Last November I presented at the Deutsche Scrum the first version of my new presentation “Debunking Agile Myths”. The core message of the presentation was to show that many of the things we believe in the world of agile are based on… ehm… nothing, actually! Surprised? So was I when I started checking the scientific … Read more
In a conversation during the last agile coach camp Germany I was reminded of something I see often in agility: motivational interventions. Most, if not all, agile coaches use them in one form or another: a workshop moderated with a pot of energy on their side, a training where the reasons why agile is what … Read more
Here’s a new post on design thinking. As promised in my previous post, some more details on what the presentation at XP Days Germany together with Dirk Lässig (@djlaessig) was about. In fact, we just delivered the same material in the format of a workshop at XP Days Benelux, where, rather than talking too much, … Read more
Here’s a short post just to publish the slides I presented today at XP Days Germany in Karlsruhe together with Dirk Lässig (@djlaessig): Innovation needs waste. More on this topic in a future post… Click on the button to load the content from de.slideshare.net. Load content
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
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
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
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
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
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
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