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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…

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…

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…

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…

Hat tip to Thom Kearney for drawing my attention to this great presentation:

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…

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…

Learning can be fun.  Heck, let’s just get straight to the point and state unequivocally that learning should be fun, dammit!  Learning through play is also a powerfully effective way for people of all ages to acquire and accumulate new concepts and practices.  Current neuroscience suggests that using a variety of approaches to concretize ideas…