the presentations that were voted the best at the XPDays Benelux 2009. It has … Read more
Last week I went to Kraków for the first edition of the Agile Central Europe conference. The news is that the conference was, IMO, a great success for the organisation led by Paul Klipp, so here’s a short report about it. The city I was never in Kraków before (and, for what matters, I was … Read more
As I had announced in my last post, I talked to day at Agile Central Europe, again presenting my Solution Focused approach to Agile Coaching workshop. In Kraków I had less time available compared to the XPDays Benelux version, but I still managed to add a few more information on the subject, in particular clarifying … Read more
This time I will use this space for some shameless self-promotion about the upcoming public speaking events I will be part of. After the good resonance for the “Solution Focused Coaching in Agile” presentation I gave at XP Days Benelux, I will bring it again on tour during April: April 7th and 8th in … Read more
I attended recently a meeting of project managers where “agile methods” was the subject of the evening. In fact, the whole evening was about Scrum, with three presentations trying to frame Scrum as a project management method. On one side it was good to see Scrum getting visibile to an audience that normally reasons in … Read more
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: Click on the button to load … 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