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Where Are The Problems?
4 minutesWhen I first started coaching teams, I aimed to teach people the techniques and methods they could use to manage their work better. Recently, I’ve adopted a different approach that actually leaves techniques for last and instead starts with problems and needs. I was thinking about my initial approach and how it’s changed over the…
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Rethinking Retrospectives
6 minutesI sometimes get asked by managers if they should add the action items created in their team retrospective meetings to their kanban boards. More explicit management of retrospective outputs happens when managers start getting unsatisfied with their teams’ progress at improving their metrics, shortening their lead times, or meeting their commitments. They believe by visualizing…
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Why Work Waits
8 minutes
One of the most common challenges I face when coaching teams is getting their work unstuck and flowing. When I start working with teams, they always seem to be dealing with the same problems: My approach to helping teams get out of these situations is less about changing how the team does their work and…
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Running, Falling, and the Core of Agile
7 minutes
How do you run? Years ago, when I worked as CrossFit Coach, I frequently attended workshops to improve in particular areas, including Olympic weightlifting and Strongman. One workshop I attended was called CrossFit Endurance, which taught the Pose Method of running. I’ve been thinking about how the lesson I learned from that workshop relates to how Agile teams…
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How I Use Scrum to Teach Agility
5 minutes
As part of my job doing Agile Coaching, I occasionally have to give training to groups of people, and part of that training sometimes requires that I cover the Scrum framework. But because I like coaching people and teams on agility and not frameworks, teaching Scrum is something I’m always conflicted about. But the last time…
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My Agile Sketching Experiment
8 minutes
Between September and October of 2022, because the COVID pandemic put my contracts on hold for a few months, I set a personal challenge to create and share 100 agile-related sketches on Twitter. In October 2020, after posting an average of four drawings a day, I completed that challenge. Because I no longer use Twitter,…
Flow Focused 