Looking Back, Moving Forward: Retrospectives Help Teams Inspect and Adapt
This article first appeared on stickyminds.com. Not long ago, I received a call from someone who wanted to hold a retrospective. “Tell me about your goals for the retrospective,” I prompted. The requestor proceeded to describe what amounted to a mini-witch...Making Retrospective Changes Stick
This article first appeared on Stickyminds.com. Recently, a reader wrote to me with a concern about retrospectives. “We make decisions,” he wrote, “but we don’t have the discipline to carry them out. The team is starting to feel like...Agile UI Design
Between Kent Beck’s post on Capital Efficient UI Design and attending a UI conference this week, I’m prompted to write down a few thoughts on incorporating UI design into development iterations. Establish critical design standards at the beginning and work...My Books
Micro Shifts, macro results 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change Even if you don’t have change management in your job description, your job involves change. Change is a given, as modern organizations respond to market and technology advances, make improvements, and...Tips for Retrospective Facilitators
When Diana Larsen and I teach a two-day Leading Agile Retrospectives workshop, the second day is stand up facilitation practice. We create the bare bones story of an iteration, then the class works together to design a retrospective. Each participant has a chance to...Praise Sandwich Tastes Icky, II
Art Petty posted Why I Hate the Praise Sandwich.Praise sandwich, as you recall, involves buttering someone up with a compliment or praise, stating a criticism, and then fluffing them back up with another bit of praise.Sounds icky, too, doesn’t it?Art offers:5...Five Ways that Team Members Build Trust with Each Other
Building trust may seem mysterious… something that just happens, or grows through some unknowable process. Like many things, there are concrete actions that tend to build trust (and concrete actions that are almost guaranteed to break trust down).First, a...Visibly Valuable
In these unsettled times, you can spend time worrying about things you can’t control, or you can take action on things that are within your control. Here are 10 things you can do as a developer to make yourself more visibly valuable, which may keep you off the...Meeting Madness
Seth Godin blogs about Three Kinds of Meetings:There are only three kinds of classic meetings:Information. This is a meeting where attendees are informed about what is happening (with or without their blessing). While there may be a facade of conversation, it’s...Applying “the simplest thing that could possibly work” principle
What problem are organizations trying to solve with incentive pay? Is an incentive plan the simplest, most effective way to address the problem? Most managers believe that incentive pay plans encourage the desired behavior, drive performance improvement, and reward...The Pay Off in Merit Pay (Not)
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know how I feel about compensation systems that claim to motivate better performance with differential pay. For example, A Compensation Story in 2006, It’s What We Know That Ain’t So and Pay for...Focus on the individual or the system?
I’ve been watching a discussion on the Agile Project Management yahoo group, which poses the question, “Does everyone in agile need to be above average?”The question behind the question is, “Does agile need extremely competent people in order...Are you doing your best?
Every so often, the Prime Directive comes up on one of the lists I follow. And inevitably someone says something like “I don’t believe everyone is doing the best s/he could. I know I don’t always do the best job I could.”There are a couple of...And why might someone not do his job?
Why do people fail to do what they are supposed to do? We’re quick to pin the blame on individuals, when it may be a system problem or a management problem. So to list just a few of the reasons some one might not be doing his/her job (or some aspect of it): They...A people problem or a process problem?
In reponse to yesterday’s post, Ken Flowers commented: …I’ve wondered if there are times when the retrospective should call out blame. That is, on some projects the real problem is that someone didn’t do their job. I believe that this kind of...information, encouragement, and appreciation
When I teach about feedback, I make a distinction between change-focused feedback, reinforcing feedback, appreciation/gratitude, and encouragement. Feedback is information that we hope will influence future behavior. Change-focused feedback is information about a...6 Reasons *not* to have a Retrospective
Retrospectives are a great way for teams to inspect and adapt their methods and teamwork after each iteration and release. And they’re a great way for teams to build on success, learn from hard times, or bring closure when a project ends. But they’re not for good for...People who lower productivity
In a recent post, I described a situation where one “brilliant” person is actually reducing the overall productivity of a software team. He’s writing lots of code, but no one else can figure it out. He claims that his teammates are just too stupid,...How do you spell "Productive"?
It seems that every few months I have a similar conversation: Someone asks me how to give feedback to a difficult person. This week the conversation was with a manager I’ll call Toni.”What is it about this person that makes it difficult for you to give him...
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