How to Square Your Personal Value @leanself

This tool is called “Values and Development Square” It has been invented by Paul Helwig and refined by Friedemann Schulz von Thun. “By using the value and development square  we can succeed in keeping value concepts  and letting them have a constructive effect. In particular, we can use it to find the next direction of development to be taken for ourselves and for others.” 

Kaizen 改善 - "change for the best"

Kaizen, is Japanese for "change for the best". It refers to a philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement. It is an internal drive to constantly be making things better. The traditional way of making improvements is just not enough any more or not working in many areas, yes, even in agile. With Kaizen we want to make small incremental changes it is a philosophy that can be implemented in different organizations to help them improve bottom line, reduce costs and improve efficiency. or can be implemented in personal life. So enjoy kaizen explained and Tips taken from the best.

Scoping on Similarity and Group Performance

There’s a fine balance between the great value that similarities hold to group performances and the values that variance holds. Let’s scope a minute into Similarities. Similarities in opinions, interpersonal styles, demographics, and values have all been shown to increase liking. In addition, similar background makes it more likely that team members share similar views on various issues, including group objectives, communication methods and more. In general, higher agreement among members on group rules and norms results in greater trust and less dysfunctional conflict. What is it then?

Agile Value - Courage - seek your edge; speak from your heart

This one is hard, a core value that is often overlooked.  It requires courage to speak up about the challenges we face,  Such as did you have the courage to steer your teams away from over-committing and underestimating? Did you have the courage to take a professional risk? Could you ultimately say “NO” to a project if needed? And so many more questions out there…

But what does it mean? What do professionals think about this core value? What did they do when they encountered a difficult situation? What do you think? What would you do?

Last Thing First - Back-chaining

Usually the process of teaching people how to successfully complete long sequences of is to teach how to start the task sequence and then proceed right along to the end of the chain of events. Backward chaining however refers to breaking down the steps of a task and teaching them in reverse order. The biggest advantage from the learner’s point of view is that it offers immediate satisfaction. It  minimize anxiety and provide a sense of accomplishment. This feeling of success will increase confidence and keep us motivated to learn and complete the entire sequence of steps. 

Dojo - Safe Place to Practice - and Maximize Learning

Dojo – a safe place to Practice. Maximize creativity and learning outcomes.  The term Dojo can refer to a formal training gathering place for students of any Japanese martial arts style such as karate, judo, or samurai, to conduct training, examinations and other related encounters.  It is used today for any type of learning. It is a place where we enjoy learning, using new teaching methodologies that maximize creativity, active learning, share ideas, make mistakes, solve problems, promote an environment of respect and learning and have fun.

Introducing those Big Frameworks For Scaling Agile

Number of approaches has started gaining attention around the topic of dealing with the need of scaling agile into large organizations. So increase the need to understand what approaches exists today in this regard and what's best for the organization where we want to implement agile. How do we compare these approaches? What worked best for you?

Low Hangigng Fruit Principel in Agile

A commonly used metaphor for doing the easiest or simplest thing first.  Easy-to-implement features that provide significant value. However, there are usually only so many low hanging fruits, and once those have been "picked,"you must put in  effort in other places to achieve results.

Responding to Change - Can’t Survive Without It.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change- Darwin. Our world is dominated by change and the need to quickly adapt in order to survive.  .  As personal or organizational coaches we all recognize this need, particularly the difficulty that our coachees , learn and understand what they need to change or do to cope with change. Personal or organizational change, both needs attention.  How? One of them is agile and there are few others..

An Approach to a More Reliable and Valuable agile Coaching

What we have is huge buzz about Agile, huge transactions, and no transformations hatsoever. It's ridiculous!

We need to get better results and let the results do the talking. Highly authoritative, embedded "coaching" has never work. 

The Epic:

AS A coach ,  I WANT the org I was coaching (and left) 1 year ago to be  twice as evolved as when I left, and  actively sensing and esponding to their environment in agile terms, and    display lots of happiness in the culture, with strongly improved revenue growth

SO THAT I know my coaching is effective.

We need to start adressing those challanges.

Transparency -Scrum Boards Example

Many times I find myself looking for board’s example to show new scrum teams. We also understand that each team board is very unique and reflects the specific team needs, personas, product and workflow. There are so many ways to design a scrum board (even if it’s not by the book or taking a bit from Kanban and other methodologies). So I have collected few common examples that I usually use as an example I come to implement and coach for scrum.

Post-Agilism is Simply Doing What Works For You

What’s next for the Agile movement? Should we move on? Is “post Agilism” an emerging era? Is it a slogan? Why is there so many criticism and skepticism? Or is it just a phrase we can all use to describe new improved ways of shipping software? Whatever it is, it’s becoming a live and kicking debate.  No matter how you look at the future, things changes, so does agile it’s inevitable. Looking into “post Agilism” you may find more than just hunches and future telling stories but the true bottom line is that communication of ideas is a wonderful thing that helps people improve their work.

I bet it would have been great if Disney run your company.

Disney was (among many other great talents) a great lean thinker. The creation of Disneyland in the early 1950's was a brilliant Lean, Mean Performance Machine. As a result he had a deep grasp of the situation and was able to articulate strategy in compelling ways. 

 I bet if we let him run some of the companies we work for it would have been great. Why? Because it’s all there, all we need to know in order to be able to achieve a good productive flow of work: ‘Teamwork’ ,  ‘initiative’ , ‘continuous improvement, respect… even story-boars…and so much more are  all linked to lean thinking.

Dilbert On Agile

I just love using Dilbert s part of explaining agile development concepts. Here are some of my favorite Dilberts that I use for coaching , training , posts and whatever…. Enjoy :)

The Power of Crossing Perspectives - Interdisciplinary Thinking

"The  ability to think about something familiar in an unfamiliar way is the strength of interdisciplinary thinking". Interdisciplinary collaboration and exploration has a very good effect over engaging people/worker/students. It also helps to develop knowledge, insights, better problem solving skills, Helps Advance Critical Thinking and Cognitive Development, self-confidence, self-efficacy, and a passion for what they do. And of course it increases productivity. How does it work and why?  Read more into this Roojoom.

Elephant Carpaccio Exercise

The Elephant Carpaccio exercise was invented by Alistair Cockburnis and it is a great way for software people to practice & learn how to break stories into really thin vertical slices. It also leads to interesting discussions about quality and tech practices.

The (Funny) Wrong Way to do Agile

What's the Ideal Scrum Team Size?

There have been a lot of discussions over the optimal scrum team size. What will be the ideal team size  for maximum productivity. People have been trying to answer this question for ages. Most  Agilists will probably agree that small teams are better than larger ones in terms of productivity , but what do they think is the optimal team size? Here’s a collection of opinions on the subject. What do you think? 

Dave's Cynefin Model -Framework for Decision Making

The Cynefin framework, developed by Dave Snowden and CF Kurtz, is a model that enhances decision making and understanding how to act in certain situations with different levels of complexity.

The framework helps managers determine the prevailing operative context, enabling appropriate choices and decisions (ref Wikipedia).

I’ve found this model really useful for analyzing certain situations and to make decision regarding ways to approach those situations.

Team Accountability in Agile

It takes training, time, practice and monitoring to bring a working group to own thier tasks and be accountable as a group to thier outcomes. What are those challages to get an agiel team to be accountable? Should they be accountable? Is it possible? And if so How?

What do you think ?

Agile Leadership is not just about Becoming a Good Agile Team Managers

Agile leadership is not just about leading self-organized team, or motivate agile employees in a complex environment with lots of ambiguity but moreover they need to create an agile organization. So they are required to think about the whole organization and the entire ‘production flow’, they need to think beyond one function. We want them to create an agile organization leadership. In this Roojoom you will find a short review over the agile manger role and the expectations of an agile leadership. What do you think about the agile leadership?

#NoEstimates is not about refusing to estimate

It’s (a hashtag) for those willing to explore alternatives to estimates in software development, exploring various approaches to delivering software without the use of estimates. The commonality between those #NoEstimates approaches seems to be the continuous delivery of small increments of high quality, valuable software. Here are some of them and some thoughts about the rising #NoEstimates debate…