Leading a Self-Organizing Scrum Team

Published June 19th, 2012 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

Leading a self-organizing Scrum team can be a fine line. One of the challenges of agile development is coming to grips with the role of leaders and managers of self-organizing teams. Many would-be ScrumMasters and agile coaches go to the extreme of refusing to exert any influence on their teams at all. Others retain too much of their prior command-and-control management styles and fail to unleash the creativity and productivity of a self-organizing team. Read more

Collaborative Leadership

Published June 7th, 2012 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

When members of a development project are asked to become a self-directed agile team, some claim that leadership and leaders are obsolete. Or, is a different type of leadership exactly what agile teams need to truly flourish? Whether you are a senior manager, product owner, customer, ScrumMaster, or an individual contributor, Pollyanna Pixton’s collaborative principles will empower you and everyone on your team to become better leaders and deliver the business value that stakeholders deserve. Read more

The Agile Mind

Published August 8th, 2011 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

Your brain is literally wired to be agile. Are you working with it’s strengths? Do you know how to tell if you’re not? In this session we’ll explore some exciting discoveries in neuroscience and psychology, and then immediately put this knowledge to use creating iterative change inside our brains. If you want to fine-tune your team’s agile processes, or if you just think it would be fun to know how to hack a debug breakpoint into somebody else’s brain, this session is for you!

Video Producer: http://www.agileroots.com/

How To Handle Team Conflict

Published December 3rd, 2009 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

Talking with Christina Bowen about conflict resolution in project teams. This is episode 25 of The Project Shrink Podcast.

Self-Organization: The Secret Sauce for Improving your Scrum Team

Published November 23rd, 2009 Under Project Management, Scrum | Leave a Comment

High performance depends on the self-organizing capability of teams. Understanding how this works and how to avoid destroying self-organization is a challenge. Until you understand complex adaptive systems and how Toyota works it is difficult to improve team velocity. Jeff Sutherland discusses three core topics:
1. Shock therapy as a strategy for booting up teams.
2. The Cosmic Stopping Problem, otherwise known as the choice uncertainty principle.
3. Punctuated equilibrium – how software systems evolve

Take advantage of these concepts and you may find a way to achieve the ultimate potential of a team.

Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: How to Build Any Team Any Time

Published April 30th, 2009 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

Knowing how to get things done with others over whom you have no control may be your greatest lever for career success. Learn key strategies and agile team applications from 20 years of field studies on getting things with others. Apply the Responsibility Redefined™ framework to orient, work in, build, lead, and maintain teams, partnerships, and collaborations of any kind.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/teamwork-an-individual-skill

Lean Organizations to Support Agile Teams

Published April 21st, 2009 Under Agile, Lean | Leave a Comment

Robin Dymond gives an overview of Lean, how it can help take Agile to the ‘next level’ and why organizations that fail to change will not have successful Agile teams. Robin describes an organizational mismatch between traditional hierarchies and team structures. He believes that organizations will need to reorganize around teams to get the most out of Agile.

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/lean-orgs-for-agile-teams

Agile Testing by Elisabeth Hendrickson

Published February 14th, 2008 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment

As more teams are adopting Agile practices such as XP and Scrum, software testing teams are being asked to become “Agile” as well. But what does that mean? Is the Agile label yet another buzzword? Or could it be Agile practices are actually changing the way software is built? In this talk Elisabeth Hendrickson shares her perspective on how test teams can be more Agile based on her experiences working as a tester on Agile teams. Along the way, she’ll provide an overview of how Agile practices differ from traditional practices and discuss what those differences mean for independent test teams.