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Are you looking for a simple way to liven up your retrospectives?  In my coaching engagements, I often encounter teams that are having ineffective retrospectives because they always take the same approach to framing the discussion. Using the same format for every retrospective preordains a very similar conversation each time, and it won’t take long for team members to start grumbling that the retrospectives aren’t working for them,...

Well-formed user stories help Agile teams to make the right decisions about what to deliver next.  Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman’s excellent new book, Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis, gives Agile teams practical guidance on planning and analysis practices that will help practitioners explore all dimensions of their product so that they are focused on learning the things that will enable them to deliver...

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of presenting “An Introduction to Lean and Agile Work” to one of the IEEE Ottawa SIGs As a prelude  to the conversation, we played a simple variant of the penny game in order to spark some lively discussion and great questions to frame the rest of the evening.  We then talked about Agile values and principles, and how those ideas are manifested in Agile and Lean practices.  As the group was quite small,...

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...