This handy app automatically schedules Slack messages so your entire team sees them Slack is great for communicating with your entire team no regardless of whether you’re in the same room together or working remotely. But if you use a common chat channel to ping your group, there’s a chance that your message will get […]
Learn more about transforming people, process and culture with the Real Agility ProgramValerie Senyk I like taking notes when I’m learning. I believe it helps me to retain what I’m hearing, although I have no solid proof to back that up. March 9, 2016, I took advantage of a free webinar offered by the Scrum […]
As a manager, asking this question scared me a little. I posed it to each of the engineers on my team last month in our one-on-one’s and I worried about how they would respond. Did they feel safe enough to answer honestly or would I get fluff answers that side-stepped the question? Imagine my surprise […]
With the release of Scaled Agile Framework 4.0 a new 4th level is added to the freely available knowledge base. It is for a higher level of operation for larger organizations, providing a greater value stream for those businesses that have both software and systems engineering teams, developing both hardware and firmware (embedded software). Scaled Agile, the […]
I’ve recently been working with a number of scrum teams, across a few different organisations, and I’ve started to notice a bit of a trend with regards to agile practices dropping by the wayside. Now, this might be a sweeping generalisation, but I’m noticing something of a correlation between Scrum teams who are struggling, and […]
I want a number, a metric, that tells me how productive our teams are” challenged my former Head of IT, some years ago. Certainly, it’s a reasonable request to ask how productive a team (or a whole system) is. But first let’s look at the why behind the question. Why do we measure productivity? […]
We’re in a retrospective. This was after a major event, so we discussed a few of the things that have gone awry, like delayed integration with other teams, unfinished stories, and then how we’re going to fix them. All in all, a good open discussion. And then, as we’re getting ready to close the session, one […]
Thought Exercise One Let’s say for the moment that I am the CIO of a mid-sized company. I have a team of 100 or so people building software. Let’s also say that those 100 people are largely dedicated to 10-15 smaller products, there are few dependencies between those products, and we are currently using traditional […]
An agile team that finds its groove is a precious thing. A group of smart diverse people, passionate about their shared purpose, openly collaborating and continually experimenting can do amazing things. They don’t need managing in the traditional sense so what can leaders/managers who work with these teams do to help them? Don’t Tell, Ask […]
While surfing a thread about a potential job change in Reddit’s /r/cscareerquestions (DISCLOSURE: I’m a mod), I read the following comment: "There is no such thing as ruining a career by switching jobs too often" At the time this was the most upvoted comment in the thread, which troubled me because it is rather poor […]