Have you ever wondered what truly drives the success of agile methodologies? Is it merely the technical benefits of speed, efficiency, and continuous improvement, or is there something more profound at play? As a CTO (I'm co-founder and CTO of Alli Connect) and a long-time practitioner of pair programming and continuous delivery, [...]
Tito Jackson: How Adding More Cowbell Can Be the Prescription for Your Team's Fever In this episode, Richard interviews Tito Jackson. Tito is an entrepreneur, founder of Apex Noire, and a former City Councilor of the City of Boston. He tells us how to inspire cultural dedication to goals within your [...]
Dr. Dave Cornelius: How Having Fun and Building Trust Makes Teams Resilient and Successful In this episode, Richard interviews Dr. Dave Cornelius. Dr. Dave is a lean and agile catalyst leading and empowering others to achieve their best. He is the author of several books, including Belonging and Healing: Creating awesomeness [...]
Jessica Kerr: How Some Shared Fun Time Increases Your Team's Productivity In this episode, Richard interviews Jessica Kerr. Jessica is a software developer, popular public speaker, and a symmathecist. She tells us about symmathesy and observability and how they make our world develop faster and more harmoniously. When you finish listening [...]
Sally Elatta: Here Are 5 Factors That Will Guarantee Your Team's High Performance In this episode, Richard interviews Sally Elatta, CEO and founder of AgilityHealth. Sally tells us how leadership is just another way of serving a team and how leading from a place of love keeps the team engaged and [...]
Andrea Ippolito: How to Bind Your Team With Friendship and Trust In this episode, Richard interviews Andrea Ippolito, CEO and Founder of SimpliFed. SimpliFed is an organization supporting families in feeding their babies. Andrea was a part of and led many teams, including as the Director of the Department of Veteran's [...]
Lisette Sutherland: How to Build Strong Personal Connections in a Remote Team In this episode, Richard interviews Lisette Sutherland. Lisette is an author and keynote speaker, helping people work remotely successfully. She's also the founder of the online community Virtual Team Talk, the host of the Collaboration Superpowers podcast, and the [...]
Claire DeMarco: How to Bring Your Team to Perfection With the Core Protocols In this episode, Richard interviews Claire DeMarco. Claire is the Director of Information Discovery Services at the Harvard Library. She led multiple high-performance teams, including the one that made Harvard University Libraries available to virtually anyone in the [...]
Patricia Kong: How to Get From an Average to a Great Team With Emotional Intelligence and Psychological Safety In this episode, Patricia Kong comes back to the show and turns the tables on Richard, asking him questions. Patricia Patricia leads Enterprise and Leadership Solutions at scrum.org. She is a public speaker, coach, [...]
Brian Lucas: How to Define Your Team as a Powerful and Long-Lasting Brand In this episode, Richard interviews Brian Lucas. Brian is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He is best known for his research on creativity and morality in the workplace and everyday life. [...]
Luke Hohmann: How Being Happy with Who You Are Makes You Feel Wonder for Who You Can Be In this episode, Richard interviews Luke Hohmann. Luke is the founder and CEO of FirstRoot, the company on the mission to create the next generation of impact investors. He is also an inspiring [...]
James Grenning: How to Make Your Team an Iterative Engineering Machine Safely In this episode, Richard interviews James Grenning. James is the founder of Wingman Software, where he coaches and consults around the world. James is also the author of the book Test-Driven Development for Embedded C and the co-author of [...]
Catherine Louis: How to Make Your Current Team Your Best Team In this episode, Richard interviews Catherine Louis. Catherine is a coach, trainer, and consultant helping people like their customers, create high-performance teams, optimize value, innovate and learn together. But it is Catherine's unique experience as a K9 handler and a [...]
Michael Spayd: How Destiny Brings the Best Teams Together In this episode, Richard interviews Michael Spayd, a co-founder of The Collective Edge, Agile Coaching Institute, and the co-author of Agile Transformation: Using the Integral Agile Transformation Framework (tm) to Think and Lead Differently. Michael is best known as the originator of [...]
Kate O'Brien: How "Rushing to Health" Actually Makes Your Team Perform Worse It is a part of human behavior to resist change, especially when things seem to go well. So, how do we secure "buy-in" among the stakeholders for the new ideas? In this episode, Richard interviews Kate O'Brien, Senior Human [...]
Arie van Bennekum: How Saying "Yes" Can Take You Anywhere You Want In this episode, Richard interviews Arie van Bennekum. Arie is a co-author of the Agile Manifesto and an Agile thought leader at Wemanity Group. Arie tells us how accepting new challenges, even when doubting ourselves, opens new opportunities and [...]
Psych Safety and Team EI: The Antidote to the Five Dysfunctions of a Team In this episode, Richard talks about the importance of trust among the team members and how psychological safety increases performance. You can read more about it here: https://kasperowski.com/the-five-dysfunctions/. Watch video Subscribe on Apple [...]
Vanessa Druskat: How to Cross Rope Bridges by Relying on Your Teammates' Skillsets In this episode, Richard interviews Vanessa Druskat. Vanessa's research on organizational behavior and team emotional intelligence profoundly influenced Richard's work with teams. She tells us how relying on a specific skill set of each individual within your team [...]
Mary and Tom Poppendieck: How a Focused Leader Ensures Their Team's Success This episode is a continuation of Richard's interview with Mary and Tom Poppendieck. As the official part of the interview finished, they continued chatting and sharing some great ideas. Luckily, the record button was still on, so we can [...]
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash My students are my best teachers. In a recent High-Performance Team Building™ class, my students asked some great questions. I had to pause, ponder, learn something new, and get back to them after class. Here’s one of those great questions, along with my response. In the [...]
Mary and Tom Poppendieck: Keeping Your Team Together During the Great Resignation In this episode, Richard interviews Mary and Tom Poppendieck. Richard's Agile heroes, the Poppendiecks have written highly influential works on lean software development, including Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, The Lean Mindset, and Leading the Lean Software Development: [...]
Woody Zuill: The Best Leader Is the One Who Leads Without Authority This is the second part of Richard's interview with Woody Zuill. Woody is an Agile coach well known for popularizing mob programming and the No Estimates movement. In this second part of the interview with Woody, we talk about [...]
Woody Zuill: Knowing When to Stop a Conversation Is Knowing When to Listen In this episode, Richard interviews Woody Zuill, an Agile coach well known for popularizing mob programming and the No Estimates movement. In this first part of the interview with Woody, he tells us how kindness, consideration, and respect [...]
Adam Weisbart: Make Things Simple and Your Team Will Move Faster In this episode, Richard interviews Adam Weisbart, principal at Weisbart Consulting, certified scrum trainer, and agile coach. Adam was also an initiator of Agile Virtual Summit, which grew into a community at https://agilemastery.com. Adam tells us how to eliminate friction, simplify [...]
Steven Wolff: How Understanding and Caring Eliminates Tension and Angst In this episode, Richard interviews Steven Wolff. Steve is a Team Emotional Intelligence expert whose research greatly influenced Richard's work with teams. Steven tells us how to transform angst and tension into excitement - a driving force of any successful team. [...]
Could You Win a Nobel Prize for Slacking Off? In this episode, Richard talks about slacking off and why is it so important. You can read the entire essay at https://kasperowski.com/could-you-win-a-…for-slacking-off/. Watch video Subscribe on Apple Subscribe on Spotify Subscribe on Youtube [...]
Before it was an app, “slack” was already a useful word. As a verb, it meant to take things easy and even be a bit lazy, but the noun hints at its more exciting possibilities: an empty piece of time or space where unknown things can occur. A bit of surplus time in your [...]
Seb Rose: The Secret of a Good Team is a Shared Goal and What Else? In this episode, Richard interviews Seb Rose. Seb is a Continuous Improvement Lead at SmartBear, a co-author of the BDD books Discovery and Formulation, and a regular guest lecturer on behavior-driven development in Richard's course at [...]
Jeff Sutherland: Know How to Overcome Your Team's Limits and Become a Leading Force In this episode, Richard interviews Jeff Sutherland, a co-creator of the Scrum, founder of Scrum Inc., inventor of Scrum@Scale, and a signatory of the Agile Manifesto. He is also the author of the international bestselling book Scrum: [...]
Maria Matarelli: You Must Empower Your Team if You Want Them Motivated In this episode, Richard interviews Maria Matarelli. Maria is a co-founder of Personal Agility Institute, a co-founder of Agile Marketing Academy, an agile coach, and a well-known DJ! She tells us about applying agile principles outside of the IT [...]
Emily Bache: You Need Practice to Achieve Greater Harmony in Your Team In this episode, Richard interviews Emily Bache. Emily is the author of The Coding Dojo Handbook and Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman Method. She is well known in the software development community for her work on the Gilded [...]
Jorgen Hesselberg: Spread the Luck Surface and Increase Your Chance for Success In this episode, Richard interviews Jorgen Hesselberg, a co-founder of Comparative Agility and the author of Unlocking Agility: An Insiders’ Guide to Agile Enterprise Transformation. He tells us how luck is not necessarily a product of coincidence and how [...]
An interview with Richard Kasperowski on High-Performance Teams Stephen Harrison: Let me introduce Richard Kasperowski. Richard and I worked together a while back and have been friends ever since. Along the way, Richard has become a recognized expert in an interesting and relevant field. SH: Richard, welcome. Thanks for taking time to chat. Richard Kasperowski: [...]
Lynn Langit: Make Every Team You Are in the Best Team of Your Life In this episode, Richard interviews Lynn Langit, a cloud architect specialized in big data, a technical educator, and an angel investor. Lynn also used to be the Director of teachingkidsprogramming.org, a not-for-profit online platform for early coding [...]
Matthew McCarthy: Why Being at Peace with Yourself Makes You A Better Team Player In this episode, Richard interviews Matthew McCarthy. Matthew is best known to the world as the CEO of Ben & Jerry's, where he leads an iconic and innovative global brand that continually breaks the rules on how [...]
Richard Sheridan: Dig-Out Your Basic Kindergarten Skills to Become a Better Team Player In this episode, Richard interviews Richard Sheridan. Richard is the CEO, Co-founder, and Chief Storyteller of Menlo Innovations, a software design and development firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also the author of two books on creating [...]
Patricia Kong: Know How to Use Evidence to Quickly Improve Your Leadership In this episode, Richard interviews Patricia Kong. Patricia leads Enterprise and Leadership Solutions at scrum.org. She is a public speaker, coach, a co-author of The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum, and a co-developer of the Evidence-Based Management Framework. Patricia [...]
Michael de la Maza: Use the Friction to Get Your Team to the Top In this episode, Richard interviews Michael de la Maza, a well known Agile and Scrum Coach and Consultant from the Bay Area. Michael is a founder of the Heart Healthy Scrum, an Agile and Scrum consultancy firm. [...]
James Shore: How to Build Super-Cohesive Teams and Work with Joy In this episode, Richard talks with James Shore. James is an Agile software development teacher, writer, and consultant. He is the co-author of the book The Art of Agile Development, a seminal work in the Agile community. He also co-created [...]
Want to Know More About High-Performance Teams? Hi, friends! We did a webinar on high-performance teams a while back. In case you missed it, here are the video and slides: I wanted to make sure we answered everyone’s questions, so here we [...]
Want to Know More About High-Performance Teams? In this episode, Richard answers the questions from the readers and listeners about high-performace teams, psychological safety, team emotional intelligence, and the Core Protocols. Listen Audio Watch video TRANSCRIPT Richard 00:11 Hi, [...]
Natalie Warnert: How to Turn Conflict Into a Strength? In this episode, Richard interviews Natalie Warnert, the founder, president, and executive director of Women in Agile, and an Agile Process coach at Volkswagen Financial Services. She tells us about the importance of embracing healthy conflicts in your organization to achieve real [...]
Ted M. Young: How to Have Fun Through Learning? In this episode, Richard interviews Ted M. Young, better known in the software development community as "Jitter Ted". Ted is a software industry veteran with decades of experience working with companies like Apple, Google, and eBay. Ted is the principal Java trainer [...]
Cue the piano: If you don't want to see me... I did a full one-eighty, crazy Thinking ‘bout the way I was - from Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now” I did a full one-eighty in my teaching, coaching, and consulting work. As recently as March, I advised clients that if they care about the product [...]
Your Remote Team Actually Can Be Awesome In this episode, Richard shares his story of 180 degree transformation. You can read more about it here: https://kasperowski.com/your-remote-team-actually-can-be-awesome/. TRANSCRIPT Richard Kasperowski:00:10 Hi, friends! Welcome back to With Great People, the podcast for high-performance teams. I’m Richard [...]
Lisa Crispin: How to Transform Your Workplace Into a Safe Place? In this episode, Richard interviews Lisa Crispin, a quality owner at OutSystems, co-founder of Agile Testing Fellowship Inc, and one of the most influential testing professionals in the software industry. Lisa co-authored several books, including Agile Testing and Testing Extreme [...]
Tricia Broderick: How to Create a Support Network in Your Organization? In this episode, Richard interviews Tricia Broderick, an agile coach at Agile for All and an Agile Alliance Board member. She tells us how the feeling of being supported increases the success of the team and shares how to build [...]
Wicked Problems, Wicked Opportunities: Mindset and Perspective In this episode, Richard discusses the importance of inclusive, critical-thinking based education system to achieve growth-mindedness, flexibility and productivity. You can read more about it at https://kasperowski.com/wicked-problems/. TRANSCRIPT Richard Kasperowski:00:10 Hi, friends. [...]
Joanne Stone and I recently had a great conversation about wicked problems. I love the word wicked. It’s a wonderfully positive word in my native New England vernacular. We use it to amplify or express the superlative of an idea: a wicked good movie, wicked awesome lobster dinner, a wicked nice day at the beach. [...]
Lyssa Adkins: How Strong Team Relationships Increase the Value of Products? In this episode, Richard Interviews Lyssa Adkins. Lyssa is a co-founder of the Agile Coaching Institute, an independent agile and leadership coach, and the author of the Coaching Agile Teams. Lyssa tells us about the importance of interpersonal relationships within [...]
Diana Larsen: Do You Know What True Compatibility Is? In this episode, Richard interviews Diana Larsen. Diana is a true agile pioneer, a visionary pragmatist, and one of the highest authorities on agile retrospectives. She co-authored several books, including Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great; Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile [...]
Collaborate Better and Save the World In this episode, Richard discusses how the Core Protocols can help our teams thrive no matter whether their members are together or miles apart. You can read more about it at https://kasperowski.com/collaborate-better-and-save-the-world/. TRANSCRIPT Richard Kasperowski:00:11 Hi, friends! Welcome [...]
Mark Kilby: How to Stay Together in a Distributed Team? In this episode, Richard interviews Mark Kilby, a coach, and mentor to distributed teams. Mark co-authored the book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams with Johanna Rothman, and he designed many online courses on the subject. We talk about finding a shared [...]
Team Communication in Times of Crisis Once upon a time, a very long time ago—also known as “February 2020”—my personal and professional life consisted of being together and communicating with other people face to face. I gave talks at conferences, business coaching sessions in my clients’ offices, and professional training in their classrooms and in [...]
April Jefferson: How to Achieve Greatness Through Imagination and Fun? In this episode, Richard interviews April Jefferson. April is a coach, facilitator, and speaker. She currently serves as a board chairwoman at the Design Action Lab. We talk about achieving happiness within a team and among customers through innovation, improvisation, and [...]
Continuous Integration of People: Teamwork Is The Work In this episode, Richard discusses the importance of continuous integration of people within your team and presents his how-to guide to achieve it. You can read more about it at https://kasperowski.com/continuous-integration-of-people/. TRANSCRIPT Richard Kasperowski:00:10 Hi, [...]
Yann Toutant: How to Build Trust Between Your Teammates? In this episode, Richard interviews Yann Toutant, President of the French Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands, startup advisor, and manager at Toucan Toco. Yann tells us about the importance of building trust and understanding between your team members and how to [...]
Esther Derby: How to Keep Your Team Connected and Focused? In this episode, Richard interviews Esther Derby, one of the world's top experts in organizational dynamics. Esther coauthored three books, including Behind Closed Doors with Johanna Rothman and Agile Retrospectives with Diana Larsen and Ken Schwaber. In her newest book - [...]
Lynne Cazaly: You Don't Have to Be Perfect! In this episode, Richard interviews Lynne Cazaly, a speaker, trainer, facilitator, and sense-maker who helps business owners, teams, and organizations transition to better ways of thinking and working. Lynne is the author of six books, the latest of which is Ish. We talk [...]
Stay Amazing Together When Life Is Hard In this episode, Richard is discussing how to keep your team thriving even in this new era of remote work, by using the Core Protocols and the Team Transformation Canvas. You can read more about it here. TRANSCRIPT [...]
Tiffany Farriss and George Demet: How to Achieve Certainty in Uncertain Times? In this episode, Richard interviews Tiffany Farriss and George DeMet. Tiffany and George are CEOs of Palantir.net, a consultant company that designs web-based solutions for education, health-care, and other socially-oriented services. We talk about the role of distributed decision-making [...]
Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash Continuous Integration of People: a how-to guide Share emotional connection continuously. On a regular cadence: Do an emotion check-in with your teammates on a regular rhythm. Check-in with each other at least once every 24 hours. Try more frequent check-ins, like every half-day, or even every hour. [...]
Molood Ceccarelli: Tips on Surviving Remote Work During the COVID-19 Crisis? In this episode, the first one recorded since the beginning of the Coronavirus outbreak, Richard interviews Molood Ceccarelli. Molood is an agile coach, the founder of the Remote Forever Summit, and CEO of Remote Forever. As someone who dedicated her [...]
Arlo Belshee: What Are the Hidden Foundations of Successful Team-Building? Richard interviews Arlo Belshee. Arlo is a well-known legacy code consultant, a team-building leader, and one of the inventors of promiscuous pair programming. Arlo currently serves as CTO at Deep Roots. As we chat about our favorite teams, Arlo shares with [...]
Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash Core Protocols for Remote Teams Check In frequently. Stay connected with each other emotionally. Explicitly Pass on an activity by typing or saying, “I pass.” Explicitly Check Out by typing or saying, “I’m checking out.” Manage your apps’ alerts and notifications appropriately. Ask for Help early and often. Use [...]
Radhika Dutt: How to Create a Clear Vision for Your Company? Richard interviews Radhika Dutt. Radhika is an entrepreneur, product leader, and co-founder of Radical Product Thinking. At Radical Product, it is all about vision-driven product creation. But how do you define the vision of your company, and how do you [...]
I Feel Unsafe Here In this episode, Richard talks about disagreements at work and how to transform them from destructive into a creative force with the help of Core Protocols. You can read more about it at https://kasperowski.com/i-feel-unsafe-here/. TRANSCRIPT Richard Kasperowski:00:10 [...]
Joshua Kerievsky: How to Grow from a One-Man-Show into a Global Team? Richard Kasperowski interviews Joshua Kerievsky. Joshua is the creator and steward of the Modern Agile movement, CEO of Industrial Logic, and the author of the award-winning book, Refactoring to Patterns. He tells us the story of how he grew [...]
Allison Pollard: How to Give a Sense of Ownership to your Team? Richard Kasperowski interviews Allison Pollard. Allison is the director of Improving, an agile coach, creative facilitator, consultant, and public speaker. We talk about the importance of giving your team a sense of ownership. Can that be done? And how? [...]
“I feel unsafe here!” Photo by Frank Busch on Unsplash Millennials get a bad rap for snowflake-like sensitivity and delicacy. It’s impossible to criticize anything a Millenial says or does – so the story goes. They’ll call you out on it and accuse you of creating an unsafe space. Millennial or not, sometimes [...]
I Lived with the Monkeys for Three Months In this episode, Richard talks about the joy and methods of learning. Unlike babies, adults never really learn anything from scratch, and only rarely do they learn unintentionally. There is always some foundational knowledge we can build upon, even if it is from [...]
Gil Broza: How to Transform Management Into an Effective Team in No Time? Richard Kasperowski interviews Gil Broza. Gil is a mindset and leadership coach. He is well known for his books: The Agile Mind-Set and The Human Side of Agile. Recently, he authored a third book - Agile for Non-Software [...]
Cuando era un bebé, viví con las monas durante tres meses. When I was a baby, I lived with the monkeys for three months. Photo by Tj Kolesnik on Unsplash My Spanish teacher tilted her head sideways like a puppy trying to understand the world through new eyes. My words were correct. My [...]
Engagement Is About Me (and You) In this episode, Richard talks about engagement. Who is responsible for keeping people engaged? How to do it? And how to bring the disengaged back into the circle? You can also read about this topic on Richard's blog at https://kasperowski.com/engagement-is-about-me-and-you/. [...]
Linda Rising: How to Listen to Understand and How to Share to Gain? Richard Kasperowski interviews Linda Rising. Linda is an independent consultant and speaker with vast experience in telecommunications, avionics, and other industries. She is an author or a co-author of four books, including the Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing [...]
Want an Awesome Team? Start With You. In this episode, Richard introduces the Team Transformation Canvas, a new tool he created to help you transform your team. You can read more about it at https://kasperowski.com/team-transformation-canvas/. TRANSCRIPT Richard Kasperowski:00:10 Hi, [...]
Rod Collins: Innovation Discovery and How to Do It the Right Way Richard Kasperowki interviews Rod Collins. Rod is the director of innovation at Optimity Advisors and innovation curator at Salt Flats. Rod and I talk about the collectivization of strategic leadership in the dynamic business environment of the 21st century. [...]
Want an easy tool to help you start building the best team of your life? That’s what the Team Transformation Canvas is: a practical worksheet to help you and your teammates discover the best in each other and put it into action. The canvas facilitates individual self-awareness of your current emotional state and desired [...]
I Will Never Do Anything Dumb on Purpose This episode is the first of a new series of solo pieces in which Richard will be sharing whatever he is thinking about at the moment related to great teams. Today we are talking about the necessity of rephrasing the 11th Core Commitment: [...]
The more things change, the more they stay the same. This includes the fundamentals of human nature: what motivates us, how we work together in groups, how we collaborate and communicate. The essential truths are unchanged — from the earliest human tribes just trying to survive, to the high-performance teams of today. The Core Protocols—derived [...]
Jutta Eckstein: 4 Secrets of Bossa Nova for Powerful, Motivated Teams Richard Kasperowski interviews Jutta Eckstein. Jutta is an Agile coach, consultant, and trainer. She is the author of the books Company-wide Agility, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams. Jutta and I chat about the importance of [...]
Llevellyn Falco: How to Grow Crushingly Effective Remote Teams? Richard Kasperowski interviews Llewellyn Falco. Llewellyn is a technical coach specialized in rapid mob programming and in building remote teams. Llewellyn and I chat about the ways of growing, rather than engineering, successful teams. Llewellyn shares with us his insights about the [...]
Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash Real-world cases and challenges—this is the exciting part of my work in high-performing teams. Real people have complicated and unpredictable lives and behaviors. This is where ideas get tested. For example, I recently got involved in a discussion about showing up at meetings. A team leader [...]
Richard Kasperowski: How to Increase Success with Simple Team-Building Tools? In this episode, Richard Kasperowski answers the questions! Back in March 2019, I was a guest on the radio show Morning Affair with Mark Bishop at 1030 KVOI-AM The Voice in Tucson, Arizona. We talked about team- building techniques in the IT [...]
Photo by Thomas Drouault on Unsplash Like every good citizen, I was glad to do my civic duty. Juror service never comes at the most convenient of times, but it’s a responsibility that’s part of our social contract. When I got the call, I was happy to answer. The empaneling process was interesting, [...]
A Really Good Team Is Rare. If You're In One, Celebrate It! This episode is an interview with Caitlin Walker. Caitlin is a specialist in creating the conditions for groups to collaborate, which is her modest way of saying that she is the world’s leading expert on Clean Language and Systemic [...]
Original photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash When’s the last time you got good feedback? Not pat-on-the-back, puts-a-smile-on-your-face feedback. I mean effective feedback, feedback that helped you make a positive change in yourself. Whether from a manager responsible for reviewing your performance, a peer evaluation system, or a 360-degree exercise, giving and receiving [...]
Michael and Audree Sahota: Oh My God, I Love Being Here This episode is an interview with Michael and Audree Sahota. Michael and Audree are the authors of the book, Emotional Science. We chat about intentionality in creating your organization’s environment, including meditation as a form of “Check In on steroids.” [...]
There Was This Buzz in the Organization Richard Kasperowski interviews Johanna Rothman. Johanna is known as the Pragmatic Manager—that’s the name of her email newsletter, where she shares her thinking on practical pragmatic approaches to hiring people, looking for a job, and managing projects, programs, and portfolios. Johanna talks about the [...]
Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash Hands up, who loves work meetings? Stupid question? You’re probably rolling your eyes, not raising your hand in affirmation. A slew of workplace memes and Dilbert cartoons mock the stereotype of compulsory, oppressive, time-wasting endurance sessions. Everyone hates meetings. There’s definitely a problem here. According to research [...]
First Scrum Team Was the Best Team of My Life Richard Kasperowski interviews Vasco Duarte. Vasco is a long-time Agilist and the host of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. Vasco talks about his journey as an Agilist, starting with the time he did Scrum exactly by the book—and it turned out [...]
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. - Carl Jung Learning to play the pututu in Peru [...]
What Makes a Team Successful Is You Meet Your Objective Richard Kasperowski interviews DiDi Vaz. DiDi is an Agile coach working on the data sciences platform at the Broad Institute. DiDi and I chat about connection: connection to each other as teammates, and connection to your shared goals. She offers advice on [...]
Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash Conversation is a big part of human dynamics. How we talk, how we listen, how we communicate our intent: our interactions affect the emotional state of the people around us. During their initial work defining the Core Protocols, Jim and Michele McCarthy focused on work teams. They [...]
There’s No One Truth for How to Do Things Richard Kasperowski interviews Yuval Yeret. Yuval is an Agile coach and trainer at Agile Sparks. Yuval and Richard chat about his best team ever, which he describes as family. He offers advice to listeners working with both f2f and partially distributed teams, and [...]
The end of the year is a great time to reflect on what the last twelve months have brought you and what you’ve learned or done—and to look ahead to the promise of the coming year. It’s a blank page on which you can write whatever future you desire for yourself. A blank page can [...]
Figure Out What You Want to Do, and Do It Figure Out What You Want to Do, and Do It Richard Kasperowski interviews Abby Fichtner, the Hacker Chick. Abby is an author, speaker, and innovation ninja. Abby shares the story of her best team ever, the founding team at the Harvard [...]
Making Team Magic Happen Richard Kasperowski interviews Michael Nir, a keynote speaker and bestselling author with expertise in Lean, Agile, and Gestalt. Michael shares his experience with a team of people from different walks of life, their intention to be part of a great team, and investing the time to make [...]
What is love? Many great writers, artists, and philosophers have tried to define love over the years. They’ve all approached it from different perspectives and produced some interesting answers. I won’t compete with the romantics here. My interest is in workplace relationships and teams. After working for so long with the Core Protocols and observing teams that have high [...]
Delivering Awesome Value at High Speed Richard Kasperowski interviews Heidi Helfand, director of engineering excellence at Procore Technologies and author of the book Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams. Heidi shares her wisdom on clarity of roles, having a clear sense of purpose, and patterns of dynamic reteaming. Visit [...]
The Feeling of Belonging Richard Kasperowski interviews Dave West, product owner and CEO of Scrum.org. Dave talks about the feeling of belonging, the regular work rhythm of great teams, and remembering that everyone is human. Connect with Dave at dave.west@scrum.org and read the Scrum.org blog at https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog. Join hundreds of high-performers and subscribe to Richard’s newsletter at https://kasperowski.com. [...]
Photo by Henri Pham on Unsplash In last month’s blog, we looked at some of the reasons we find it difficult to ask that simple question, “will you help me?” I wanted to come back to Ask For Help again because despite being one of the simplest team behaviors to explain or describe, it seems [...]
Clean Language – Know What Brings You Joy Richard Kasperowski interviews Andrea Chiou, an Agile coach based in Reston, VA. Andrea shares her thoughts on Clean Language and Systemic Modeling, knowing what brings you joy, and the strength that arises from our diversity. Connect with Andrea on Twitter and on her [...]
Steve Denning: Courage to Ignore Limits Richard Kasperowski interviews Steve Denning, author of The Age of Agile and contributor to Forbes.com. Steve talks about courage, openness to diverse viewpoints, and ignoring limits – working around the team’s constraints. Contact Steve at stevedenning.com, and check out his book, The Age of Agile, at kspr.co/theageofagile. [...]
Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash I get by with a little help from my team… Or I could have called this, Help, I need somebody, not just anybody There are lots of song lyrics and literature references about asking for help and looking for the support of others. And also about how [...]
I’ve been reflecting on some recent research into workplace motivation published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (and reported in The New York Times) by Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, which concluded that meditation was not a good thing for workplace productivity.This was surprising to me, given all the evidence about intrinsic motivation and [...]
Complementary Skills & Work Styles Richard Kasperowski interviews Wendy Wong, Senior Director of Product Management at Constant Contact. Wendy discusses opt-in team formation, complementary skills and work styles, and the right number of people on a team. Connect with Wendy at wwong@constantcontact.com. Join hundreds of high-performers and subscribe to Richard’s newsletter at [...]
Richard Kasperowski interviews Eugene Krylov, VP of Engineering at HealthEdge. Eugene discusses learning, short feedback cycles, and inviting your actual customers to your sprint reviews. Connect with Eugene at www.linkedin.com/in/ekrylov, visit HealthEdge at www.healthedge.com, and listen to HealthEdge’s CEO’s podcast. To support this podcast, sign up for my newsletter at kasperowski.com. [...]
Safe to Fail, Learn, and Grow Richard Kasperowski interviews Julie Bright. Julie is an Agile coach at Capital One. She introduces the concept of “going slow to go fast”. Julie and I chat about her experience with fostering an environment where it’s safe to fail, where it's safe to learn and grow [...]
When You Listen Better, Your Teammates Think Better Richard Kasperowski interviews Judy Rees. Judy is an author and an expert on Clean Language and distributed teams. Judy and I chat about attentive listening as the most important element of her best team ever. If you enjoy this conversation with Judy, be sure [...]
Love the Work You Do, Do the Work You Love: an interview with Sateesh Kamisetti Richard Kasperowski interviews Sateesh Kamisetti, a young team leader and Scrum Master. Sateesh’s personal vision is to continuously explore, improve, and see life with a new lens every day. He shares thoughts on individual and team growth, [...]
Jim and Michele McCarthy share the origins of the Core Protocols. The Core Protocols describe the behaviors of the best teams in the world. Jim and Michele observed teams in their lab and in industry until they understand the common behaviors that the best teams shared. The documented these behaviors and [...]
People on high-performance teams act like they’re in love with each other. Given the building blocks of high-performance teams, add the behavior patterns of connection, productivity, and error handling. Put it all together with behaviors from previous episodes, and you have the recipe for love (or friendship if you’re not allowed to [...]
Self-aware individuals are the building blocks of high-performance teams. This episode is a segment of Richard’s talk at Craft 2017 in Budapest. Self-aware individuals are the building blocks of high-performance teams. Richard shares information and activities to help you build self-awareness within yourself. View the session sides at www.slideshare.net/rkasper/highper…-core-protocols. [...]
Positive bias and freedom/autonomy are the foundations of high-performance teams. This episode is a segment of Richard’s talk at Craft 2017 in Budapest. Positive bias and freedom are the foundations of high-performance teams. Richard shares information and activities to help you embody these foundations with your team. View the session sides at [...]
An introduction to the science and research on high-performance teams This episode is a segment of Richard’s talk at Craft 2017 in Budapest. Remember what it felt like to be on the best team you were ever on in your life? Want to be able to do that again, on purpose, and [...]
How to build awesome relationships using the Core Protocols This is a workshop Richard facilitated at Heartspace Teachings in San Jose, CA, in July 2017. View the workshop slides at www.slideshare.net/rkasper/somethi…-fueled-by-love.
Credit: jurvetson@Flickr Hi there! I'm so glad you visited! After you read this article, check out my courses, latest book, podcast, and other blog articles. Enjoy! Most people don’t want internal memos leaked and made public, but if you are the iconic figurehead of a ground-breaking innovator like Tesla, you probably expect to [...]
The Italian Job* My colleague mentioned, “By the way, I was thinking of Sicily, for the September conference.” Me: “Mmm… Where?” Colleague: “Southern island of Italy. Nice climate for the time of year, and I heard about a great new venue there. If you agree I’ll check it out and get back to you.” “Sure, [...]
Last month we had a look at the ‘Pass/unpass’ core protocol, used to indicate whether you are actively engaged with your teammates in an activity. Today let’s go a bit deeper into what being actively engaged when you’re part of a high-performing team means by examining two more protocols: Check In and Check Out. They are related, but [...]
Being part of a great team doesn’t mean showing up and being awesome about everything, every second of every day. Great teams aren’t formed from robotic supermen and women who never have conflicts, contradictions, or confusion – or who’ve never had a bad moment. They’re made up of everyday people who bring their whole selves [...]
My work with teams builds upon a body of knowledge developed across decades, applying the latest thinking to fundamental and well-tested theories of human behavior within groups. Repeatedly, and in many different settings and industries, the correlation plays out: High-performing teams require psychological safety. Psychological safety requires emotional intelligence at a team level. And understanding and applying [...]
Many manufacturing businesses follow a predictable rhythm of activities based on a production and distribution cycle. And Santa’s North Pole-based outfit is an excellent example. Everything builds to a single tight annual shipping window, and to ensure customer satisfaction, it’s vital that the entire team is performing at an optimal level — particularly during the run-up to [...]
Have you heard? Psychological safety is the key to high-performance teams at Google. Google is full of high-performers, both individuals and teams. Some teams at Google really stand out—they are the highest of the high-performing teams. At Google, they want all the teams to be the highest of the high-performing, so they spun up a [...]
A team is a group of two or more people aligned with a common goal. A high-performance team is a team that is objectively better than other teams doing similar work (or with a similar goal, if it’s not a work team). Objectively better means that we can measure teams and compare them to each other. Aim for objective metrics that someone outside [...]
Have you ever tandem-bicycled? Molly and I cycled across Upper Austria on a tandem this summer. We enjoyed the vistas of the Danube River with its lush green hills, medieval towns and castles, and vineyards. Tandem cycling is an incredible team experience. Being on one bike together brings us into a state of high "teamness." [...]
It seems like everyone has high-performance teams on their mind. Just this morning, I had a great conversation with a young army veteran who had led teams. He said he experienced some incredibly bad teams during his stint in the army. The teams were toxic. They were run by bullying and negativity. His team leaders complained about everything that [...]
I joined my wife, Molly, and a group of around 25 old and new friends at the Open Space Institute’s conference on Peace and High Performance. I drew this quick sketch of Harrison Owen, creator of Open Space Technology as he reminded us how easy it is to connect using Open Space: just sit in [...]
I’ve been on tour, sharing my Building Great Teams with the Core Protocols class and talk all over North America and in London. And I’m honored and grateful for the positive reviews, reflections, and connections to other people’s work. Hannes Horn writes about his experience in my half-day class on Medium . He describes [...]
Want your students or clients to really learn Agile? Then get them to teach Agile to themselves. Experience Agile is the activity I use to close my two-day Agile class. Students learn Agile by doing Agile and by teaching Agile to each other. The assignment: Design, implement, and deliver a product that teaches you everything [...]
Introducing my book, The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness. Here’s the blurb: Want to live in greatness? This book is your guide. The Core Protocols show you how to discover and obtain what you want, on your own, with your friends and family, and with the people you work with. Follow [...]
On May 1, 2015, a group of 16 people gathered at Crystal Lake near Seattle, Washington. We announced to the world that we feel. That we suffer and that we are responsible. That we want a world filled with abundant love and greatness. That we have been "booted" running a new operating system, the [...]
Here’s a great Scrum scaling pattern based on the pattern that one of my clients uses. They use this pattern to scale their 500 people into a very successfully business unit of a huge technology company. For each Product Backlog, there is one Product Owner (PO), one Scrum Master (SM), and up to four [...]
Are your Sprint Planning meetings painful? Are your Sprint outcomes always as great as you want? Have you ever held a Sprint Retrospective and decided to get your Product Backlog truly Ready? Here’s an outline of a Product Backlog Refinement Workshop I use with teams I manage and coach: Goals The goals [...]
Hi there! I'm so glad you visited! This blog focuses on learning activities that work in physical space. Want 15+ amazingly fun learning activities that work online? Then take a look at this article, Your Remote Team Actually Can Be Awesome. Enjoy! I love using games and interactive activities when I share Scrum and [...]
Welcome back to the Scrum Master Skills Series! In part 1, I shared my notes on how to facilitate a great Sprint Planning session. Here, in part 2, I share my notes on ho to facilitate a great Daily Scrum. Enjoy! INTRO Facilitate: to make facile, to make easy. That’s your job as facilitator. [...]
Which is better, Open Space Technology or Lean Coffee? We explored Open Space and Lean Coffee at QCon London 2014. We put 15 facilitated peer sharing sessions on the program. We thought we would hold a series of 15 short Open Spaces, each one focused on a different conference track, staggered throughout the day. The conference was three days long, [...]
Hi there! I'm so glad you visited! After you read this article, check out my courses, latest book, podcast, and other blog articles. Enjoy! Welcome to the Scrum Masters Skills Series! In part 1, I share my notes on how to facilitate a great Sprint Planning session. Enjoy! INTRO Facilitate: to make [...]
What is the manager’s role in an Agile team? In the typical Agile training class, we learn about Scrum’s three roles: Product Owner, Development Team member, and Scrum Master. Where do managers fit in? Should managers be afraid that their job title isn’t part of Scrum? What is a manager, anyway? In industrial management [...]
This is a transcript of the pecha kucha I shared at Give Thanks for Scrum 2013 in November. My slides are here. I’m Richard Kasperowski. I’m an independent Agile coach and Open Space facilitator. I wasn’t sure what to say today, so I followed the advice on page 11 of the Scrum Guide and held a retrospective. I used [...]
I've been thinking about "the good life" a lot lately, inspired by reading John H. Bodley's textbook, Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System. Bodley uses the term summum bonum in his discussion on the good life. He definessummum bonum as, "the maximum human good … as culturally defined". Bodley writes: ... in addition [...]
Who am I? I do great things with great people. I am a Business Transformation Coach, Agile Coach, and Open Space Facilitator. I help people, teams, and organizations understand what they have, discover and align around what they want, and transform from what they have to what they want. What is a coach? A coach [...]
This is an edited transcript of my presentation at Rebel Jam, a global 24-hour long conference on positively changing business, government, education, healthcare, and the world itself. You can find my slides here. I do great things with great people I’m Richard Kasperowski. My vision is that I do great things with great people. Everything [...]
What is the perfect job? I'm playing Perfection Game with myself. If I were to give my job a perfection rating, the criteria would be: I do great things with great people--my personal vision. I'm not doing mediocre things, and I'm not doing things with mediocre people. Everything else derives from this vision. (My vision [...]
Cancel your sprint. You'll be glad you did. I cancelled a sprint this week. We had begun building a new software increment, and we were on track to get it done. During the sprint, we discovered the limits of our approach, and shared what we learned with our customer. Our customer shared with their [...]
If my mom asked me, "What's Scrum?," what would I tell her? Here's my answer.Scrum is a way to take great ideas, turn them into a great product, and end up with happy people. Imagine a group of people doing something cool together, maybe inventing new tech product, or something else innovative that no one's [...]
Hi there! I'm so glad you visited! After you read this article, check out my courses, latest book, podcast, and other blog articles. Enjoy! Self-management and self-organization, or command-and-control: it's a deliberate choice for you and your team, not a default that you blindly accept. But what if your team [...]
Thanks to everyone who attended my session, "Radical Innovation: The Six Week Open Space Experiment," at Scrum Gathering Barcelona 2012 this week. My slides are here. My hope: each of you will hold Open Space when you return home. Will you share your experience with me?
If you could only read one book on Agile, which would it be? What about two books? Three or more? Here is the Official Agile Reading List, the full list of recommended reading to get you Agile: Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Start here. Everything else derives from this. The Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and [...]
I build great software with great people. We need a great space in which to do it. For the last year, we’ve been experimenting with an open plan collaboration space. Instead of working as individuals in cubicles, we work together in a space with no walls between us. For the first six months, [...]
Perfection Ping Pong is derived from the Perfection Game, one of the McCarthy Technologies Core Protocols, and inspired by TDD Ping Pong. This game will support you in your desire to aggregate the best ideas with people who are available only via communication channels such as email and IM. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ping-Pong_2.jpg Player A and Player [...]
The Agile Games conference is great. I have the privilege of participating in this year’s conference as a facilitator. On Friday, April 20, I will lead a game session called “Self Management: 5 Games with Motion.” We’ll play kinesthetic games that explore command-and-control versus self management. These are some of the most outrageously fun games you’ll ever [...]
You opt in and show up at a meeting. You type an email to your boss. Or maybe you IM someone in another building. Sometimes you tweet something or send a text message. Would you do that if you were having dinner with a close friend? Would you act like your friend isn’t worthy of [...]
Six weeks of Open Space—it’s a new world record! I facilitated a six-week-long Open Space with my software development team. As far as we know, this is a unique experience: we are the only people in the world to have held an Open Space for such a long time. We pushed the limits of Open Space [...]
Want to kill your high performance agile dev team? Make it hard for them to deploy to Production. Set up a bureaucracy of approval gates, review boards, committees, and meetings. Make sure they miss their deadlines and disappoint their customers. Control them until they can't get anything done. Don’t let them [...]
My Product Owner is my business owner. He deserves all the credit when we succeed, and all the blame when we fail. He has the most important role in my Agile team. He should be the highest paid because he takes the greatest risk: if he fails, he’s fired. So says Mike Dwyer, and I agree. My PO [...]
Once upon a time, the team was having trouble getting things Done. We asked why, five times. We found a root cause: we struggle to get backlog items Done because we aren't Ready on sprint planning day. So we brainstormed a Definition of Ready. We use it as a checklist to ensure we understand each backlog item well [...]
Dear Future Product Owner, Congratulations on your new job. I want you to play a strong Product Owner role. I am excited about this. We haven’t had a strong Product Owner. The backlog is yours. You define it: you tell us what you want, and you understand what our customers want. You prioritize it: you [...]
A colleague writes: Is Information Overload Wasting 40% of Your Time? In general, multiple studies have indicated that >50% of people feel like they are experiencing "Information Overload”. At the more detailed level, Basex (a consulting firm that focuses on this area) derived the following from a survey intended to determine “How does a typical [...]
Playing well together is important: communicating, learning, sharing, getting things done. Our native culture shapes how we think, how we behave, and how we perceive our coworkers. Geert Hofstede is a master of understanding culture. In his book, Culture’s Consequences, 2nd ed., he shares the data and analysis of many years of research on national cultures. [...]
Happiness is important.Happiness is a leading indicator of your team’s success. Many economists think a happiness metric is more important than GDP and other metrics. Want to knew whether your team is happy--whether your team is trending toward success? Play this game, and find out. Rock-paper-scissors Happiness In this game, team [...]
High tech andon lights are great. Your build breaks, your tests don’t pass, a server goes down, and the bright red light goes on. The team swarms, someone fixes the build, and the light goes green. It’s all good. But it takes some technical effort to set up that magic red/green light. Why not go low [...]
Lean optimization: a case study (Alternate title: Lean optimization of the home brewery) Subtitle: Why does my back hurt? (Alternate subtitle: How to convince my wife I need a kegerator) Beer is good. Homebrew is better. I don’t brew often enough, but when I do, my back hurts the next day. I must be [...]
Here are some highlights from the amazing Agile Games 2011 conference . First, my major themes from the event: Learn Fast, not Fail Fast Teach People Early, not Disappoint People Early Luke Hohmann of Innovation Games gave a rousing inspirational keynoteabout how awesome it is to work on software. One key problem he noted is that we don’t talk to our customers [...]
I’ll be dead soon. I’ve been out in the cold rain for three hours. Hypothermia is setting in. You try to sell me a mansion. You show me the plot plan and the floor plan; you did a lot of planning up front. You brag about the foundation, firm and solid, ready to last [...]
led two sessions at this year’s Mobile Camp Boston on February 19: one on mobile consumer identity, and the other on agile software development. Give them what they want: mobile consumer identity We talked about knowing your mobile customers. The most important question for you to ask your customers is, would [...]
We do a series of sprints to build our product, then we do 4-8 weeks of hardening sprints to really test our code and get the bugs out before we deploy it in production. Guess what? You’re not Agile, and you’re not doing Scrum. You are using the jargon, maybe because it’s fashionable, or [...]
The programmers write new code so fast, the testers can’t keep up. It’s like shooting a firehose into a straw. It doesn’t matter how fast the programmers shoot new code out of the firehose, because the testers have to get it all through the straw before we can say it’s Done and deploy it in [...]
Pay people enough that they don't have to worry about money, and they'll perform well. Don't bother with monetary incentives beyond that. Want people to perform better? Establish an environment that encourages masteryand purpose. That's the essence of this great video from the nice people at the RSA.Thanks to Jeff Sutherland for the pointer.
What is the ideal sprint length? I've been thinking about this a couple of ways. First, what is your definition of Done? For my teams, Done means, concisely, it can be deployed in production, and people can use it world-wide. Then, think about your minimum batch size. How much work do you have to do [...]
Done is the crux of doing Agile well. You can do all the Agile activities--the iteration planning, the daily standup, the burndown--and still suck. But if you focus on getting things Done, two things happen. First, you start to actually get stuff done, and you can recognize your success. Second, when you don't get stuff done, [...]
At the Scrum Gathering in Orlando, we talked about company management as an impediment to the adoption of Agile and Scrum within organizations. Within the Scrum/Agile community, we are all believers and advocates. We network within our community. We publish data that support the adoption of Agile and Scrum, and we trust the data because [...]
Don't change In parts one and two of this three part series, I explored that you need to be prepared and that finding a job is your job. Before you needed a job, you were doing a lot of things right. Why stop now? Keep doing the things that made you successful in the past, and you’ll be [...]
Finding a job is your job In part one of this three part series, we explored that you need to be prepared. Part two is about the fact that finding a job is your job. Don't act like you don't have a job, because you do. You don't get a paycheck for it at the end of the [...]
Motivation I am a loser, a good for nothing jobless scum.Not really, but that’s how I sometimes felt when I was looking for a job. Are you looking for work? Are you good at it? How long will it take for you to find a job?I left a job I loved to join a small promising [...]
Your dev team sucks. Use Agile software development for mobile, and be awesome. That was my pitch Saturday morning at MobileCampBoston3. I led a session later that day, titled "Agile for Mobile." I introduced Agile, explained some of its rationale, and identified some of the Agile frameworks. I talked a lot about Scrum and a little about XP. I [...]
I am now officially a Certified Scrum Practitioner. So what? So it signifies that my peers recognize that I understand Scrum pretty well. The certification shows I have actually applied Scrum for real, on a real project, in a real organization, for real stakeholders. It's not a big deal, really. It's just a token from an independent [...]
Anyone can write code, but how do you effectively lead a team building an excellent software product? To guide your team to greatness, you have to be a great technical leader. A great tech leader does three things: know what to build, help the team build it, and help the team continuously improve. [...]
am doing two presentations today at the Scrum Gathering: Sneaky Scrum, a way to sneak Scrum into your organization From AnyCo to AwesomeCo: A Case Study in Scrum Transformation Enjoy!
I will be presenting at this year's Scrum Gathering in Orlando, March 8-10. My first presentation is Sneaky Scrum, a Pecha-Kucha, on March 9 at 8:00 in Sanibel 1 & 2: Does your organization resist Scrum? Is your boss afraid of Scrum because of the strange jargon and lack of big up front planning? Do your developers [...]
Every wonder how many Certified Scrum people there are? The Scrum Alliance web site has the answer. Scrum Alliance lists the names of all the registered certificate holders at http://www.scrumalliance.org/training. If I count correctly, these are the numbers, as of January 13, 2010: CSM CSPO CSP CSC CST Registered practitioners 53,990 3,558 908 23 105 There is [...]
The Scrum Guide is the definitive guide to Scrum. It precisely summarizes and hones the canonical sources from earlier this decade: Ken Schwaber's books, Agile Software Development with Scrum and Agile Project Management with Scrum (affiliate links). The Scrum Guide is hosted at scrum.org under the aegis of Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland.
Are you doing Scrum, or are you doing Scrum-But? Many teams use the Nokia Test to evaluate their Scrumness. Bas Vodde presented the original Nokia Test in 2006; he used it as a simple way to evaluate the Agileness of development teams at Nokia. In 2007, Jeff Sutherland adapted the Nokia Test to Scrum. Ken Schwaber recently developed a more comprehensive Scrum assessment. [...]
Nokia has a great reputation in the Agile community. Why can't we be as good as Nokia? It turns out we can. Here's my presentation from the Nokia Agile Community Autumn Meet 2010 conference in Helsinki, held on December 7. Use the Nokia Test, a simple value stream map, and Theory of Constraints, and you can transform your dev team from [...]
I presented Winning Clients with Scrum and Agile last night at ICCA Boston. Thanks to Norm for inviting me.
Ken Schwaber presented "Flacid Scrum--A New Pandemic?" last night at the Agile Bazaar. Ken's talk was a one hour overview of Scrum, with the point that if it's ScrumBut, then it's not Scrum. Scrum works because it exposes organizational impediments to success, not despite exposing impediments. Don't adapt Scrum to your organization's dysfunctions; correct them!
Michael de la Maza presented "Learning Agile via Agile Games" at Wednesday night's Agile Boston meeting. We played some fun games that would have been impossible to win if they weren't fun and if we didn't communicate with each other face to face. One of the games was a brief Planning Poker exercise. Michael's point was that one of [...]
When is it Done? How do you know? Does your Product Owner agree? Does your customer agree? When we estimate user story size and sprint task effort, we ask ourselves how we will know when a task or a story is done. We make a list of doneness tests, and we call them acceptance criteria. In the spirit of Mike Cohn's user story template, we use [...]
Michael James of Danube recently published the Scrum cheat sheet on Refcardz. Download it, read it, and live it--it's good!
Agile for mobile These are my notes from a presentation I gave Saturday at MobiCamp Boston 2. The pitch ... or maybe it's in the product development, too Software engineering is where you spend most of your effort, time, and money when you build your mobile app Scrum can help control your software engineering effort/time/expense [...]
These are my notes from a presentation I gave Saturday at MobiCamp Boston 2. The pitch You are building a mobile app You want it to be successful How do you do that? Is there something in product development that you can control? Of course, but we all know how to build a great app, so [...]
Donald Sull recently discussed three styles of management, with management by commitments as the winner, and management by process the runner up. I agree: these are key aspects of Scrum, and two of the reasons Scrum works. Sull's first style management is managing by power hierarchy. This is the old command-and-control style of management. This [...]
The question is a cliche among agile teams: what does Done mean? I recently heard a number of responses from two teams: It works so well we are willing to give it to the customer. I like this definition. These team members are proud of their work and are focused on pleasing the customer. The pilot has landed the airplane [...]
Mike Cohn writes that there should not be a release backlog. He has impeccable timing, given my recent post defining the term Release Backlog . I disagree with Mike. Release Backlog is a useful tool for my teams. I won't argue with Mike point by point because Mike's context is different from mine. He suggests that the context of [...]
Two team members asked, "What does 'release backlog' mean?" I drew this Venn diagram, and they both understood: Everything: The universe contains all possible product requirements. Most of them will not be included in our product. Product backlog: The product backlog contains the subset of all possible product requirements that we agree could be included in our [...]
I am now officially a Certified ScrumMaster, registered with the Scrum Alliance.
I spent two days last week at Jeff Sutherland's Certified ScrumMaster class. Jeff is one of the creators of Scrum. He is an excellent teacher with high caliber experience, not just applying Scrum, but applying Scrum well. I highly recommend Jeff's class to everyone interested in doing software development well.
First he butters me up: "As one of my best managers, I thought I'd get some advice..." Then he makes a genuine request for help: "... on how perhaps my company should structure one of their processes... in particular, team meetings" I offer a snarky response: "Meetings suck. Avoid them." And then I get interrupted [...]
Is the milk in your refrigerator safe to drink, or is it rotten? Open the bottle and take a sniff. If it stinks, it's probably rotten. You don't have to taste it. You don't have to drink a pint of it and see whether you get sick. You know immediately that it's no good. Throw [...]
