[English summary: Bastian Wilkat interviewed me about Work Hacks in his podcast “Der Flaneur”.]
Falls Du thematisch nicht so festgelegt bist, gibt es einen ziemlich interessanten Denkanstöße-Podcast: “Der Flaneur” von Bastian Wilkat.
Die Themen reichen von “Robo Advisors und Geldanlage” über “Positive Psychologie” zu “Denkwerkzeuge”. Und seit Anfang Dezember auch “Work Hacks” mit Yours truly. Viel Spaß beim Anhören 🙂
“Self-Selecting Teams” and “Dynamic Reteaming” are a big topic in my timeline thanks to the books by Sandy Mamoli & David Mole and the upcoming book by Heidi Helfand respectively.
This made me relize that I’ve written about the composition of our teams over the course of the years but not about how people join and leave teams. Let’s take a look at this now.
We made the switch to Scrum and cross-functional teams in 2010. Tim (the CEO) asked two designers and me into a meeting room. There was a board with a table in it. Three empty columns headed Team 1 | Team 2 | Team 3. The teams would start with Scrum one after the other with two weeks (= one sprint) in between and we each should pick a column.
The three of us were the first ones who got to choose a column, so I just picked the first one. I was looking forward to getting started with this whole Scrum thing. I still think that many of the people looking forward to Scrum self-selected into that first team. It was certainly fun to be part of that team. Continue reading
Maybe it’s because usability was such a strong focus of mine for such a long time but I feel like most good ideas boil down to usability. It’s kind of my “grand unifying theory of good practices”. To me, Agile Software Development is about providing good usability to the customer (not necessarily the user). Clean Code is about good usability for other developers. They’re both about going the extra mile to make someone else’s life easier.
Not convinced? Well, I hope it’s easy to see how Clean Code will make code more usable for its future maintainers. That’s why I’ll concentrate on making the case that agile software development is for product development what usability is for product. Continue reading
When you let the writing on whiteboards stay on for long enough – say, a couple of month – dry-erase markers stop being “dry-erase” and start being “leave unwipeable shadowy traces behind”. You’re left with an unsightly board, no matter how often you wipe. Water doesn’t help, at least not against dried up German Edding markers.
Even worse are traces of the slim tape that some teams use to create tables on their boards. Its remains are stickier than candy floss and way uglier.
Fear not, my colleague Frieda has the miracle cure: Clean your whiteboard with “Wepos Kunstoffreiniger” (= Wepos plastics cleaner) and it will become perfectly clean and smoother than a baby’s butt. Way smoother, actually.
That’s also the catch: After wiping your board with the cleaner you have to wipe it with water. Otherwise no sticky note will stick to the board. Try it, it’s quite fascinating. The sticky notes fall right off of the infinitely smooth surface.
If you don’t have tape traces you can also get rid of the old marker markings with a wet microfibre cloth. Again, kudos to Frieda for finding this trick.
The very last resort, for people without any equipment, is ye olde overwriting trick: Retrace the old writing with a whiteboard marker. The solvents in the marker’s color will also work on the old markings and make them wipeable again. It’s works, it’s just tedious.
Do you have any neat tricks for cleaning dried-in markers?
Sometimes we have guests over who want to learn more about our Open Friday and see it in action. Lately we’ve been asking for a session in return so that visitors add to our pool of knowledge. These guest sessions are often interesting and sometimes you strike gold: Cynthia Hohlstein and Kevin Plechinger hosted an inspiring session on and with Story Cubes. Because neither of them blogs, I get to share their idea with you: Story Cubes are sets of 9 dice with images on them. The images cover a wide range of motives, such as a speech bubble, a sheep, a star, a hand or a walking stick figure. The idea is that you roll 3 dice and then tell a story that contains the 3 motives you rolled.
This can easily be turned into a fun activity for agile retrospectives if players answer a question instead of just telling a story. Cynthia and Kevin already had a couple of ideas:
We spend the hour-long session answering questions in groups of three. It was very interesting because the cubes prompt you to talk about aspects you wouldn’t normally have touched on – you tell the truth and still have to incorporate the 3 images. Among others, we used the “Customer View” question and it was quite revealing. Story Cubes help with changing perspective and add a fun element.
Thank you Cynthia and Kevin for introducing us to story cubes!
From Kat Matfield’s session “User Research in an irrational world”:
1) If at all possible, look at records of what people actually did in the real-world situation, (screen recordings, chat logs, …) instead of putting them into a research situation (in which they will always pay more attention) or asking them to remember (memory is extremely unreliable).
From Gez Smith’s session “Agile Marketing”:
2) Maybe 1 thing goes viral per year. Rest is planted and pushed with fake accounts
From Darci Dutcher’s session “Running killer workshops without killing yourself”:
3) If you use dot-voting and don’t limit the number of votes you get information about the long tail of interests. Not relevant in short retros but maybe for a longer workshop.
4) A retro is a sub-kind of workshop. I never thought of retrospectives in those terms. Nice realization.
From my own session:
5) Putting your cell phone near a mic is a really bad idea (audio feedback)
I also learned about Jeff Patton’s Cups, the sticky note bonus shape and that I’ll try to remind more speakers to repeat the audiences question before answering it.
All in all, a very nice (knowledge) haul 🙂
As you know, I’m a sucker for a good metaphor be they coconuts or hosting. I’ve got a great new one for you: Baby Elephants! Fantastic, right?
Well, yes, it’s promising. Baby elephants – What’s not to like. But what are they a metaphor for, pray tell?
Cute baby elephant courtesy of Beratung Judith Andresen
Judith Andresen introduced baby elephants as a metaphor for MVPs at Agile on the Beach 2016. One immediate benefit is that it short circuits endless, mostly fruitless discussions along the lines of “What exactly is an Minimum Viable Product?” “We need an Minimum Marketable Feature instead!” “No a Minimum Loveable Feature is the way to go!” “No, it has to be a …”
Instead of arguing about different concepts, baby elephants give people concrete images to work with:
Judith’s fable includes much more, e.g. the context in which a baby elephant is an excellent MVP. Read the whole fable about nature-oriented forest management with baby elephants here.
All my sketchnotes from AotB 2016:
Linda Rising – Keynote: Better Decision Making – Science or Stories?
Kat Matfield – How to do research in an irrational world
Jon Terry – Does this Fizzgood?
One of the topics in Darci Dutcher’s session “Running Killer Workshops Without Killing Yourself” at Agile on the Beach was promisingly called ‘Sticky note party tricks’.
“Don’t really use them at a party. Other people do not get excited about sticky notes.”
– Darci Dutcher
Well, I’m the kind of person who does get excited about sticky notes and that’s why I present to you the sticky note bonus shape: Diamonds! (Is “Diamonds are forever” now stuck in your head? You’re welcome! *evil laughter*)
This is super handy for when you want to color code stickies and don’t have enough different colors. Yeah! I’m excited! Aren’t you? 😉
Credits: Learned it from Darci Dutcher who learned it from Adrian Howard who learned it from Jeff Patton
Do you know this inner debate when you’re facilitating and somebody keeps monologuing: “Is this still relevant? Should I stop him? Do the others look bored? I should cut him off …”
That makes me judge and jury about whether something is still relevant to the whole group. I don’t like to make that call. If you’ve got a team (or team member) that’s prone to rambling you can make the team facilitate themselves with Jeff Patton’s Cups (Jeff himself credits “Katrina”):
Write “Tangent” on several styrofoam cups and distribute them around the table. Whenever someone verbally wanders off one of the other team members can signal it unintrusively by raising one of the cups. Upon the signal ramblers usually cut themselves off and the team can decide whether to park the topic for later.
Other possible cups are “Sold” for people still arguing when they’ve already convinced everyone, “Too much detail”, “No solving” when you’re still trying to frame the problem, and so on.
Keep cups and pens ready. Whatever the team is struggling with, approriate signal cups will evolve.
Obviously the signal doesn’t have to be cups. Paper would also do it. But cups stand out more (figuratively and literally) and are a great visual reminder that each team member can help keep the discussion going.
PS: For something more specific and even more playful check out the Rathole technique by Sandy Mamoli.