pete roessler

LEGO Serious Play: Modeling & Story-Telling

Pete Roessler — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:06:59 +0000

Some weeks ago I attended the “StrategicPlay® Fundamentals Facilitator Training” at the StrategicPlay® headquarters and have used elements of LEGO Serious Play™ (LSP) quite some time with teams since then. As a Playmobil® fan it is “shocking” to see how easy you can use LSP for solving complex problems or helping team members to understand …

How to Deal with Results from an Agile Retrospective?

Pete Roessler — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:00:16 +0000

Have you ever heard a team complaining about results of a retrospective not being realized? I have. And it’s important to change something immediately after hearing it. Realizing the agreed improvments from the retrospective is one of the agile principles of the Agile Manifesto: At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more …

Agile Team Retrospective Activities: Starfish & Team Radar

Pete Roessler — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:59:18 +0000

Variety in retrospective activities are definitely necessary. The more retrospectives I do, the more I’m getting tired of using the same method over and over again. And hey, this will most probably bore the teams I work with as well. Therefore it’s good to challenge the team AND you with new retrospective techniques. In the …

Soft Agile Transition: Slowly from nowhere to Scrum

Pete Roessler — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:09:58 +0000

Lean Thinking is what I’m trying to learn and adopt at the moment. What a perfect coincidence that I stumbled over Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. On page 54 they describe Kaizen, one of the crucial Lean Principles, as a plausible “inspect …

Scrum of Scrum introduced. Yes!

Pete Roessler — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:34:06 +0000

It’s great to witness how a company changes from somewhat “old school-ish” to something agile-like: Last week we finally started with a Scrum of Scrum and it turns out to be working pretty well only after a few days. Actually most of our teams have been working with some kind of agile process for some …

NOT done!

Pete Roessler — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 07:35:36 +0000

One of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto is maximizing the amount of work NOT done! If you really manage to do it, it is very liberating. It actually sounds very easy but is really hard to get it started and keep it going. In meetings I again and again find myself trapped in the …

108 Ideas in 30 Minutes

Pete Roessler — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:00:50 +0000

6-3-5 Brainwriting is a Brainstorming method that generates 108 different ideas or views for any topic within 30 minutes. This is how 6-3-5 works: 1) Choose your brainstorming topic/question 2) Prepare the sheets with the topic/question and a table of 6 rows and 3 columns (see image below) 3) Make a short introduction/warm-up with the …

Visualizing Kanban Lead Time

Pete Roessler — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:30:15 +0000

Measuring the lead time is one of the three core means of Kanban (next to Workflow visualization and WIP limitation). But whereas Workflow visualization and WIP limitation are easy to understand for the team, I experienced that nobody really cares about what to do with Measuring the Lead Time. This week I tried a different …

A Burndown Chart is much more than Traffic Lights

Pete Roessler — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:35:38 +0000

This post is a wonderful example of me being a project manager struggling to become an agile coach: As a project manager I loved to show the status of a project via traffic lights (see image below). I always pinned those traffic lights on the team board and every developer could move his or her …

3 Retrospectives in 2 Days

Pete Roessler — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 11:31:27 +0000

Last week I had retrospectives with three different agile teams within 2 days. I love retrospectives and a retrospective meeting is one of the first agile things I try to establish when I start working with a team. Every team needs to get used to the advantages of retrospectives though… The agenda for retrospectives always …