Posts by ellengrove

Mishkin Berteig made a great point last week about how The Agile Planning Onion is Wrong.  Mishkin notes that “culture both surrounds the planning onion and cuts right through it” .  He goes on to suggest that we update the metaphor to at least allude to the double-loop of learning in order to foster a more conscious approach to applying learning and planning to the organizational culture as well as the product.  And then he asked for...

Play is powerful stuff. I had the tremendous good fortune to take part in Play4Agile, an Unconference on games for Agile teams held near Frankfurt, Germany two weekends ago. It was a tremendous amount of fun and a really intense learning experience — there were so many skilled and enthusiastic people there to learn from and create with that a goodly number of new games were generated over the course of the weekend. One of the (many)...

Hat tip to Thom Kearney for drawing my attention to this great...

A member of a team I’m working with recently observed that the team’s design workshops were much more effective when she (and everyone else) came to the meeting prepared with an agenda, examples of the problem space and some other concise reference materials related to the design discussions. Having this pre-work (and pre-thinking) in place made the meeting flow smoothly and helped participants understand the context for the decisions...

I had the rare delight today of participating in an Agile lunch and learn at a client’s site.  There have been a series of successful lunch and learns there over the past several months, but this one was different in many ways. An Agile lunch and learn attended by a few dozen people, despite the fact that no lunch was provided. An Agile lunch and learn that (as an Agile coach) I had no part in organizing or running because it was...