The Co-Active Coaching Model

“Co-Active personal and professional development Coaching is Based on the Co-Active Model, it begins by holding the coachee as naturally creative, resourceful and whole, and completely capable of finding their own answers to whatever challenges they face. The job of a Co-Active Coach is to ask powerful questions listen and empower to elicit the skills and creativity a client already possesses, rather than instructor advise. “ (CTI)

The 4-Hour Workweek

Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint.

Don`t just ship software, make an impact! - Impact Mapping.

“Impact mapping can help you deliver projects that make an impact, not just ship software. It is a strategic planning technique that prevents organizations from getting lost while building products and delivering projects, by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and make better road-map decisions.” It is a mind-map grown during a discussion facilitated by answering the following four questions: Why are we doing this? Who will be impacted by it? How should our actors' behavior change?

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. ~ Leonardo da Vinci

Simplicity is a core Principle of Agile Software Development.  

Simple things are easy to understand, and straightforward to implement. Simple things do not cost a lot of time (or money) to implement and are therefore also easy (painless) to revert. But how does it look in practice? What does it mean to keep it simple? 

Here’s a short review explaining the implementation of the agile 10'th principle - simplicity.

The Nibble - Don't Do This For User Stories.

If you don't feel you’re Getting Enough Out of a Negotiation, Nibble for More at the End. It usually helps during selling. Asking for a small thing makes it seem mean for the other person to refuse. It can also make them feel good by giving you something that seems small to them and makes you so happy. But sometimes a manager or a stakeholder nibbles a user story during the planning session or at any time. What shell we do then? Here, we need to know how to deal with it. So first know how it looks like and then know how to avoid it.

The Zeigarnik effect – Our brain nag us about unfinished work.

People can’t stop thinking about things that are not done. If they start something they’re more inclined to finish it. So when faced with a large task they may try to avoid starting, just because they don’t know how to start or where to start. We stop thinking about tasks once they are completed. This effect is widely used by marketing, sales, movies and it is also used with agile. Getting things done, dividing to small tasks, setting small goals, visibility, brakes (sprints) are all productivity related actions overcoming the Zeigarnik negative impact and start using it to our benefits.

Your thinking is largely the cause of your feelings and behaviours

It is not the event itself that causes the emotional reaction but the automatic thoughts that run through our head in immediate response to the event. (CBT) is a form of psychological therapy which aims to alter patterns of thought, behavior and emotion. The way we interpret reality dictate the way we feel, behave and react. How does it work?

Affective events theory- Workplace emotions impacts performance

Affective events theory is a model developed by organizational psychologists Howard M. Weiss and Russell Cropanzano. The model explains how emotions are central to employees' job satisfaction and job performance. Managers need to understand how workers are impacted emotionally by events at work.

ETF - The Enterprise Transition Framework

agile42 has created the Enterprise Transition Framework™ (ETF) that leads and supports an organization through the process of becoming more Agile. The focus of ETF is to allow an organization to implement continuous improvement and to experience change in an empirically controlled way. The ETF by agile42 provides the right tools and methods to become Agile no matter whether you are a local business or a multinational corporation.

We better start dealing with those stopping us from achieving our goal

How to deal with those that stopping us achieving our goals? There are lots of ways and the answer of course is "it depends”.  First of all it is advisable to familiarize yourself with who they are. These can be you or others. It is advisable to familiarize yourself with the variety of methods and options to deal with your opponents, they can be an opportunity or that you need to destroy them, depending on the situation or the type of your relationship. What is certain is that if you keep with one strategy only you are doomed.

Open Kanban

Open Kanban is an Agile and Lean ultra light method to improve any area of your organization. Although it's main focus is in IT and Software Development, Open Kanban can be used in any business or non-profit to achieve agility and continuous improvement.

Unfinished Work at the End of a Sprint?!

How much unfinished work should be allowed? As little as possible and yet, how do we handle unfinished stories or tasks? Here are some tips and practices collected from around the net.

The Four-Sides Model

The four-side model (also known as communication square or four-ears model) is a communication model by Friedemann Schulz von Thun. According to this model every message has four facets, though not the same emphasis might be put on each. The four sides of the message are fact, self-revealing, relationship, and appeal. Often people have one ear that’s more sensitive than the others. (Although effective and worth knowing its only one dimension of an agile communication)

The “aggregation of marginal gains.”- Optimise your performance.

Started from cycling, the rule of ” if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1 percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement", and ending with everything we do... Almost every habit that you have, good or bad, is the result of many small decisions over time.  In the beginning, there is basically no difference between making a choice that is 1% better or 1% worse. But as time goes on, these small improvements or declines compound and you suddenly find a very big gap between people who make slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don’t.

"Fun Retrospectives" Great Agile Team Activites

Activities and ideas for making agile retrospectives more engaging. 

However important, retrospectives are difficult.  A good retrospectives facilitator must know different activities. The Fun Retrospectives Workshop is designed to talk about and execute dozens of activities, besides discussing how to properly select a combination of activities for any given context.

Learning from the Future -Activities for Project and Personal Coaching

Do you wish to practically know How to Influence your future (in a positive manner), …Find missing or unexpected details and Think outside of the box?

Futurespective is an incredibly positive perspective approach to get things done!

The following activates are great for preparing for an upcoming project or challenge. Those activities the activity guides the participants into the future, talk about all that could go wrong and what could be achieved following an action plan.

Time Management Tips For Students

The time management skills and disciplines that you develop as a student can help you for the rest of your life. Those skills that we as parents help our children to develop as the same thing

Sometimes we get so many tips, as parents and as students, most of them are theory , using  simple task board , agile thinking and scrum framework will take those tips from idea to action.

Here are some tips and practices to help students (in various ages)  develop good time management skills.

“There are often many opinions to a problem’s root cause. One way to stimulate an idea brainstorming on root causes is the cause and effect diagram, commonly called a fishbone. The fishbone will help to visually display the many potential causes for a specific problem or effect. It is particularly useful in a group setting and for situations in which little quantitative data is available for analysis.”

The agility of the OODA Decision making model

Born in the army The OODA goal is to increase the speed with which you orient and reorient based on new information coming.  You want to be able to make a smooth and direct transition between what you observe, how you interpret it, and what you do about it. It is a Fast continual process. If you were to sit down and map out each step, your decisions would likely slow down instead of speed up. The OODA Loop model is closely related to the PDCA model .Both highlight the importance of analyzing a situation, checking that your actions are having the intended results, and making changes as needed.

T - Shirt Sizing user Stories

The Scrum Framework itself does not prescribe a single way for the Scrum Teams to estimate their work. However T-shirt sizes can be a great way of becoming accustomed to relative estimating. (XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL) The primary advantage to t-shirt sizes is the ease of getting started. I really like this method although there are few more other good sizing methods we can use.

Explain Agile to CFO

The Chief Financial Officer is responsible for financial planning, financial reporting, financial analysis and managing financial risks. What would be a better language than finance, to explain the benefits of Agile to a CFO?

Kanban For HR to manage work more efficiently.

As any operation HR can use and benefit from the Kanban techniques to better manage their tasks and flow.

As in one instance HR provides services to the organization which can be easily translated to a common flow of work, visualize and controlled using Kanban. Not only the services, any other HR project may be managed as any other project, so why not use Kanban?

Obviously and very critical remember that Kanban is not enough, but this is a different story for another Roojoom.

The agile talent organization

“Built to engage and inspire the workforce in meaningful ways every day, across the employee lifecycle”. However, to deploy HCM solutions that will truly meet the needs of the business, HR leaders must first build an agile talent management and HR technology strategy in order to begin transforming the way people work. It’s not just creating a talent management, or HCM strategy, but creating an “agile” strategy.  The primary goal of an agile strategy is to quickly respond to the rapidly changing needs of the business with the right people, processes and technology.