Agile Florida Preparing for Agile Open Florida 2015 - No One Size Fits All Later this month, I have the privilege of facilitating the Agile Open Florida 2015 conference. Final preparations are well under way and we have sold out six weeks before the conference. There is some personal preparation that would benefit everyone as well. I’ll use the rest of this blog
Facilitation Why You Want a BackChannel in Distributed Meetings When I started facilitating my first distributed meetings, I ran into a problem that many encounter: my primary collaboration tool would fail. It usually involved one person “losing connection” or in some cases the whole collaboration software system crashing for everyone. Regardless, it meant that someone in the conversation was
Feedback Gifts and Greats for True Feedback Sometimes I ask for feedback and other times I feel I can serve someone by providing feedback. Also there may be cases where you are taking on a new role and you may “shadow” someone to see how they perform the job so you can learn from them. In all
Coaching Perfect feedback for an agile coach Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been trying out a new peer feedback system at Sonatype. I asked for feedback from some of the teams I coach. One of those team members shared the following image today as part of his response. I thought it was perfect feedback
Remotely Agile Where can I find a cool agile remote job? So I’ve been getting this question recently as I blog more about it. Here are my suggestions: * update your LinkedIn profile to reflect any remote/distributed work in the past and make sure you enable the option that you are looking for a job (somewhere in settings) * write/blog
Agile Florida Agile Roadtrip to Valpak This past Thursday I had an opportunity to road trip from Orlando to Tampa to meet with folks from Valpak whom I’ll be collaborating with on the next Agile Open Florida (AOF). What an awesome trip! The picture is me with Diana Weber, my co-facilitator for AOF and agile
Remotely Agile Agile2015 - 3 stories of successful distributed agile teams (I hope) Some folks have asked me “Why 3 submissions”? The typical strategy for the Agile20xx conference is to get in more than one with the hope that one will be accepted. That wasn’t my plan at all. I had one story in mind and it ended up expanding into three.
Agile Answering questions from Driving Value with Agile Teams This past Tuesday, I had an opportunity to speak to a combined audience from Central Florida IIBA and Agile Orlando. It was a great session and I hope everyone had as much fun as I did! Thank you for the opportunity. If anyone took photos, please let me know so
hybrid-remote Remotely Agile: The Buddy System Over the last 10 years, while learning how agile methodologies can work in different industries and organizations, I also discovered how I could help distributed teams work as if they were face-to-face teams. So I am starting a series of posts where I hope to share some practical tips for
Community Come hear how to adapt your agile career at AgileOrlando Tue 6:30p (just sent this note out to the AgileOrlando community and thought it was worth sharing widely … I’ll post an update after the event) This week is Orlando Tech Week and as part of that AgileOrlando a very special session tomorrow night called Adapting Your Agile Career. I have asked
hybrid-remote-facilitation Deep skills not soft skills Something that always makes me wince is the term “soft skills”. Dictionary.com gives the following definition of soft: yielding readily to touch or pressure; easily penetrated, divided, or changed in shape; not hard or stiff: However, when many people talk of “soft skills”, I get the impression they find
Community How to build your tribe at Agile Coach Camp Agile Coach Camp is not just for agile coaches. It is for anyone who wants to build their knowledge and connections within the agile community. But you may have a few questions. What is Agile Coach Camp? In a nutshell, Agile Coach Camp is an event that provides many opportunities
Agile Agile2014 - Let's Build a Better Tribe It’s been 12 days since Agile2014 ended and I’m still struggling to answer the most frequently asked question from colleagues and agile enthusiasts: What happened at Agile2014? If you are not familiar with the conference, it is THE conference to understand the concepts and trends within agile software
Agile My advice for attending Agile2014 A new attendee to Agile2014 contacted me and asked me what they should look for in next week’s conference. Here is my response: 1. pick 2-3 things in each time slot that are interesting for you. If one is full, you can quickly move to another (think – the Law
Agile Why 3 Agile2014 Lightning Talk submissions? Agile2014 is right around the corner (both in time and geography for me). While my submissions did not get accepted earlier this year, I’m actually somewhat glad. As some of you know, I’ve made some shifts in my agile coaching and I have some new thoughts to share.
Agile Florida Reflecting on Agile Open Florida It’s been over 2 weeks since Agile Open Florida happened and I’m still buzzing with the possibilities of where Florida can go next. Not only did we hold our first state-wide open space for agilists, but we were able to have one of my favorite OST facilitators, Ainsley
Agile The 4 R’s of Sustainable Pace This is a lesson I’ve struggled to capture for over a year. In that time, I’ve made a few changes both personally and professionally and, when asked why, my answer has typically been “sustainable pace”. But it was difficult to explain beyond that. After some time to reflect,
Agile Florida Agile Open Florida on June 27 The first Agile Open Space conference is coming to Florida on June 27! Since I attended my first open space at XP Universe 2001, I have been hooked on the open space concept. Never attended an “open space” or a Un-conference? Wondering what it is like? Think back to one
Reboot Today marks a reboot of my coaching career, this blog, and a focus on developing new techniques on collaboration and building more effective organizations. My intent in the coming months is to share lessons from my agile coaching career over the last decade to help you in your own journey.
Agile Florida Serving Lean Coffee to build a Learning Community Lean Coffee is a lightweight way for self-organizing a group of people together to share information. Originally started by Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith in 2009 in Seattle, I have found it can be a very simple way to bring together or build a community. I have been running lean
Agile The first key of successful teams and organizations For any team or organization I start to coach, I seek out three things that will immediately tell me the group health and if they will be successful at any goals they set. Those three things are: (1) Vision, (2) Values, and (3) Agreements. Whether it is a 8-person delivery
Agile Reflections on Agile2013 I’ve been struggling to summarize the best way to describe what happened at Agile2013. It’s been 3 weeks now and I’ve come to this conclusion. With over 1700 participating and 20 tracks, I decided I can’t do it. It’s almost like the description of space
Agile Successful agile transformations come in 3's I’ve been swamped since the Agile2013 conference, but wanted to share an answer to a recent question: “How does Agile and Lean thinking contribute to help organisations become learning organisations?” What is typically behind this question is this: “We’ve been successful with agile on our teams. Is there
Facilitation How to build Facilitation Muscle online. (Oct 2018 – Unfortunately, Janet Danforth passed away recently and her partner, Robert Moir, has retired. Still, I leave this article online to honor the cutting edge work in 3D remote facilitation.) Coaching leaders and teams at various organizational levels, I am constantly amazed at how many people do not know
Teams What's In It For Others? (WIIFO) Last Wednesday I was invited by AgileBill Krebs to share my thoughts on the evolution of teams on Agile Witness News. We discussed some of the evolving enterprise agile frameworks and the different types of teams being classified by these frameworks. We also discussed what are still challenges in the
