Today with my team I tried something new for our retrospective. There were a few reasons for me trying something new.

Although I think that retrospectives are a fundamental practice of any agile team and the foundation for a continuous improvements mindset … I still think that I suck at facilitating them. And I cannot get excited about doing so.

Most retrospectives become a wailing-fest of the bad things that happens and very seldom leads to actionable small (!) items that we can implement to improve.

Also … I forgot to book a room after moving the retrospective in time.

These things led me to be a little bit innovative and we ran the retrospective today as described below.

The post will be the description of how to run the retrospectives, a few lines of correct attributions and then a few thoughts about why this worked. Because it was really...

I had a colleague on one of my gigs many years ago, let’s call him Olle (since that was his name). Olle just got a blood pressure meter for Christmas. He was around 45, at the time, and in reasonably good health, according to himself. But he was one of those guys that “had everything” and someone got him this machine. Mostly for fun.

Now, as he as a gadget geek he loved this new toy and of course started to use it. And he kept records in Excel. A few weeks after he started to track his health, to his horror he saw that he was getting worse by the day he measured.

Now, at the time when he told me this, he just started to measure 3-4 times a day and the result were not promising; his blood pressure was through the roof.

He had a doctors appointment...

Scrum was my first love in agile. I still remember the revolution and excitement I felt after the Scrum Master course and when I and my colleague Öystein started our first Scrum team. It was awesome!

Later I moved on to more flow based approaches when I ended up in environments where Scrum was not a great fit with it s iterations and locked down scope.

Scrum and I was far away from a time. There are no hard feelings but we just don’t hang around much anymore.

I saw someone tweet something like;

I feel like many people talking about Scrum doesn’t really know what it’s about. Really.

Something like that. I felt that it was about me. So I decided to read the official Scrum guide and take some notes. They are summarized in this post.

In 2013 I got invited to write blog posts for CodeBetter.com. I was quite surprised and honoured, since that’s a place where I’ve read many great posts over the year.

I hopped to the challenge though (never regretted doing that) and ended up writing 6 posts, before I lost tempo.

I’m actually proud of all those posts and wanted to preserve them here on my site also. I noticed that CodeBetter.com has slowed down and went away completely the other week without anyone noticing. So I thought it would be better to save them somewhere else.

Here’s they are:

REPOST FROM CODEBETTER

I noticed that CodeBetter is slowing down. Maybe dying. I’m preserving my post from there, here to my site.

Original post

A couple of months ago I was very fortunate to work alongside a great team. They had a not so envious task before them, namely to introduce a new main concept into an legacy code base. You know, the code has been around for at least 5 years and now you need to add a concept that was no-one ever thought we would have in there.

They did that. In just 3-4 months and delivered with flying colors. I didn’t have much to do with that, I merely observed their work.

When they were done I proudly introduced the team to a new senior in the company and told him about their feat and how they had gone about doing it. His...

When our board is lined up as our process it’s quite often an array of columns starting to the left when the idea first comes into mind (or in a backlog column) continuing down our workflow, adding more and more value until it reaches our customers where we can learn from the usage of our new feature.

Although it could be tempting to go through the columns from left to right in our morning meeting, I would suggest that you consider doing the opposite.

• Blocked is not a column
• Todo - Doing - Done is not your process
• Done? There’s no Done
• Colors speaks volumes - use them deliberately
• It’s not a kanban board if you don’t have a WIP limit
• Walk the board from right to left
• Focus on the work - not the workers
• And for the love of...

My job is to help clients to use and adapt the principles of lean and agile to achieve a better flow of value. Sometimes I get questions from friends and old clients about how to do specific things. And sometimes I get questions from complete strangers.

Last Tuesday was such a day when Emily reached out via email and asked me three insightful questions.

I was happy to do that and my “fee” was that I can publish the questions and my answers here on the blog. So you’re reading my payment

Many daily stand-up meetings adhere to Scrum’s traditional format, where each team member reports on their activities from the previous day, plans for the current day, and any impediments they face.

While well-intentioned, this approach misdirects our attention.

Ensuring team members stay busy isn’t as crucial as ensuring work flows smoothly.

A simple adjustment can realign our focus, particularly during morning meetings.

• Blocked is not a column
• Todo - Doing - Done is not your process
• Done? There’s no Done
• Colors speaks volumes - use them deliberately
• It’s not a kanban board if you don’t have a WIP limit
• Walk the board from right to left
• Focus on the work - not the workers
• And for the love of everything holy - please tear off the post-it’s the correct way!

When Kanban emerged as a popular practice, it was often presented as an alternative to Scrum. However, as Torbjörn Gyllebring emphasized years ago, Kanban is not a replacement for your process. Instead, it serves as a tool for process enhancement, adaptable to various workflows. This adaptability is one of its greatest strengths, and it’s why I’m such a proponent of Kanban.

However, some early Kanban adopters, in their eagerness to depart from Scrum’s ceremonies, went too far and removed all constraints and trade-offs. “Kanban—love it! No planning, no sprints, no constraints—it’s just our board, and work flows as fast as it flows… Nice!” But, to be honest, a board without a Work In Process (WIP) limit isn’t really a Kanban board. Let me explain why.

• Blocked is not a column
• Todo - Doing - Done is not your process
• Done? There’s no Done
• Read More

One of the things that always catches my attention when I walk past a board is the colors of the stickies. Why? Because colors requests our attention and can help us in understanding more about a thing. Red is naturally a warning (in western culture at least), green feels ok, etc.

This is why I get troubled when I hear that the reason that we have chosen the colors of the stickies on our board is “because we took the ones that was closest to us”.

That is sad and I share a few thoughts on how to improve on that state of mind - it’s easy.

• Blocked is not a column
• Todo - Doing - Done is not your process
• Done? There’s no Done
• Colors speaks volumes - use them deliberately
• It’s not a kanban board if you don’t have a WIP limit
...