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...

A problem we were facing recently was that our teams perceived their own progress as not being fast enough and were developing a sense that they were not performing well. Sometimes it is useful to know how productive we are as an organisation and how our teams compare to teams in other companies. A...

Self-selection helps Agile teams pick themselves. And it’s spreading: Since we shared our Self-Selection kit in May 2014 we have heard about successful Self-Selection events from companies from all over the world. Read our interview with MYOB’s Simon Bristow and Alex Barreto, and find out how they m...

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...

Recently, someone from the small but perfectly shaped nation of Iceland asked me the following question: “When watching your InfoQ talk on portfolio Kanban I noticed that you talked about measuring autonomy, mastery, and purpose as they are defined by Daniel Pink. I have been searching the web for a...

This is a sample agenda for a sprint planning meeting. Depending on your context you will have to change the details, just make sure the outcomes stay the same. Meeting purpose: Plan and prepare for the upcoming sprint Meeting duration: ca. 1 hour for a 2 week sprint (it will be less if you’re an ex...

Inspired by our squadification event, Australia Post set out to try self-selection for themselves. 60 people were asked to figure out who should be in which team and choose who they wanted to work with. Read our interview with Andy Kelk, Australia Post's Head of Technology for Digital Mailbox, who m...

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...

Doing too many things at once can slow down an entire organisation. As every successful organisation will have more great ideas than they have capacity to build, it is tempting to start too many of them at the same time. However, too many projects in progress will slow down delivery of each and ever...

It can be easy to forget what a Product Owner or Scrum Master actually do. A poster with a role description can come in handy so, based on popular demand, here are the beautifully designed ones we use at Trade Me. Download the pdf version here. Download the pdf version here. I hope they'll look a...

My goal for the next couple of years is to become an awesome public speaker. And here’s why:This is handball, and this is what I used to do. First, on a competitive level from when I was 12 and then, when I grew older, as a professional player representing Austria at the 1992 Olympic Summer Games. W...

Let them be in control of the way they work ... After having been though a day of letting people self-organise into squads David Mole, Trade Me's head of projects (and my Agile partner in crime) and I are often being asked how we kicked off the new squads and how we make sure they work in a discipli...

... getting more stuff done At Trade Me we want to measure the overall health of Tech (that’s our team of 125 designers, developers, testers, BAs, and Squad Masters) to identify trends and to know if we are getting better (or worse!). We know that when we measure something it is a strong way of sayi...

This free Self-Selection pocket guide is a quick guide to Self-Selection. Use these handy checklists for preparing and running self-selection events of 20-200 people. It can be used as a stand-along guide or as a companion to the book “Creating Great Teams - How Self- Selection Lets People Excel” by...

Spotify's whitepaper on how to structure an organisation with Agile tribes, squads, chapters and guilds has been the most inspiring and interesting idea to come out of the Agile scene in the past three years. For anyone who has read the excellent paper we have created a one page infographic on how i...

Organisations get the best results when people can choose what they work on and who they work with. In that spirit we decided to let people self-organise into small, cross-functional teams called squads. Up until last week we had six established squads within two tribes the rollout had been purposef...