There are many awesome practices we do at sipgate that I love to share with others. But we’ve also gotten some things very wrong, especially in the beginning in 2010. Let me spill the beans about 3 “do not recommend” things for a change 🙂 Double duty Scrum Masters All the first Scrum Masters were …
Continue reading “Mistakes were made – 3 things not to do when going agile”
At the end of 2011 I wrote about what makes an agile mindset (in my opinion) and even made a fancy infographic about it: It concentrates on how people think about their colleagues as humans vs. cogs; whether they have a growth vs. a fixed mindset; iterative product development vs. extensive planning and more. These …
Continue reading “What is an Agile Mindset? Six years later”
When I first learned about Kanban, I also learned about “Swarming”. Swarming is when the whole team pitches in to work on the same thing. That same thing is often a blocking task that WIP limits helped surface. Can’t work on “your” tasks because you reached the WIP limit? Go help clear that blocking task …
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 … …
Continue reading “How did you introduce pair programming at sipgate?”
[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 …
Continue reading “Demo time – How to stay up to date with 10+ teams”
“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 …
Continue reading “How teams form and break up when there are no managers”
This little exchange happened on Twitter: I thought the topic might be worth elaborating on, as “no overtime” seems to be a rare thing. It’s time to confess my undying love for our time clock: Obviously, it’s not its looks that secured the clock my affection. In fact, whenever I take visitors on a tour …
[This post is part of a series about Menlo Innovations, the company described in “Joy, Inc.“] Menlo does a lot of things different from other companies, Hiring for example. And I don’t mean “different” as in Google, i.e. you get grilled by a succession of 6 people or get interviewed by a good-sized portion of your …
[This post is part of a series about Menlo Innovations, the company described in “Joy, Inc.“] At one point during Menlo Innovations history, the employees decided they would like to stretch their legs and shake up routine by a short walk. Ever since, at 3 pm people gather for “walkies”. A 5-10 minute walk around the …
[This post is part of a series about Menlo Innovations, the company described in “Joy, Inc.“] It’s quite common for my colleagues and me to pair. Not just developers, but also UX & dev, PO & UX, Customer Support & PO, … There are many combinations and I usually feel quite smug about our level …
