Posts tagged retrospectives

Cure Your Agile Planning and Analysis Blues: The Top 9 Pain Points

frazzledproductchampionIf you’re on a team that’s transitioning to lean/agile, have you experienced troubling truths, baffling barriers, and veritable vexations around planning and analysis? We work with many lean/agile teams, and we’ve noted certain recurring planning and analysis pain points.

Mary Gorman and I shared our top observations in a recent webinar. Our hostess, Maureen McVey, IIBA’s Head of Learning and Development, prompted us to begin by sharing why we wrote the book Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis and then explaining the essential practices you can learn by reading the book.

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Experiencing Agile: 6 Agile Planning and Analysis Practices to Try

What practices can you adopt to help your team experience Agile?

This question was raised by a listener to the podcast we recorded on agile analysis practices with BA coach Yamo. (Find the podcast here.) The specific question that Katie Metcalf asked us was this:

“What Agile techniques would you suggest introducing to a software development team that is currently not using the Agile approach but would like to get a flavor for the methodology?”

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Are Your Software Development Practices Jumping the Shark?

By Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman In September 1977, the TV sitcom Happy Days had über-hip Fonzie, clad in leather jacket and swimshorts, water ski over a shark to prove his mettle—and at that moment even diehard fans knew that the show was past its prime. They were right. After that episode, ratings plummeted, and the…

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Being Agile when Designing and Playing Agile Games

By Mary Gorman

In my Stickyminds.com column “Playing at Work: Agile Games Deliver Value” I share game ideas and experiences – the benefits games can provide, selecting an appropriate game, facilitating a game, and designing a winning game.

Designing and Facilitating Agile Games

When writing the column I got to thinking how agile principles could provide a basis for good game design and facilitation. I reflected on a recent experience I had at Deep Agile 2010: Empowering Teams with Agile Games. Working in a small group we created a new game, tested it, and retrospected both the game and our design process in less than half a day. We consciously (and some times unconsciously!) were being agile! (To see and learn more about our game, read Michael Sahota’s summary at The Backlog Is in the Eye of the Beholder.)

Games and The Agile Manifesto

To clearly communicate the agile-ness of our work and what we learned I did a quick mapping to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

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The 4L’s: A Retrospective Technique

by Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiener We liked it when a good thing took on a life of its own. We learned that it really resonated with many folks. We lacked sharing the full understanding of the technique. We longed for more sharing. Liked — Learned — Lacked — Longed For At the recent Deep…

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Lessons on Collaboration: Retrospective on Delivering the IIBA BABOK, Part 1

What are good practices for delivering a complex product for a broad global customer with a group of volunteers scattered all over the world?

This is a real-world question for me right now: I’ve volunteered to participate on the Agile-BABOK® (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) addendum effort. Like the BABOK itself, this addendum can impact the practices of a broad worldwide community of professionals.

Learn From Those Who Have Been There Before

Two groups have tackled the problem of using volunteers to deliver an industry standard, so I figured we should “learn before we burn”. One group is the PMI Agile Community of Practice group, and the other is the BABOK Body of Knowledge Committee.

Ideally, learning what worked for these groups, along with their suggestions for what they would do differently were they to do this again, could help the Agile-BABOK addendum effort to start smart: leverage what they’ve found works, avoid or mitigate what didn’t work, and adjust their practices based on their experience.

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