A retrospective is a meeting where the team stop working and take a step back to review how well they are working and what they can do to improve. It is generally done every sprint (or every two weeks if there is no sprinting going on). The theory is easy - the team share their… Continue reading Do you get value from your retrospective?
Category: Reflection
I thought training was easy – what is going on here?
I spend a lot of my time training people in areas such as agile project delivery, business and product innovation and business analysis. Allegedly I spend around 50% of my time running training sessions, while I also spend time consulting or providing “transition management” to help an organisation through change.But against all expectation I have been seeing… Continue reading I thought training was easy – what is going on here?
The dark art of office politics for IT leaders (part one – why is it stressful?)
Apparently office politics is a horrible thing that other people do. But many of the emerging IT leaders I speak to get told they need to be better at "soft skills" and "influencing at a senior level". What this often means is get good a politics. Sadly a lot of office politics seems to involve… Continue reading The dark art of office politics for IT leaders (part one – why is it stressful?)
Focusing questions and project charters are great, but where do you start?
I am starting a bunch of small projects at the moment and people are rushing to help define the solutions. That is great but I am (as always) nervous that we are providing solutions before we really understand what we want to solve. I like to define the problem (or vision) and then a rough… Continue reading Focusing questions and project charters are great, but where do you start?
Famous BAs in history: Mark Twain on interviews
I stumbled on a letter from Mark Twain where he comments on "the interview": Inteviews are pure twaddle Controversially, he claimed that interviews are appalling and should be completely abolished ... which would seem to be a strong position for a business analyst to take these days. But then Mark Twain was around at the beginning of… Continue reading Famous BAs in history: Mark Twain on interviews
Would you hire a project manager to plant a tree?
Many great ideas fall on deaf ears. So organisations bring in project managers to make sure we implement good ideas properly. Good project managers define and clarify the idea, break the idea into features and then deploy the features into production. But quite often, people just don’t make use of the shiny new features they… Continue reading Would you hire a project manager to plant a tree?
It may be logical, but does it make sense?
If you have been reading my blog, you have probably heard just about all you want to hear about logic for a while. But I suffer from the opposite problem – Logic-o-philia (not a real word). But a comment on a recent article reminded me that I can be completely logical, and still not get… Continue reading It may be logical, but does it make sense?
Talking about retrospectives on another blog
I was running a course on "facilitating workshops in agile projects" when some of the crew asked what different questions they could ask in retrospectives (instead of just "what worked and what didn't). We got talking about the retrospective at the end of a project. So I published a story of sorts on how to run a… Continue reading Talking about retrospectives on another blog
Unusual predictors of team success
I was reading Daniel Pink's book "Drive" and I came across a passage about predicting which teams are likely to be successful. It describes a guy who counts the number of times he hears people use the word "we" and the number of the times they used the word "they" when referring to their own company. Apparently the… Continue reading Unusual predictors of team success
Ask the team about technical debt – the creeping doom graph
I was just talking about the sad state of affairs where some teams know they are making life harder by taking shortcuts or creating workarounds that will slow the team down in the future. In fact, my grandma had some pretty good advice on this: There never seems to be time to do things properly -… Continue reading Ask the team about technical debt – the creeping doom graph
James King 