Critical Agile Practices, Nuanced Techniques

We often talk about how to pep up retrospectives that have gone dry. But what of the other ceremonies? Have your standups devolved into status meetings (or were they always status meetings)? Are your grooming and planning meetings effective as they could be? Are your teams able to provide demanding execs with satisfying forecasts? Are your teams really teams or just individuals who report to the same standup? Are you seeing the effectiveness, focus on outcomes, and teamwork you know your teams are capable of?

Almost all of us have teams we want to work better: better productivity, effectiveness, clarity, quality, and frankly joy. No silver bullet, but Ron Lichty will share five nuances to the practices that he’s found have made teamwork and teams dramatically more effective. All are pretty easy and pretty simple. One of the techniques - one for forecasting - leverages Miro or Mural; if we have time, we’ll play with that one together in small groups. And he’ll share metaphors he’s found resonate with teams he’s led and teams he’s trained - metaphors you can use to help team members understand their role in delivering teamwork - what Christopher Avery refers to when he says that teamwork is an individual skill.

Ron will also share data you can use from the Study of Product Team Performance he also coauthors - correlations from thousands of respondents on product teams all over the world that have validated the universality of the workshop’s techniques.

After participating in this workshop you will be able to:

• leverage new data and metaphor to evangelize more effective practices
• surface issues earlier
• plan better
• improve the effectiveness of standups that have been rote status meetings to something much more
• improve deliverable quality
• estimate more predictably