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  • Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives

    Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives.

  • Effective Retrospectives Require Skilled Facilitators

    Retrospective facilitators can develop their facilitation skills by self-study and training, and by doing retrospectives. Better retrospective facilitation can lead to higher effectiveness of change and impact the progress of an organization.

  • Applying Cynefin in Agile Retrospective

    Sense-making can prevent teams from jumping to the first solution that comes to mind. Cynefin helps teams decide what to do in their retrospective after informed sense-making. Facilitators can use Cynefin to enhance transitions from gathering data to generating insights in retrospectives.

  • The Benefits of Nostalgia: Q&A with Linda Rising

    Remembering the past can bring about benefits; nostalgic reflection can make us more optimistic. Looking back leads us to feel there is meaning and purpose in our lives which enables us to better navigate the future and help us move forward.

  • Using a Team Game for Richer Retrospectives

    Games can bring freshness to retrospectives and enable rich discussions about how things are going. Patterns emerging from the discussions provide insight into the team’s strengths and weaknesses. Considerate coaching or facilitation can allow everyone to contribute.

  • Establishing Change Agents within Organisations Using Shu-Ha-Ri

    Shu-Ha-Ri provides us with a learning path toward being agile by mastering the basics and understanding the fundamentals to gain incremental success. By having their own change agents, organisations can adapt quickly to changing market needs and get a competitive edge.

  • How to Grow Teams That Can Fail without Fear: QCon London Q&A

    Blameless failure starts with building a culture where failure is acknowledged, shared, investigated, remedied, and prevented, said Emma Button, a DevOps and cloud consultant, at QCon London 2019. Visualising the health and state of your system with CI/CD practices can increase trust and ownership and invite people to help out when things fail.

  • Retrospective 3.0 at Ocado Technology

    Toni Tassani identifies retrospective pitfalls, such as stale and repetitive activities and raises risks: the retrospective as an excuse for not solving issues on the spot, identifying an experiment but not driving the impediment to resolution, Post-it theater. He suggests looking at retrospectives radically differently, leveraging continuous improvement techniques borrowed from Kanban.

  • Psychological Safety in Post-Mortems

    Emotions often come to the fore when there is an incident; psychological safety in blameless post-mortems is essential for the learning process to happen. The post-mortem session must be fairly moderated, preferably by an outsider, giving everyone a turn to speak without criticism. Don’t start the analysis of the incident before there is a clear and common understanding of what actually happened.

  • Think in Products, Not Projects: Q&A with Ardita Karaj

    Organizations structured around products oversee their work end-to-end. Reversing Conway’s law to establish long-lived teams around the products brings stability and makes it easier to manage and prioritize work. Retrospectives are a powerful tool for product management; they give confidence to continue and help you pivote quickly on what might become high risk or loss for the organization.

  • 12th State of Agile Report Published

    The 2018 State of Agile Report has been published by CollabNet VersionOne. Some of the conclusions from the report are that the need for customer and user satisfaction is increasing, more and more organizations are scaling agile, distributed teams are becoming the norm in agile software development, and many organization have started or plan to start a DevOps initiative in the next 12 months.

  • Data-Driven Thinking for Continuous Improvement

    Organizations need an objective way to measure performance and tie actions back to business outcomes to improve continuously. Avvo uses a data-driven decision framework with an autonomous team model and a practice of retrospectives to help people make better decisions and proposals for continuous improvement.

  • Should Teams Decouple Cadences?

    Recently a Twitter discussion took place about allowing teams to have multiple cadences, for instance by using a different rhythm for planning the work and for learning and improving. Decoupling cadences gives teams room to explore and learn what works best for them; it can lead to more adaptability and autonomy and better outcomes.

  • Q&A with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland about Scrum Guide Updates

    The Scrum guide has been updated to better reflect what Scrum is and clear up misconceptions. Scrum can be used for building software products, and it can be applied to many other areas outside of software as well. Scrum is a framework based on empiricism for continuous improvement. Having a potentially shippable product increment at least every sprint or more often is a key element of Scrum.

  • Tackling Awesome Superproblems with Collaborative Games

    Awesome superproblems are large, complex and enduring problems which can only be solved through collaboration. The key to making collaboration work is serious games, where participants voluntarily agree to follow the rules of the game to create a better and more durable result.

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