Dan Milstein shares his advice on how to run a 5 Whys retrospective with humans rather than robots. A great watch!
Video:
Slide deck (also shown in the video):
I particularly like his use of humor and contrast in setting the tone for a retrospective.
I’m not normally a huge fan of white papers, but Rally Software has done something extraordinary with this one. They’ve analyzed the process and performance data for nearly 10,000 teams using the Rally platform to extract some rather interesting findings. While there’s empirical evidence to support many of the prescribed Agile behaviors, Rally’s unique access to performance data as a SaaS process tool provides them with the ability to get an inside look across many different companies and teams.
Here’s Rally’s introduction:
Though people have made Agile recommendations for many years, we have never been able to say how accurate they actually are, or how much impact a particular recommendation might make. [Chris: I disagree as many of these recommendations have been made based on other data and evidence.]
The findings in this document were extracted by looking at non-attributable data from 9,629 teams using Rally’s Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform. Rally is in the unique position to mine this wealth of SaaS (cloudbased) data, and uncover metrics-driven insights.
These insights give you real world numbers to make an economic case for getting the resources you need, and your people to commit to change. That’s the underlying motivation of this work.
A few highlights that I’ve copied and pasted:
[T]here is almost a 2:1 difference in throughput between teams that are 95% or more dedicated compared with teams that are 50% or less dedicated.
Stable teams result in up to:
60% better Productivity
40% better Predictability
60% better ResponsivenessTeams doing Full Scrum estimating [both story points and task hours] have 250% better Quality than teams doing no estimating
Teams that aggressively control [work in process]:
• Cut time in process in half
• Have ¼ as many defects
• But have 34% lower ProductivitySmall teams (of 1-3 people) have
• 17% lower Quality
• But 17% more Productivity
Than teams of the recommended size (5-9)
While these are the summary findings, the white paper is short and well worth a read. Check it out!
You do not get capacity by attempting to forcefully take it. You get it by gracefully creating it.
Agile is exquisitely simple. Empower people and expect high performance. While it’s no guarantee that they can solve all of your problems, they have a better chance of it than you do.
I just came across Richard Lawrence’s excellent story splitting flowchart. It’s a poster that offers several different strategies for splitting large user stories into smaller ones, including:
Check out the full flowchart, here. This is an especially useful resource for product managers who are coming from a waterfall environment and are new to writing Agile user stories.
David Koontz, a practicing Agile coach, shared an excellent list of twenty Agile team exercises on his blog, Agile Complexification Inverter. This includes the Marshmallow Challenge I wrote about in an earlier post. There’s some real gems, so take a look!
I’ve used relatively standard Agile Retrospective questions to great success over my career:
While this is a nice base, I’ve been looking for other questions to ask. Here’s several that I liked from Ben Linder’s blog, Sharing My Experience:
Here are some nice why examples:
From Debategraph, I liked “What don’t we know yet?”
Are there other questions you like to ask during retrospectives?
Photo from Magnus D on flickr
The Haka (plural is the same as singular: haka) is a traditional ancestral war cry,dance or challenge from the Māori people of New Zealand. It is a posture dance performed by a group, with vigorous movements and stamping of the feet with rhythmically shouted accompaniment.[1] The New Zealand rugby team‘s practice of performing a haka before their matches has made the dance more widely known around the world.
Does your team have this degree of ba? If not, what could you do to foster it?
Imagine a team that admits mistakes, reinforces their shared values, forgives one another, and moves on. Do you think such a team would come up with astonishing ideas? I do.
— Lyssa Adkins, Coaching Agile Teams
Here’s a mural (bigger, please don’t use this for anything commercial) that I commissioned from Fred “NoOne” Padilla.
In the upper-left-hand corner, an art car (“Charlie the Unicorn”) can be seen riding off in the distance. Beneath that, a representation of the cluster of condo buildings I’m living in at the moment and rooftops from a distance. A circle around a fire with elder ones, younger ones, and familiar spirits. Beneath that, a fruit and vegetable stand outside of the Ferry Building. A food stand in the Mission, a view over Bernal Heights to Sutro Tower, a truck and VW bug on 280 South, the docks along the Islais Creek Channel. Broken Glass waves as an homage to The Slanted Door, a map of Golden Gate Park, a nicely set table. A picnic in Dolores Park. Finally, the cosmos represented as a galaxy, but if looked at carefully is a night-time view of the Playa on the night of the Temple burn in 2009.
Mind-blowingly beautiful, Fred. Thanks again. 🙂
In the series “The Secret Life of a Food Stamp,” Marketplace reporter Krissy Clark traces how big-box stores make billions from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka food stamps. What’s more, the wages of many workers at these stores are so low that the workers themselves qualify for food stamps—which the employees then often spend at those big-box stores.
This video crunches the numbers on how much Walmart, the single biggest beneficiary of the food stamp economy, might have to raise prices across the board to help a typical worker earn a living wage.
A note on methodology: Eligibility for food stamps varies according to income, number of dependents, and other factors. This estimate of Walmart’s potential cost from raising wages is based on wages for a Walmart employee with one dependent working 30 hours a week, a typical retail worker based on federal data.
Beautifully presented.