Linda Rising gave a great talk last night at Agile New England. Her topic was problem-solving and decision-making. One of her points was to discuss the problem, out loud. When you talk, you engage a different part of your brain than when you think. For us extroverts, who speak in order to think, this might […]
Define Your Agile Success I bet many of you are working to use agile in your organization. Is your agile approach working for you? If you think you could use agile better, maybe it’s time to define what agile success means to you. Consider these three questions: What is valuable to us? How will we
We encounter problems all the time. Some we can resolve on our own in a couple of minutes. Some take more time, and/or we can’t resolve them alone. What do you do then? I’ve had a policy for about twenty years for when I become stuck. If I’m stuck for more than twenty minutes, it’s
Do You Have Too Much to Do? If you are like most of the people I work with and meet, you have too much to do. You’d like to say, “No!” to more work, but maybe you’re not sure how. The first step is to gather all the work, so you and everyone else knows
Creating an Environment of Leadership I bet you have some problems that have been problems for a while. Or, you want to influence other people to change. You need an environment of leadership, because you can’t do it alone. Here are three tips to creating an environment where everyone can lead: Tip #1: Share the
Discovering Your Leadership Do you think managers are the only leaders in your organization? Nope. We have always needed leaders at all levels of the organization. You might not feel like a leader. How do you discover your leadership? Ellie, a tester working on a supposedly agile team, was worried. The team worked in timeboxes,
In self-organizing teams, teams remove their own obstacles. It’s a good idea. It can be difficult in practice. In Scrum, the Scrum Master is supposed to facilitate removing the team’s obstacles that the team can’t remove. It’s a good idea. It can be difficult in practice. And, what if you aren’t doing Scrum, or you’re
I was coaching a new client. He’s a senior guy with several directors reporting to him. He had stopped his staff meetings for a while because no one wanted to participate. Hmm. I almost asked him why, but he kept talking. “What do you think of this format for my staff meeting? Everyone does a
Let me guess. If you are a successful woman, in the past, you’ve been told you’re too abrasive, too direct, maybe even too assertive. Too much. See The One Word Men Never See In Their Performance Reviews. Here’s the problem. You might be. I was. But never in the “examples” my bosses provided. The “examples”
Workshop Objective: You may have started with technical component teams long ago. You were all responsible for your own teams, as technical leaders. It made sense then. Now, you need to work together, in an agile or lean organization. This workshop will help you learn how to be technical problem-solving leaders, as a team, in