Two concepts most new Agile teams get wrong are working agreements and values. If teams adopt values at all, they are most likely to follow the Scrum or XP values. These are a total of seven values that are mentioned in both Scrum...
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Image taken from the 2008 film “Hancock” (Colombia Pictures) starring Will Smith and Charlize Theron Extreme Programming Pairing One of the more controversial techniques that XP employs is Paired Programming. Paired programming is when two developers work on a single task,...
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When we judge ourselves, our tendency is to judge ourselves based on our intentions, but to judge others on their actions and results. Feelings, Facts, Intentions is a simple conversation framework for approaching feedback and conflict situations. The framework moves...
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In “Teamwork is an Individual Skill” Christopher Avery suggests that collective leverage and power does not come from distributing and delegating accountabilities, but from collectively demonstrating responsibility for the entire result, with each member doing their best to make their...
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Agile teams have the sacred goal of delivering value. So perhaps Agile teams be made accountable for the value that they create? This seems reasonable. However, there are problems with this. For one thing, it is very open-ended. How is...
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One of the problems that teams can easily fall into is that after a while the team stops feeling the pain of missing commitments. The commitments becomes aspirational goals that somehow don’t seem to get reached … “well we tried,...
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June 5th was my first retrospective with the team since being appointed as their Scrum Coach. One of the main challenges that the team had was that as a ‘NICE” team, they had fallen into a culture of group-think and...
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Throw away those personality tests and group therapy sessions. Getting your team to be highly performing is as simple as T.E.A.M. T is for Talk E is for Engagement A is for Accountability M is for Measurement Find ways to...
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