The Quick Brown Fox

For today's retrospective I took a slightly different tack. We've been reverting to the "standard" good/bad/improve format lately, and it doesn't seem to have been very effective. Today I kept the perspective firmly on concrete future actions, asking the team to come up with things they could do tomorrow  to make things better. I also tried out the 1/2/4/all (we only had four today) format that got so much exercise at the Agile Games last year. Most of the concerns fell into a couple of affinity areas, and the top one had to do with the clarity and availability of requirements. I have therefore scheduled a quick meeting with the product owner team (yeah, there's more than one, which is... a problem) for tomorrow afternoon, and am also going to try a little experiment during sprint planning. It's going to be a little excruciating during the meeting, but I'm hoping that it will drive home the point that we have been shortchanging our grooming process. ...

A while back my perusal of Management 3.0 posts led me to an exercise called Moving Motivators . I did it by myself and thought it was interesting, and I've been wanting to try more exploratory kinds of activities with my team in our retrospectives. I thought this might be a good one, but I was determined to start small. We had an hour set aside for the entire retro, and I thought ten minutes was a good slice for something like this while still letting us talk about the sprint. This an existing team that has had several members join recently, one of whom has previous experience with this same group but has been on a different team for a long while now, and two who do not. So I thought this might be both fun and useful as an introduction of sorts. I printed out a bunch of card sets and asked everyone to spend a few minutes sorting them. (Mine had changed even since the last time I did the exercise.) Curious though I was about everyone on the team, I had them pair up and spend a ...

I saw a post about doing a personal retrospective , and it seemed like a good time. The year has had some strong successes. If you're into the shu/ha/ri model, I feel like as an organization, we have gotten pretty good at stage 1. After a year+ of doing it, we have solidified the habitual motions of Scrum. People are working together more, there's been a lot of product knowledge shared, we're getting better as a group at estimating (and stressing out a bit less about estimating -- I fear that "no estimates" would be a tough sell here at the moment). The biggest success for me personally was going to the Agile Games back in the spring; I don't think it's overstating to say that it was life-changing. Whole new areas to learn about have opened up for me, and I'm excited to keep moving in this direction. I did some improv, I led some Open Space conversations (for which I was totally unprepared but loved it), I did a kick-ass presentation with a colleag...

One of my development goals for the next six months is to try out a variety of retrospective games with my team. I floated this idea a few sprints back and made sure that they were all okay with it, but the three members who made it to today's retrospective still seemed taken aback. One mentioned that we've never really gotten the hang of the basic three questions version, while another countered that it was really just another way of getting the same information (the third was late, never added anything to the drawing, and joined the conversation in progress). Now, I picked this technique for the first exercise in part because it was a day when I thought the whole team was going to be in the office -- that turned out to not be the case, one member was working from home, and we had a brief discussion about why I am not on the team's Exchange email group. My other reason for starting with sailboat is that it's a pretty non-threatening exercise. I offered to abort the e...