I recently read the book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable”. It was referred to me by one of my mentors. It was a very enlightening read. I identified with many of the people in the team described in this book. Sometimes the protagonist and often times with the antagonists. It was … Continue reading Reading List: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Leadership
What Makes a Good Leader
I’ve been reading “Management” by Peter F. Drucker. It’s one of his foundational works that essentially defined management as a discipline in the early 1970’s. It’s been a great read, very insightful, and provides an impressive foreshadowing of things to come (given that it was originally published in 1974). Early on, Drucker posits his definition … Continue reading What Makes a Good Leader
An Agile Team’s Progression Through the Stages of Team Development
I read an old colleague’s article about ‘Adaptive Leadership’. I really enjoyed it. He posted it on LinkedIn. Go check it out, it’s a good read. It’s his fifth article on there and I hope to see more. In it, Brian discussed and explained the different leadership styles used during different team development stages (you … Continue reading An Agile Team’s Progression Through the Stages of Team Development
Confidence Vote: The Whole Train Votes
I was recently coaching an Agile Release Train where when they were doing the confidence vote during PI Planning the managers sat around a table and had the teams each sequentially vote on the confidence in their plans. The confidence vote in PI Planning is to capture the entire Agile Release Train’s confidence in the … Continue reading Confidence Vote: The Whole Train Votes
What is Commitment?
Commitment is a huge concept in agile. So many teams are so used to treating commitments as if they are really the ‘good ole’ college try’ and can you blame them? When a couple smart guys get into a room and come up with some Ludacris plan and sign the whole team up for it … Continue reading What is Commitment?
Checkbox Scrum Roles
Recently I was coaching an Agile Release Train where they were struggling with the concept of a Product Owner. The teams were organized with a Scrum Master and a Product Owner each. This organization’s product management team was very resource constrained so one technique employed was the use of “Product Owner Proxies”. Product Owner Proxies … Continue reading Checkbox Scrum Roles
Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part III
In Part II, we discussed how we measure people impacts the dynamic of the team. We channeled some W. Edwards Deming and recognized the fact that we need to establish measurements that optimize the whole and discourage individual success at the expense of the success of the entire team. The idea sounds great in principle … Continue reading Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part III
Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part II
So in Part I, we started the conversation about taking a siloed team each with its own individual objectives and forming a single team out of it. We overcame some key hurdles such as overcoming latency in hardware fabrication and high levels of specialization within the team and think we have a plan that will … Continue reading Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part II
Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part I
I had a really interesting conversation with a customer in Shanghai. In terms of taking on an agile transformation, let’s just say that they’re on the edge. They know what they are doing now isn’t making them competitive in the marketplace but they are concerned. They’re concerned about how things will change. Will they be … Continue reading Conversations about Forming an Agile Team: Part I
Plan in the Same Room
I recently facilitated a PI Planning workshop where we had, well, let’s just say—erm—less than optimal facilities. To be fair, the Release Train Engineer (RTE) did the best they could given other constraints. Our train was conducting it’s planning somewhere in Europe (I know, I know, I sound like a secret agent). If you’ve been … Continue reading Plan in the Same Room
Sky Cliffs 