Agile To Go

Lean Coffee - simple solution for engaging meetings What it is all about? Lean Coffee is pretty new format of running meetings. It has been started first in 2009 in Seattle. As per Lean Coffee official website “Lean Coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated.” It is very good format to quickly organize conversation on topics that are most relevant for people, who showed up on the session. It's name suggest it combines Lean approaches (including Lean Thinking as well as Lean in terms of eliminating waste) with the idea of meeting in informal place. One of the functions of "lean" part is eliminating waste of resources, peoples' skills and time. This format was developed to use available time in most efficient manner. Why I should even get interested? If you are still looking for reasons why to give it a

A couple of simple check-in activities for retro Structure of retrospective How to run good retrospective? How to structure it in a good way? What to do to make people feeling that the time of retro session was spent in a good, productive way? And how to make changes, improvements from retrospective possible? There are many approaches to running retrospectives. There is certainly group of people who jump straight away to the main point - discuss last sprint, release, project, insights about it and proposed improvements. Others prefer to use more structured approach.  There are many structures which will work well. Majority of them has the following common points in agenda: Setting the stage   - introduction to retrospective, providing a context, setting up goal for session. In this part we often also review working agreements and prime directive for retro. It's important to take care of creating open and comfortable atmosphere for participants. This part also may cont

Retro for beginners with RetroKit! As you most probably noticed recently lots of my attention is focused on inventions created by colleagues from Spotify. I must say to on Spotify Labs you can find quite a lot of interesting ideas related to Agile or leadership. One of this very simple, yet very useful, ideas is RetroKit. Why RetroKit? I think we all agree that Retrospective is one of the most important ceremonies/events in Agile world. Retrospective supports inspect and adapt loop and facilitates continuous improvement. Unfortunately not everybody is lucky enough to either have instant access to Agile Coach or have necessary skills and experience to comfortably conduct retrospective by himself/herself. To help in such cases it's good to have tools helping teams becoming self sufficient. Colleagues from Spotify encountered this problem and came up with tool for teams to start running retrospectives on their own in energizing and easy way. This was the RetroKit was born.  W

My first experience with Spotify Team Health Check For some time I was thinking about checking my team's satisfaction (or health) in more scientific way than using the best method ever - "just talk", or collecting information from individual people via one on one sessions. Previously I was using some satisfaction surveys - with quite good effect. However this time I wanted to go for more and make this exercise more interactive, closer to people. I was hoping to get better response, more honesty and openness than in case of online/email survey. While looking for more interactive way I came across Spotify's Squad Health Check, an interesting tools which I decided to experiment with. The method is based on physical meetings, but there are easy ways to conduct these procedures online – so don’t worry, you’ll be able to make use of it even working from home! What it's all about? You can read this Health Check as replacement for satisfaction surveys or even c

The Agile paper plane factory Some time ago I was looking for some interactive scrum simulation which is interesting and makes use of something different than Lego bricks :)  Recently my current team had opportunity to meet in person and work in one location for couple of days so I started looking even harder for some interesting activity.  And I found that - paper airplanes game. I must say the game is really great and shows power of working in sprints, planning, retrospectives in very nice form. I would recommend it not only for teams who are new in Agile or Scrum but also for more experienced people. What do you need? 1. Depending on number of people but you would need a room with table for each of teams 2. For each team you need decent amount of sheets of paper so they can build as many planes as possible 3. Flip chart and several sharpies 4. Tape measure How to play the game? Teams: Divide your group into several (at least two) teams - 5 - 6 people each.

First post... Doesn't matter how hard I try, I know that there won't be any magic in first post. So - stay tuned for incoming, I hope interesting content!