When you picture a truly amazing team in your head, what does it look like? Now consider your teammates. Do they have the same picture? Really - all of them? The things people have experienced and read massively shape what ‘great’ looks like for them. The differences can lead to frustrations or peo...

There is a magical moment where a team gathers together to pause ‘business as usual’ and has a conversation to reflect on teamwork. It’s called a Retrospective. If done well, it helps to take a step forward. But a poorly held Retrospective is just another meeting that anyone barely wants to go to. O...

Has your team ever felt like things are going stale? Do you worry that you’re beginning to rest on your laurels? None of the greatest teams I’ve experienced ever think that “good enough” is good enough. Here’s a handy way to collectively challenge each other to improve in a constructive way. This ca...

In Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash Mary and Tom Poppendieck categorised waste encountered in software development into: Partially Done Work Is work going from beginning to end in a single rapid flow? For example; are you building up large amounts of untested or undeploye...

New Agile teams tend to place a significant emphasis on the retrospective meeting. When an issue rears it’s head, they often say “we need to talk about that in the retrospective” rather than deal with it there and then. The problem facing teams who do this is that having placed a lot of emphasis on...

Are you tired of capturing ideas and experiments that come out of your retrospectives only to forget about them after a couple of days? Do your improvement ideas get lost in waves of sticky-notes and hand drawn diagrams? Try idea balloons! Idea balloons are a way of keeping your ideas and agreements...

Urban dictionary: rat-hole To digress in an extensive way. To divert the conversation to a topic that is not only unrelated to the topic at hand, but a topic that will likely have no immediate resolution either. As a facilitator of a group discussion, a conversation or a workshop session it is impor...

Even with high performing teams sometimes there are common themes coming up again and again in each retrospective. Much like a tight spot in a muscle that keeps lingering around (until we get a good massage) those issues keep coming back until we pay them enough attention to make them disappear. Use...

I recently worked with a team of content writers, where we had introduced Kanban to help with the flow and consistency of delivery. The cycle time of work had reduced, but it was still high and as a team they seemed a little flat. They knew ‘what’ they were doing as individuals, but not the context...

It's common among Agile teams to use some form of voting to make decisions, and that's especially true for retrospectives where the team as a whole decides what to fix next. Over the years I have facilitated many retrospectives and had the opportunity to vote for many things, over that time some pat...

I recently ran a “get to know your team” session to help a team with lots of new members to better understand each other’s history, motivations, likes and dislikes. We did a number of exercises including journey lines, what do you value and team flags and we wrapped it up with postcards (insert ref...

... or Team Closure within a Project Closure Why? Projects come to an end, which means that a team that has been working closely together, may well be torn apart. This can lead to a sense of loss associated with disbanding some strong team relationships; especially if the team has reached the fourth...

We all know or at least we should know that retrospectives are one of the Agile recipe's 11 secret herbs and spices. It performs a valuable role in the improvement of the team and its practices, as well as throwing up a whole host organisational issues. One step / practice when you are setting the s...

The idea For quite a while I have been waiting for an opportunity to try a 5-why root cause analysis in a sprint retrospective. The 5-why analysis has its origins within Toyota and lean manufacturing and is used to find the root cause of a problem through identifying a symptom and then repeating th...