Category Archives: Project Management

Facilitating with The Focused Conversation

I was presenting Building Antifragile Relationships and Teams at Santa Barbara Agile recently and as we worked on ideas for a conflict protocol, we started discussing the common theme of “facts vs. feelings”. I’ll point out that there was not a hard-line view in the group as to one way or another, but it came up and opened up a nice discussion on the topic.

The Focused Conversation Poster.

I mentioned The Focused Conversation as a great tool you can use to help structure a conversation. Focused Conversations include four important categories of questions — objective, reflective, interpretive, and decision focused questions. The acronym ORID is sometimes used to describe The Focused Conversation.

The structure also provides a way to hear all of the voices that need to be heard within the group or team. You might even use this as part of an agile retrospective. Using the tool is another way to build antifragile relationships in teams and organizations. Continue reading →

Be Better, Don’t Limit Yourself to Best Practices

by Jake Calabrese

We hear a lot about best practices. We talk a lot about them. Many organizations are of the opinion that if they can identify the best practice, they are set. Of course, that thinking can be limiting in a number of ways. We need to be better, not best.

Limiting Yourself with Best Practices

Googling “best practice definition” gives you “commercial or professional procedures that are accepted or prescribed as being correct or most effective.”

Wikipedia says : “A best practice is a method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark. In addition, a “best” practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered. Best practice is considered by some as a business buzzword, used to describe the process of developing and following a standard way of doing things that multiple organizations can use.”

Notice in the Wikipedia definition they add the idea that they can evolve to become better. This gets to the root of what we need to be doing. Continue reading →

Understanding ACI’s Agile Coach Competency Framework (Part 1)

by Jake Calabrese

Agile Coaching. A seemingly simple term that causes so much confusion. Much of the confusion seems to stem from the reasonable question of “what does an agile coach do?” The Agile Coaching Institute (ACI) defined an Agile Coach Competency Framework a few years back. I’ve used the framework both internally at organizations and in more public venues (conferences, etc.). I’ll be facilitating a learning session on a variation of it at an upcoming conference in a few weeks. I find it valuable to help people to understand the different perspectives they can approach agile coaching from. In addition to using the framework in Advanced Scrum Master Training or Agile Coach Training, I find it offers leaders insights into how they can shift from a leader-follower to a leader-leader approach to leadership. The ACI Whitepaper by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd outlines the framework. This article includes my summary of it based on multiple sources — as well as my personal experience with it and ways to learn from it.

Continue reading →

Thoughts on Agile Coaching

by Jake Calabrese

There are many ideas and definitions of agile coaching. I was talking to with some people this week about agile coaching and figured I’d summarize a bit of the discussion here.

Given that each agile coach is helping unique people, who make up unique teams, who make up unique departments, and organizations — we should expect there to be a large degree of variation as to what an agile coach does. People, teams and organizations are at different points in their agile journey. This necessitates that as an agile coach, you meet people where they are. There are so many variations of clients and situations that attempting to propose a prescription is unwise.

Agile coaches work in service to and with clients, helping them achieve the amazing results they are capable of. Continue reading →

Bad Standard: Plus-Minus-Delta Agile Retrospectives

by Jake Calabrese

Many people dislike the 3 question, plus-minus-delta retrospective. I am one of them. The plus-minus-delta agile retrospective leads to many problems. I say it was never the “standard” in the title, so why are so many people confused? Or…am I the one confused?

While co-coaching recently, the other coach and I had a brief exchange about how the “standard” agile retrospective was not good. I was a little confused, since while I certainly do not always use ‘the standard’ or baseline agile retrospective, there is value to it — at least I thought so? The baseline retrospective I employ is a solid method to teach people how to do an agile retrospective. I asked a few more questions and realized that while we were both using the term “standard retrospective,” we had different definitions of the term. Continue reading →

Cursing Your Vision Statement

by Jake Calabrese

I was coaching someone a while back and asked them to tell me what their vision statement: what motivated him? When I heard the answer, I was not moved. What I heard was boring. I knew this person had passion for what he did. What happened to it?

If I ask you to tell me why you do what you do, and you are not jumping up and down a bit, getting a bit fired up, I don’t buy your passion! Here are some ideas to find the passion in your vision statement. They may not be for everyone, but I know they have helped some people already, so I wanted to share. Continue reading →

Improving Yourself with StrengthsFinder 2.0

by Jake Calabrese

I am often asked by folks I’m coaching for ideas of assessments they can take to help them grow.

I’m working on a few articles about different types of assessments and improving yourself (subscribe if you are interested in being notified). I thought I’d take some time to explain some of insights I got from taking the StrengthsFinder® 2.0 assessment a while back, as well as explain what it is and how to take it. This is the first of three articles on assessments. The other two will cover MBTI® and The Leadership Circle Profile® . All three are very different in a number of ways, which I will discuss in those articles.

Agile and Agility are about people, learning, and collaborating – a foundational part being able to collaborating and learning with others is personal mastery. Continue reading →