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Space for the joy of work
I was reminded today how much that matters. In the retrospective the things people care about, things they’d really like to do, but cannot because all the other work is ‘scheduled’ is what gets more and more voices join to join in, ideas being thrown in by even the quietest of team members. I tried…
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Making connections
When most of us think of this subject we probably imagine bringing people together, us sitting somewhere central, helping to facilitate discussion…but what happens after that initial moment? Everyone goes back to their desks, starts working on their current item, responds to emails, etc. What I am learning today is that there’s not enough value…
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Asking for permission
Recently we attended one more of the change advisory (also known as approval) board meetings. We were kindly asked to provide more detail … and that’s the boring part of the story. The interesting part is the difference in the weight of arguments from the friends we brought into the discussion. Again, we were surprised…
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The magic ingredient
Several years ago I was involved in a programme of work that tried to do agile at scale (small scale, 4-5 teams). At that time most of us that were driving the change agenda thought we had a million and one things to fix, so after reaching a milestone in the plan and finding something that…
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Bare people and empty containers
An example of how well the DevOps team was doing spreading their practices was recently used to encourage us who work with people to repeat their success. As much as I would like to follow their methods of innovating and introducing new things I’m struggling with it. As per the title, I think my biggest…
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Only flow is important
I had this struggle in my head about dealing with interruptions/disruptions in the sprint for a very long time now. We and I have tried all kinds of process/people changes to prevent anything impacting what we do for the two weeks of work we committed, given it a goal, priorities to and called it a…
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Never stop never stopping
Yesterday I had a good lesson from one of my teammates about the pace of change and feeling of having a goal that is so far away that it seemed like a good one 🙂 That was shattered the moment he showed me this. Up until that moment, I thought if we get to “there”…
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Fix the problem
Today I stopped myself from hiding a problem. I already had a message typed in that would allow me to get the right tools and access to take on a task that is painful and seen as a blocker by the team. Yes, you guessed it, I was going to do our deployments 🙂 But…