Pete's Blog

  • Learning Playfully: Kanban Lead Time, Spectral Analysis Chart, Service Level Agreement

    Some team members are at war with Kanban metrics (and probably other metrics): What are Lead and Cycle Time for? What does a Spectral Analysis Chart (SAC) show? Why should we care at all about a Service Level Agreement (SLA)? (Especially when there are so many dependencies with other teams.) You can always quote David…

  • “Sexy Not-So-Sexy Tasks” Retrospective Activity

    In one of the last retrospectives a team member complained about the “not very sexy” tasks the team had to do. Well, we all know that life is not all beer and skittles. Nevertheless I think, the team member was actually pointing out, that the “sexiness” of tasks can have impact on the general motivation…

  • Check-In Activity for Agile Retrospectives

    Fortunately retrospectives are already a standard at our company now. Not only our developers teams, but also our sales team, our team assistents and as of late also our management (surprisingly, the last.. :)) have regular retrospectives. Because it has become standard to have retrospectives there is also the chance of falling into a dull…

  • Job or Joy & The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

    Some weeks ago I was asked to facilitate the warm-up for our management offsite. It was the first offsite for this group of people as there had been some changes in the management lately. I thought it would be a good idea to start with “Job or Joy” and then raise the participant’s awareness of…

  • 6-3-5 brainwriting, 2020 Vision & NUF Test

    In the last weeks I facilitated three sessions for our Sales Team in which I mixed up or combined different creative methods: 6-3-5 brainwriting, 2020 Vision and NUF Test. The goal was to create different ranked lists with answers to the question “How can we increase our total revenue?” 6-3-5 brainwriting The 6-3-5 brainwriting was…

  • LEGO Serious Play: Modeling & Story-Telling

    Some weeks ago I attended the “StrategicPlay® Fundamentals Facilitator Training” at the StrategicPlay® headquarters and have used elements of LEGO Serious Play™ (LSP) quite some time with teams since then. As a Playmobil® fan it is “shocking” to see how easy you can use LSP for solving complex problems or helping team members to understand…

  • How to Deal with Results from an Agile Retrospective?

    Have you ever heard a team complaining about results of a retrospective not being realized? I have. And it’s important to change something immediately after hearing it. Realizing the agreed improvments from the retrospective is one of the agile principles of the Agile Manifesto: At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more…

  • Agile Team Retrospective Activities: Starfish & Team Radar

    Variety in retrospective activities are definitely necessary. The more retrospectives I do, the more I’m getting tired of using the same method over and over again. And hey, this will most probably bore the teams I work with as well. Therefore it’s good to challenge the team AND you with new retrospective techniques. In the…

  • Soft Agile Transition: Slowly from nowhere to Scrum

    Lean Thinking is what I’m trying to learn and adopt at the moment. What a perfect coincidence that I stumbled over Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. On page 54 they describe Kaizen, one of the crucial Lean Principles, as a plausible “inspect…