You are starting a new project. You have a mix of feelings that range from anxiety to excitement. You have your team gathered and ready to start. You will be assuming formal or informal leadership roles at least once during the project. You know you and your team are all in this together. You want […]
Front Line Agility – the missing link to true innovation and customer centricity
Front line employees are often overlooked in an agile transformation – but they can be the key to a truly successful approach. When leading the second phase of an agile transformation, we put focus on transforming the business to an agile approach – which usually means introducing collaborative, design-thinking driven ways of working in our […]
Retrospectives series: Big event in a team
Here is a new idea for you, my friend facilitator, to try out in your next retrospectives. The core of format is based in a tool from my ORSC teachers from CRR and Augere, and I added some ideas over it. I have already applied this format a couple of times with success in authentic multidisciplinary teams. A strong commitment and smooth conflict […]
Retrospectives series: Heaven and Hell
This is the second article of the retrospective series, I hope you enjoy it, find it useful and can apply it with your team soon. Please, leave some feedback when this actually happens! This retrospective is titled “Heaven and Hell”, soon you will learn why… USE This is a good retrospective format for teams who are […]
Challenges coaching multidisciplinary teams
It is a great concept this multidisciplinary thing: Create a single team with all the different people required to deliver a service, instead of having different knowledge areas doing their part independently. Make them work at the same pace. Have them focus on the same goal at a given moment. Remove extremely detailed documentation to […]
Agilar as Belbin Team Roles Accredited professionals
Last February 2015, José Ramón Díaz and myself finished our Belbin Roles Accreditation Course. We had already used this technique, helping other accredited professionals to run the exercises with some of the teams we were coaching. After all this period, we can say that we find it a very useful and powerful tool to coach teams and […]
Adapting the Inception Deck
Many of you are probably familiar with the Inception Deck. It is a tool to get all the stakeholders aligned at the beginning of a project or product development. The idea is to get this alignment to happen with the least paperwork possible. The Inception Deck provides a set of 10 exercises to be done […]
The value of your network
How do you manage your professional network? I have an account at both Viadeo (which I rarely use) and LinkedIn (which I use much more than Facebook). I always wondered how some people managed to get to over 500 connections so quickly. I personally reached that number less than a year ago and I have […]
Letter of intent
Acme Inc. Av. Frederick W. Taylor 42 Gantt Building 1000 Gotham City NeverlandDear IT Manager,before you hire your next Agile coach to either kickstart or breathe some life into your Agile change initiative, take a step back and think about it. You might be surprised to hear this from me, but maybe that budget could […]
Story points vs Man days – The misguided debate
Relative estimation and story points is one of the topics I find people most often struggling to grasp, whether in trainings or at client sites. The main issue seems to be the belief that eventually, Story Points (SPs) need to be translated into Man Days (MDs) if you want to be able to do things […]