By Chris Sims
I just noticed that XKCD, my favorite geeky web comic, has a cool unix-like shell interface available!
In other news, there are seats available for this month's Agile Learning Labs Weekend Certified ScrumMaster workshop, and Weekend Certified Scrum Product Owner workshop. Get 'em while they are hot!
Cheers,
Agile Learning Labs is a small startup company in Foster City that delivers training and coaching to project managers, executives and software developers. We are looking for a part-time administrative assistant who relishes being part of a small team as much as we do. You will be responsible for managing the infrastructure of the business, from bill-paying and document preparation to providing support for the activities of the company's CEO, publications editor and salesperson.
The position is part-time. Growth is part of our plan and this job could become full time in the future. We’re also open to a long-term relationship with someone for whom part time work is a lifestyle choice.
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By: Chris Sims
Today is retrospective day at Agile Learning Labs. We do regular all-hands retrospectives to continuously improve how we run the business. It's timely then, that my latest article on InfoQ is Rules forBetter Retrospectives. Check it out, and learn about James Carr's top five 'rules' for better retrospectives.
If you are just getting started doing retrospectives with your scrum team, check out my 2-part post Agile Retrospectives.
Cheers,
I was a new manager doing annual performance reviews for the first time. I wanted to do a good job, and truly align my group’s work with the company’s ‘bigger picture.’ I wanted to know why we existed, what we were trying to achieve, and what we valued. So I asked my manager.
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By: Chris Sims
Today finds me in Seattle for the Agile Open Northwest conference. This morning I lead a session called "An Experiential Introduction to Agile" which was based on our Experiencing Agile mini workshop. I invited participants to share their insights on sticky-notes, with a promise that I would post them. So, here they are.
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By: Chris Sims
The standard Scrum Stand-up meeting, AKA 'The Daily Scrum', has each participant answering 3 questions:
By: Chris Sims
I just found this video from AgilePalooza San Francisco 2009. It’s Yours Truly facilitating a short game that explores what certain interpersonal dynamics ‘look’ like when we act them out very explicitly.
This one is me reporting out about a session I had hosted early in the conference called “Agile Leads to Organizational Pain!”
Cheers,
In my first post about retrospectives, I described what a retrospective is, why you want to do them, and described the Retrospective Prime Directive. Now it's time to talk about how to do a retrospective.
Retrospectives are a scrum team’s most powerful tool for facilitating continuous improvement. We’ve all encountered teams making the same mistakes and suffering the same pain over and over again. The good news is that it’s possible to break this cycle by investing as little as one hour per week in a sprint retrospective.