Tag: team

  • Continuous Improvement

    Thinking about continuous improvement the other day I tried to figure out what makes a continuous improvement process work and what makes it stick, these are my thoughts: It should be a slow, gradual process of change, no “sudden movements”. It should be a continuous flow of change, no settling down into a rut. It…

  • A great team

    For me agile is about many things but first and foremost it is about people and dynamics between people, you get the right recipe going and anything is possible. I work with what I think is a great team, but what makes them a great team? I’m not entirely sure but here are some of…

  • Star Trek, a model for Agility

    As a Trekkie I’m prone to watching reruns of old Star Trek episodes from time to time and I started seeing many similarities between an agile approach to “getting things done” and the way the crew of the Enterprise work. Yes, granted, it’s a militaristic structure but that’s not to say you can’t still be…

  • Change is good

    I’m often amazed at the number of dogmatic “prophets” out there when it comes to the latest fad’s of agile development. I myself am about getting productive and like to take the best of ALL worlds; change is not only inevitable but necessary, even changing of a process BUT, only if the change leads to…

  • The chatty daily standup…

    One of the “ceremonies” of Scrum (man that sounds so culty) is the “Daily Standup”, a daily planning meeting where teams realign and coordinate their efforts for the upcoming day. It’s a concise, no frills no fluff zero waste of time meeting that answers three questions: what have I done, what am I doing and…

  • My questions on agile processes

    Something I have found very interesting in today’s “agile environments” is the adoption of processes. I’m caught in an endless loop on my thoughts around the place of processes and how they should fit in a team. Generally processes are put in place in order to protect the team, sort of like a safety net. …

  • An (agile) environment…

    Scrum often talks about “ideal development environments” (Mike Cohn has a nice blog post on this entitled The Ideal Agile Workspace, well worth the read) and this often excludes anything related to engineering (hardware, software etc.), for the obvious reason that Scrum does not profess to offer guidance on engineering practices (but clearly states they…

  • It’s about people…

    “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” I’ve been thinking recently on the importance of people in this whole agile “thing” (for lack of a better word). I think people lose focus of the actual PEOPLE in a team and still focus on them as resources (some nice baggage from our waterfall days). Agile pushes…

  • A new challenge…

    Today is my 3rd day as an official ScrumMaster. Although the first 2 days were, well, daunting at best, today there seems to be a bit more clarity. The challenges here are similar, but still different. Resistance to adoption is coming from a different place this time. The teams seem to want to do Scrum…

  • Change…

    The new year will bring a plethora of change in my life, a new company, new goals, new challenges, new ideas. I must admit I’m eagerly looking forward to this much like a new astronaut looks forward to his first space flight, nervous excitement I guess would summarize it. Along with this I’m also a…