At TopConf Linz 2017, Allan Kelly posed a question to the audience: “Have you ever delivered a project early?” Out of 75ish people only 3 raised their hands. That’s not a lot of people. All three handraisers were fellow speakers and agile practioners. I was one of them. Interestingly, I had hesitated to raise my …
Category Archives: Agile / Lean
My Facilitation Mindset
Moved to: https://retromat.org/blog/assuming-positive-intent/
How did you introduce pair programming at sipgate?
Recently I’ve been presenting our Work Hacks at a couple of places and talking about pairing up as part of it. Not only do we pair program but we also mob program and pair up across roles: Dev and UX designer, PO and customer support, UX and PO, dev and customer support, dev and … …
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Demo time – How to stay up to date with 10+ teams
[This post first appeared in German.] At sipgate, we’re more than 10 teams that work (more or less) independently of each other. Each team is self-organizing. Together we deliver more than 20 updates of our services to our customers. That makes it hard to stay up to date with all improvements. That’s why the Scrum-prescribed …
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How teams form and break up when there are no managers
“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 …
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Agile is about usability. So is Clean Code.
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 …
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How to get a very dirty whiteboard sparkly clean
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 …
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Bonus shape for sticky notes
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 …
Self-Regulating Discussions with Jeff Patton’s Cups
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. …
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24 Work Hacks – Das Buch
[English summary: We wrote a book at work (in German) and it turned out amazing!!! It’s a cross between coffee table and business book. Watch out for “24 Work Hacks“! If you’d be interested in an English version, tell me so that I can make a case for translating it 🙂 ] Endlich, endlich, darf …