Supporting the new hires
I’m seeing more posts saying that new hires need to be in the office because they ramp up faster, than if they’re remote. There’s a fundamental presupposition in these statements that once we’ve hired these people, we’re immediately going to throw them to the wolves and have them work all by themselves.
A decade with LEGO Serious Play
I just realized that it’s been ten years since I first took LEGO® Serious Play® training with Robert Rasmussen. I have this listed on my business cards and it’s amazing how many great conversations this starts. LEGO seems so out of place in a business context, that people immediately want to know more.
When we don’t have safety
While we often talk about psychological safety, we often don’t prioritize fixing the environment to make it better.
The facilitators role
If you’re facilitating the daily coordination meeting (standup, daily scrum, whatever you want to call it), and you’re doing all the talking, then you’re doing it wrong.
Constraints enable creativity
With retrospectives, we generally have specific formats that we follow, rather than just pulling people together and expecting them to talk. This feels very counter-intuitive for many; surely we don’t need rules or formats to get people to come up with creative ideas. Yet doing that will dramatically improve the results we get.
The extreme in eXtreme Programming (XP)
My first exposure to anything Agile was with eXtreme Programming (XP) back in 1999. While it had many process steps similar to what Scrum and Kanban offer today, the thing that really differentiated XP was it’s focus on technical practices. It’s those technical practices that we are usually referring to when we talk about XP today.
A tale of two teams
I was asked about two teams recently. They worked on the same product, did very similar work, and had similar team composition (team size, skills, etc), yet one of them was noticeably outperforming the other. The company wanted to understand why this was happening and how they could make it better.
What work to select for an ensemble
When I facilitate an ensemble session (also called Mob Programming) with a team, I’m often asked what work we should pick to work on. The answer is really whatever we would have done this week anyway.
Thinking we want more documentation
It’s quite common when we reflect on problems that someone will say “we just need better documentation”, and everyone will nod their heads. Yet we rarely ask the question “if we wrote better documentation, would anyone actually read it?”
Book: Shatter the Hero Culture
Hero culture is a situation where one person, or a small number of people, take on the majority of the work, and others start to step back. If you hear things like “these people don’t pull their weight and I have to do everything for them”, you may not have lazy people at all. You may have the effects of hero culture destroying the teamwork that you should have.