New(s)

Bas Vodde posted an article on action planning in retrospectives . It’s a tough issue, and I agree with Bas’ take on it. Team members need to see clearly how the actions they choose will affect their work long term. Bas suggests each proposal for action links each near term action with the long term goal it will help the team achieve.

This story on yahoo shows one reason I live in Portland: nicer drivers. :-)

Like many humans, I have a few topics about which I can become passionate. My hot topics include:

• Healthy, productive teams and their leaders.
• Open Space, Retrospectives, and other highly collaborative processes that help people think and build community together.
• Women as leaders.
• and some others

This month something came along that pokes at several of my hot topics at once. Business Week wrote an article on the growing popularity of "unconferences". At first, I was delighted to see collaborative processes getting more visibility in the press.

Then I read further and found a broader, underlying story. Chris Messina wrote

Courtesy of Brian Marick’s Blog, I took the "What programming language are you?" quiz. I’m delighted to discover that I’m Smalltalk…but I’m not sure I know enough to know why.

I continually look for new ways to gather data in iteration retrospectives. My goal is to find activities that encourage team members to think deeply about the story of their project while keeping an eye on the time budget. Timelines are a great tool for data gathering, yet they may take longer than many teams can afford in a 60-90 minute retrospective. The standard “what worked well/what shall we do differently” is short, but really takes the team directly into analysis, bypassing data gathering. Here’s an idea for a new activity I call FRIM (FRequency/IMpact).

In FRIM, the team writes...