Tips & Tricks
Revitalize Your Retrospectives
Retrospectives are an essential part of Scrum. But too often, when I talk to Scrum teams, they tell me that they’ve stopped doing retrospectives. “We’ve run out of things to improve,” one ScrumMaster said. Another complained that after six sprints, they were saying the same things every retrospective. If your retrospectives have gone stale, here are seven ways to revitalize them.
Business Agility
10 Lies CIOs Tell Themselves About Their Agile Practices
Most organizations now use agile software delivery models, with the No. 1 goal of delivering new capabilities as fast as possible. Consider the numbers: The 14th Annual State of Agile report, released in May 2020 by Digital.ai, found that 95 percent of respondents say their organizations practice agile and that the top reasons for doing so are to accelerate software delivery, to enhance the ability to manage changing priorities and to increase productivity.
Teams, Coaching & Facilitation
10 Negative Terms Used in Agile Working Settings (But Are Not!)
Some level of confusion may occur with the use of certain terminologies, likely when a relatively new-to-agile member joins an agile working team. Let’s face it, we are living in a society that requires us to know expressions, abbreviations, or acronyms on what everyone is talking about as common knowledge. It’s certainly always best to ask the question up front, but for those worried about terms that typically come up in the context of agile projects, we’ve outlined some below.
5 Principles to Guide Adaptive Leadership
The Covid-19 pandemic is constantly evolving, with leaders facing unpredictability, imperfect information, multiple unknowns, and the need to identify responses quickly — all while recognizing the multi-dimensional (health-related, economic, social, political, cultural) nature of the crisis.
Industry News & Analysis
Agile IS NOT Scrum!
There are certainly many misconceptions that occur with having to implement agility within the organization. The issue becomes even more compounded when non-agile practitioners speculate about what Agile is or for that matter what their idea of what it should be. In our example, this kind of speculation can present a sort of revolving door phenomenon whereby those who are familiar with Scrum, use it to refer to Agile interchangeably.
What We're Listening To
Retrospectives Master Class with David Horowitz – Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
In the second instalment of the Agile Retrospectives Masterclass with David Horowitz, we talk about the 5 phases of a successful retrospective, and share tips and ideas for each of those phases to ensure you are prepared and get the team to find and act on breakthrough improvements.
In Case You Missed It
Blaming and Naming: Recognizing and Avoiding Retrospective Antipatterns
Using the familiar “patterns” approach, Aino Vonge Corry Ph.D. explored antipatterns related to both remote and co-located team retrospectives in this Webinar. From “blaming and naming” to too much small talk, Aino reveals traps she’s encountered in leading hundreds of retrospectives.