Retrospectives are an essential part of Scrum. But too often, when I talk to Scrum teams, they tell me that they’ve stopped doing retrospectives. “We’ve run out of things to improve,” one ScrumMaster said. Another complained that after six sprints, they were saying...
This article first appeared on stickyminds.com. Not long ago, I received a call from someone who wanted to hold a retrospective. “Tell me about your goals for the retrospective,” I prompted. The requestor proceeded to describe what amounted to a mini-witch...
I’ve seen retrospectives help teams make major improvements. Yet, each time I talk to a group about retrospectives, someone always tells me, “Retrospectives don’t work.” Why might that be? My inquiries revealed eight common reasons behind...
This article first appeared on Stickyminds.com. Recently, a reader wrote to me with a concern about retrospectives. “We make decisions,” he wrote, “but we don’t have the discipline to carry them out. The team is starting to feel like...
(c) 2003-2010 Esther Derby This column originally appeared on Computerworld.com Twice a week, I go to the gym and weight train with Brooke Darst, a Certified Personal Trainer. As I perform my exercises, Brooke provides a constant stream of feedback: Minor corrections,...
Part of my definition of a successful team is that the members of the team increase their knowledge and capacity as a result of their work on the team. That means that giving the team the opportunity to learn is part of the job. One of challenges I see when managers...
When Diana Larsen and I teach a two-day Leading Agile Retrospectives workshop, the second day is stand up facilitation practice. We create the bare bones story of an iteration, then the class works together to design a retrospective. Each participant has a chance to...
In my previous post, I described a framework for offering feedback on work results and work relationships.Step 2 is Describe behavior or results. Use neutral language and examples. If the person doesn’t recognize himself in the description or agree with the...
Peer feedback is a core skill for collaboration. It’s impossible to work closely with out running into some bumps: differences, disappointments, and disagreements. Peer to peer feedback can help keep working relationships on track and improve results (and it...
Building trust may seem mysterious… something that just happens, or grows through some unknowable process. Like many things, there are concrete actions that tend to build trust (and concrete actions that are almost guaranteed to break trust down).First, a...
Teams have gone in and out of fashion as a way to improve productivity for years. In my field, teams are essential. The work requires a broad mix of skills and collaboration. But, myths about how to establish and support productive teams abound. These three are...
Johanna’s post, projects don’t need specialists (and the 19 the comments that went with it), got me thinking.People tend to coalesce around shared interests–both in terms of what they find interesting, and what concerns them. Take the category of...
Jim Sowers asked for more information on team renewal.Here are some reasons teams need renewal.Over time, work that was initially a challenging learning experience becomes routine. Life circumstances change and some team members need to focus their energy in a...
George Dinwiddie has posted his notes from one of my AYE 2008 sessions, Magic Chemistry of Teams.During the session, I asked people to draw a time line that represented their experiences working on teams, then, working in small groups, identify the factors that were...
I know it’s not sexy to pay attention to making meetings run better. It’s more fun to dig into tools and technology. But the truth is that an teams and companies waste an enormous amount of time in poorly run meetings. But, we need to pay attention to the...
A friend forwarded this email to me:I just wanted to share a tip that has made a world of difference for our scrum. I read through this book about 4 months ago And have implemented some of the practices in it. This has taken our retrospectives from being a 1 hour...
I still hear about managers taking teams on ropes courses and splat ball courses for “trust building.”It doesn’t work. Trust always exists within a context and relates to a specific sphere of action and expertise.So if you want to build trust on a...
It’s a truism that trust is the foundation of teamwork.But trust is a big word. What do we really mean when we talk about trust?First, trust exists within a context. The sort of trust that you need for a productive working relationship is different from the trust you...
If you’ve been holding iteration retrospectives for a while, you know that timelines get old after a while. But when team skip the data part, each person works from his own data (which other people may not know) and his own interpretations (which other people...
When I talk to teams about self-organizing, people worry about what to do when some one on the team isn’t working out. If we’re a team, they posit, we have to work things out so we can work together. Not necessarily so. Teams need to manage team membership...
