Here are five questions you can ask yourself about the teams you work on or with to check whether they are set up for success. Is the group a real team, with clear boundaries, interdependence among members, and at least moderate stability of membership over time?  Does the team have a compelling direction, a purpose that is clear, challenging, and consequential--and that focusses on the ends to be achieved rather than the means the team must use in pursuing them? Does the team's structure--its task, composition, and core norms of conduct--enable rather than impede teamwork? Does the team ..read more

Retrospective topic: What do we (really) think about quality?What do we really think about quality? What is quality to us? What trade-offs do we think about when managing for quality. What are the consequences to us of poor quality? What do our behaviours say about our beliefs and values around quality? Share your stories from the team and from other times and places.  What should we be doing to manage quality better?  How will we embed these beliefs and practices into how we work ..read more

  I am posting the workshop guides from 1st Conference in Australia hosted by @tabar.). The fourth workshop I am presenting here sits in the "Improve" vector. We took a cue from Soledad Pinter's presentation and ran a Solutions Focus themed workshop. Solution Focus is something Heart of Agile fans keep gravitating to. It's a way of both lifting our horizons and also helping us focus on what our next move should be. The Solution focus workshop in a nutshell;  What does great look like.  Draw/write what 10/10 might be for you  Whee are we now? Draw/write that down.  What is +1 to where ..read more

Retrospective topic: Managing WIP limits We all know the value in focusing.  How many things does your team have in play at the moment?  What are your cycle times?  Are you starting more than you can finish? What WIP limits should your team have as a rule. What is your policy of breaking WIP limits? When would you do that and how should the team act when this happens? Do you need to dig deeper on understanding Work in Progress limits and why they matter?  Visualise the rules of your game.  Write down the team agreements on policies around this.  Hold each other accountable to your team's ..read more

I am posting the workshop guides from 1st Conference in Australia (hosted by Tabar). The third workshop I am posting about is on "Reflect." In this workshop we wanted to pay attention to how well we listen. We used the Grow coaching framework as a guide for a conversation. People formed into groups of three and cycled through 2-3 conversations, with people rotating through coach, coachee and observer roles. The brief was to have the observer watch and then feedback how much the coaches jumped in with solutions. People commented on this, but given the type of workshop it was, many other obs ..read more

Retrospective topic: Let's talk about our technical practices This topic is an opportunity to discuss what technical practices we think make the biggest impact on our performance and which ones we value. It is also an opportunity to revisit the 'why' behind the practices.  We come together in teams with different experiences and backgrounds and it is often useful to dig deeper than "TDD is good" and talk about they reasons we think something is good.  That also let's us reflect and think about how we might improve our understanding.  "TDD is good for..." might become the focus of the discuss ..read more

I am posting the workshop guides from 1st Conference in Australia (hosted by Tabar.) We designed the "Deliver" workshop around goal setting. We wanted to assert two ideas; That we don’t think about what type of goals we set for ourselves based on the work we are going, and that we aren’t that good at goal setting anyway, and a bit of practice is always useful. First we talked about where we are on the lifecycle of the thing we are working on. Alistair has the "Pay to Learn" meme, which is echoed in other conversations as well. We presented the product/business lifecycle slide from Jurgen App ..read more

Bad meetings suck. they suck time and energy and motivation. And yet; it is so easy to run a good meeting and it in most instances takes very little time to prepare sufficiently. You know you are in a bad meeting when; You don't know the agenda you don't know what your role in the meeting is You don't know what the person talking is on about, or why it is relevant to you You walk out of the meeting unclear about what was achieved You walk out of a meeting not knowing what the next steps are going to be You walk out more confused than when you walked in The meeting's agenda or focus was not a ..read more

Retrospective topic: What do we measure? You may know the phrase "You get what you measure." If this is true, what do you expect to get? On time, on budget? What about impact? What about solving specific problems? What about learning? What are you measuring? What should you stop measuring? What needs to be measured? How might you measure progress towards your goals better? This is probably a brainstorming session, with follow on work coming out of the retrospective. It's a great opportunity to think about an important system condition that affects the way you all think and operate ..read more

I am posting the guides from 1st Conference workshops. there was one for each HoA vector. This one is Collaboration,  The collaboration session was built around the collaboration cards Alistair designed. The basic workshop game was; In small groups,  one person shares a story about friction at work, The other members of a group play a card from the deck,  The group discuss how the idea shown on the card may be useful. Variations on the game included playing multiple cards and selecting cards at random. All approaches were interesting. Feedback from participants included "It got me to se ..read more