December 31, 2013
Setting your new year goals with agile - Happy Agile New Year!!
תוויות:
Goals,
Happy Agile New Year
December 29, 2013
Change is the new habit – Personal Coaching with Agile
Shirly Ronen Harel and Avi Naparstek
As
published in: http://www.coachinginteractive.co.il/news/main/articleCL.asp?a_id=1776&MID=120&lang=1
|
תוויות:
agile coaching,
personal coaching
December 26, 2013
Visual Thinking With Mind-Map Apps
פורסם על ידי
Shirly Ronen-Harel
ב-
Thursday, December 26, 2013
No comments:
קישורים לרשומה זו
תגובות: |

תוויות:
mind map,
visual thinking
December 23, 2013
Merry Christmas! From 'Agile Kids'
AgileZen Christmas List
It's an AgileZen Christmas... list. Inspired by Niki Kohari's blog post athttp://team.agilezen.com/its-an-agile....
תוויות:
Kanban tools
November 24, 2013
Taking SWOT personally –self-diagnosing to successfully reach feasible personal objectives
It’s not enough to set personal goals and objectives, even if they are targeted
at what I really want to reach in life. It’s also not enough to set out on our
journey based only on our vision. One of the most important things is to
understand what I have that will help me succeed and what I should avoid. And
that is also not always enough. For most
of us, it’s not easy to distinguish between our internal means and obstacles
and the external, environmental powers that have potential to help us grow or
get in our way. And more so, it’s important to align internal and external
forces to help us get things done.
This distinction, the ability to see all the pieces of the puzzle
and deduce a course of action is what the SWOT tool enables. In fact, with SWOT
as a preliminary tool and some agile guidelines, achieving our personal objectives can
become quite a simple task.
So what is SWOT?
SWOT is another of many tools
that lets us discover our strengths and abilities. It is used by organizations
around the world to asses strategic decisions, organizational capabilities,
possible directions, products and more.
Let’s take a look at the SWOT definition from Wikipedia:
"
Strength Weaknesses Opportunities
Threats
SWOT analysis aim to identify the
key internal and external factors seen as important to achieving an objective.
The factors come from within a company's unique value chain SWOT analysis groups key pieces of
information into two main categories:
1.
Internal
factors – the strengths and weaknesses
internal to the organization
2.
External
factors – the opportunities and threats
presented by the environment external to the organization
SWOT is not limited for use by business organizations. This wonderful
tool can be used on a personal and team level as well.
So the benefits of SWOT are that it can take all the factors - internal
and external, positive and negative - and use them to help us focus on a
realistic plan to achieve our goals.
So let’s get started:
1. Our initial assumption is
that we have a vision or end-goal we want to reach.
2. Creating the famous SWOT
matrix:
Draw it on a sheet of paper, or better yet on a whiteboard - and place
it somewhere that will be visible to you most of the time (maybe on the
refrigerator, or on a wall in the living room, or on the billboard in your
study?)
This is what it looks like:
3. Understanding: I’ll ask
myself questions relating to my end-goal or vision. I’ll write the answers
on post-its and stick them in the proper quadrant of my SWOT board.
The first part is questions about me - S, W
* S: Regarding my vision, what
are my strengths? What makes me unique and advantageous in this event? Is it
knowledge? Experience? Good physical condition, money, family support? etc...
* W: Regarding my vision, what
are my weaknesses? What do I lack that I need to go forth, that originates from
me? Lack of experience? Lack of knowledge? Low self-esteem? Lack of family
support? etc...
The second part contains questions about my external surroundings - O,
T
* O: Regarding my vision, what opportunities
exist? Is there a specific job opening that just opened up? Political
situation? Family? Financial? etc..
* T: regarding my vision, what
threats may there be? What will hold me back? Is it starting from lower
position? Income? Residents?
** it is recommended that you take those questions and get some
feedback from your soundings. Show them your SWOT and ask them what they would
say about you regarding these questions. I know it’s its not that easy, but
true outside feedback is something very important. It gives a different point of
view over the issues at stake for me. And you may be surprise how others see
your strengths , weaknesses and how they related to threats that may be
different from what you initially thought.
Let’s take a simple career change example as in the following image:
**few words on visibility: the probability to get things done increase
when I see the things I need to do. When I see it, I can relate to it, I can
relate to it more often and it will probably catch my attention more than other
things around. If you really want to take SWOT from theory to action, make it
visible. leave out the pen and paper and take it to the level where it is
visible where you most needs to see it.
4. The analysis: Examine, ask
ourselves few questions related to our vision.
·
Our goal at this stage is
to understand how we can use our internal straights toward achieving our
vision.
·
Furthermore, we would like
to get the full picture over the situation.
·
We would like to start
taking actions, set some goals as part of our journey toward achieving our vision
·
The answers we give ,
should be completely subjective to us (the owner of the SWOT)
So.. let’s ask them:
·
How can I take my straights
and take advantage over the opportunities in my journey toward achieving my
vision?
·
What is the best way to use
my straights so I can reduce the threat?
·
How can I make sure, my
weaknesses will not hold me back from the opportunities ahead?
·
How can I reduce the
threats and weaknesses so they will less influence me in my journey towards my
vision?
·
How do I overcome threats
in general
·
How do I use the
opportunities, and when?
5. building the most basic
building blocks for the journey .
·
According to what we’ve
learned in the previous steps, Create a list of all the tasks, goals you need to
do/archive.
·
Add this list to your task
board
·
Select few of the tasks to
take as action in the near time frame (or sprint)
Go...
A good execution may be that we take one or two actions, examine them
in our day to day reality and then go back to the SWOT and see if something has
changed.
Few important guidelines for the way :
·
SWOT as presented here is
not a judgmental tool. It is a personal and subjective tool therefore, it is
highly important that the SWOT owner will understand his board as it reflects his
own subjective reality.
·
Visibility – Make
sure you see what you need to do and where you‘re at. Place the SWOT board in a
location where you can relate to it frequently.
·
Since SWOT is not just a
onetime evaluation tool, make sure to revisit your SWOT and change it
accordingly. Did I gain some more straights? Do I have new opportunities? Did I
eliminate threats? Improvement will happen when we will create the routine of
continues change and continues improvement.
·
Pick your relevant
execution actions according to their highest value for you. There is no need to
take to action all the SWOT tasks at once.
·
Start small! Take one step
at a time. Sometimes it’s enough to understand something “just enough” and
start executing, instead of examining endless options and sides of the same
situation. Anyway, the most important feedback will start flowing once you
start executing your actions.
If you’ve taken to
execute an action related to weaknesses or straights, start small. Small tasks are
easy to get done, easier to get feedback, has a good impact over the feeling of
success and achievement and..if you fail, you fail small.
·
There are many ways to achieve
your goals and vision –SWOT is just one of them.
References and further reading
●
Humphrey, Albert (December 2005). "SWOT Analysis for Management
Consulting". SRI Alumni Newsletter (SRI International).
תוויות:
Goals,
SWOT,
task board,
task card,
visibility
November 03, 2013
My most effective time to get things done
My most effective time to get things done
Beyond the fact that I hold a backlog including all those
tasks I need to do, I do need to get them done in the most effective and
efficient way. With all other things I need to consider and plan I also need to
pay attention to the timing of those tasks. After all, there are tasks that are
bounded by time. For instance, what good it will do to brush my teeth and then
eat a good meal just before going to bed and not the other way around?
As part of the agile method and especially when implementing
scrum, we are used to stop at the end of every sprint (iteration), look ahead
and plan our coming sprint tasks. This is also a good opportunity to take a
look at those tasks timing and reflect over the best time to execute them. There
may be a verity of reasons to execute tasks in a specific time frame or
another, after all each of us holds different goals, tasks and time
considerations.
As in any new techniques, we don’t have to start using it if
we have no problem executing our tasks. It really aims to those tasks that
needs a special timing consideration such as :
an outstanding bunch of tasks; Tasks that require a special
concentration; Tasks that holds dependencies to other tasks; Tasks that holds
progress from other activities and many more…
All you have to do is:
- Look ahead and identify those most effective time frames (according to the task time, urgency, needs, time frame limitations, priority…)
Ask yourself, what are my best
weekdays to perform those tasks? What is my best time of day to perform those
tasks?
It may happen that in each week there are different time and
week days to perform the same tasks.
For example:
Maybe you are a morning/night person? So there are types of
tasks that demand a high level of concentration that you want to perform at
this time frame only.
Will it be easier to address emails at the beginning of my
working day or at the end of it? Maybe both? Or maybe if I just take few thin slices
of time during the day to cover the accumulating amount of emails and messages will
be the best timing for this task? (BTW , the last one is my favorite)
There are tasks that weekdays and day time will enforce our
timing, such as…the best time to work with my sun over his final class
assignment will be the weekend. Or , the
best time to walk the dog is in the morning, otherwise…
- The next step will be to Create visibility to those most effective hours.A task board with special time zones may be great, or tasks divided according to weekdays and more…
- Act accordingly.
- Make sure to retrospect over the effective and efficient of the performance of those tasks according to the time frame set. If needed, change it.
- And as always, don’t forget to have fun.
Lets take a look at few examples I have gathered:
A father that marks
Wednesdays in his calendar as the best days to spend some time with his kids.
Obvious, right!?
Keep in mind that this visualization not only
acts as a good reminder but also creates a level of commitment to this type of
task.
The clock- the clock
creates a good understanding over the time we may or may not
perform a specific task. These can be used for homework tasks, play hours and
more….

The following table presents
a time frame where I produce the most value during the day. Therefore, I will
target my tasks to these hours.
It may be that my type of work is such that I
would prefer doing the ”paper work” early in the morning, and the coaching
stuff, meeting and face to face communication later on intothe day when other
people are around.
The following is a chart
showing Light and Time of Day. What's the best time of day to go painting
outdoors?
When is the right time to publish one of my blog posts?
On Sunday when no one from my American readers is on the web,
or on Friday when no one of my Israeli readers is on the web?
תוויות:
Goals,
time management
October 28, 2013
The Retrospective Session for Everyone
It’s continues improvement aimed meeting, taken place at
the end of each sprint. Helping the team to improve their performance
effectives and efficiency (http://qconlondon.com/london-2012/presentation/Effective%20Retrospective). We look back as a team, learning from what
we did wrong and how to improve in the future. And learning from what we did well
and how to recreate it.
This is, in my opinion, one of the most important sessions
to take place as part of the agile rituals that lead us to continuous
improvement.
Don’t skip this session!
Why ?
Because it’s a learning meeting. We Communicate our
performance on a regular basis (end of each sprint) we retrospect over our
performance and pick action for next sprint.
** Just before we continue , please note, I will be using
the term “team” as a general reference , but, you may apply this to family members,
classmates, teachers group and any other form of ‘team’ with common goals.
Why retrospective?
·
Because improvement does
not come alone. Having a heart beat of
improvement sessions will take us forward.
·
Because we if want to
constantly improve we need to have this official
place and time, and it goes without saying that talking about our performance
is what we naturally do, Regardless our results.
·
Because continues
improvement and learning can come only when we are set to reflect over our
performance, effectiveness and efficiency.
·
Each team member sees
things differently, if we wish to improve as a team we need to get everyone’s
opinion to the context of the team.
·
Without a retrospective
session, the team will probably continue to make the same mistakes all over
again and the improvement items will be randomly, based on crisis and the rate of
improvement will be lower than it can get.
Who attends the retrospective?
Team members only! Those who have tasks on the board. Pigs ,
remember?
Managers are not allowed. Why? Because it’s a self-organized
team, remember ? Because the team should
be accountable for its performance, therefore accountable for the improvements.
The team will decide whether to share or not retrospective
items.
The scrum master can conduct the meeting few first times , but later on it is
recommended that The team will conduct the meeting.
Things that should take place during the
retrospective:
·
The
retrospective is an open discussion
·
Set
up goals
·
Assign
tasks to goals for next sprint.
In this session, we will ask ourselves questions:
1.
What
should we continue doing?
2.
What
should we stop doing?
3.
What
should we start doing?
Or :
What were our successes
“+” , or things we wish to improve “_”
The session should take place at a time when it’s convenient
to chat, in a sharing atmosphere. Each team member should feel entitled to
comment and contribute to the session and to the three questions.
We sometimes encountered people who avoid this session with
various excuses, such as “we don’t have time for yet another meeting”,” we
don’t want to share our thoughts and feelings with others”, and so on. Team
members may be afraid to share their thoughts and opinions, especially if the managers
are very 'command and control', ordering team members around and managing the team
tasks.
Two types of retrospective as important to mention:
·
We can have a goal
oriented retrospective, which is aimed to talk about a specific issue. For
example – our relationships as a team with our interfaces.
·
Or we can have what I
call as “free hand” retrospective
, which is more of an open discussion
over issues bothers the team , and from there the discussion will scope over
the most important issues that the team thinks needs discussion.
Setting up a retrospective session:
●
Allocate about an hour of team
time.
●
Conduct the session when
just the team members are present, especially for the first few sessions.
●
Have the session where you
all feel comfortable. Don’t take it outside, at least not at the first times.
●
Set the ground rules: for example:
everybody can talk , we are here to share our view, don’t interrupt when one
team member is talking and more…
As usual, the format may vary, and you can employ more creative
methods than just conversation or writing tasks down on sticky notes. Here are few examples:
Example 1 :
●
One team member will review
the weekly tasks. Preferred to be the scrum master Along with the rest of the team,
the scrum master will summarize the sprint: main events, achievement, outcomes.
●
Each team member says, in
his turn, what he thought of the sprint, what can be done better, what we
should keep on doing and what we should we start doing.
●
One team member needs to
summarize what the team says. This shows that we are taking the session and the
things the team members are saying seriously.
●
Pick a few tasks (not many)
for preservation, changing, or to start doing.
●
Assign a team member to
each task. His role will be to follow this task and make sure we discuss this
task in the daily family gathering.
●
All team members are
committed to the retrospective tasks and outcomes.
●
In each retrospective
session, bring up the outcomes and progress of the previous session’s action
items. You may even choose to bring up the previous tasks as something we may
want to deal with in our next sprint.
Example 2:
1.
Draw three columns on a
white board or piece of paper:
●
Things we would like to
keep on doing.
●
Things we would like to
stop doing.
●
Things we would like to
continue doing.
2.
Pass around sticky notes.
3.
Each team member writes
down issues and adds them to the appropriate column. Don’t comment or criticize
team members over issues they add to the board.
4.
Once all finished, the team
chooses the first team member to go to the board and make his case. Explain
that you should start off with the positive things.
5.
When a team member finds
that another team member wrote the same thing he did, he may approach the board
add his sticky note together with the one presented.
6.
When a team member start
presenting the issues he thinks requires improvement, start asking questions.
7.
We now have a good overview
of the issues that occupied our mind during the last sprint. We also know what
are the most important issues we need to improve, as we listened to all the team
members' opinions.
8.
Now, it’s possible that
some issues will create a lengthy conversation. If this happens, it is best to
stop the discussion, and ask the team members to talk about it after the
retrospective session.
9.
After all the tasks and team
members concerns are on the board, lets select the tasks for improvement, to
keep or to start doing.
10.
We can move the selected
tasks to our ongoing tasks board, and put the rest in the backlog. This way we
make sure the improvement will be followed (during the daily meeting) and will
take place.
You can perform this session in many more creative ways, as
long as you remember to have :
·
Open discussion:
o
Remember to get into the
mood of active listening. Ask questions during the session. Don’t let slogans to stay as is, get to the
root cause of what happens.
o
Visualizing and sharing
your issues as a team on the board, as part of a team dialog, makes it easier
to talk about issues and address them.
·
Set up goals
Achieving
goals with agile – using Kanban and scrum with kids and at home
Why
spiders can help you achieve your goals
·
Assign tasks to goals
for next sprint.
o
Just make sure not to
select too many tasks for improvement. Focus on the important ones.
o
By the way, this isn’t as
obvious as it sounds. By choosing the important tasks, we find out what the
other family members are thinking. We may find out that there are specific
issues that bother more than one family member, and we can focus on those for
improvement.
More creative retrospective sets:
Attention and techniques:
• Don’t let this session become a status reporting meeting and
then to be delivered later to managers.
• The past looks all black and the retrospective becomes a
sad or angry meeting?
• Use future
spective technique to look at the future and make things better.
• When we delay issues to the retrospective instead of solving
them on the spot.
• Raise the issue in the retrospective and make sure to bring the
message that issues can be solved outside the retrospective as well..
• Too many problems rise in the retrospective?
• Set priority and take issues offline to task forces.
• Deal with one issue at a time
You can use
“retrospective” session whenever you have something you want to check and
improve , you don’t need wait to have a
retrospective session to make a change or improvements. All you need to know is
how to talk about things.
o Credit “agile kids book “
תוויות:
retrospective
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