We have it backwards
We don’t go out and do difficult things because we’re confident. We do difficult things and that gives us confidence. We don’t work longer hours and get more done. We work less, sleep enough and get...
View ArticleHow did you introduce pair programming at sipgate?
Recently I’ve been presenting our Work Hacks at a couple of places and talking about pairing up as part of it. Not only do we pair program but we also mob program and pair up across roles: Dev and UX...
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How to deliver a project early
At TopConf Linz 2017, Allan Kelly posed a question to the audience: “Have you ever delivered a project early?” Out of 75ish people only 3 raised their hands. That’s not a lot of people. All three...
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Examples for Swarming beyond the team
When I first learned about Kanban, I also learned about “Swarming”. Swarming is when the whole team pitches in to work on the same thing. That same thing is often a blocking task that WIP limits helped...
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My most important retrospectives were horrible
I’ve got a confession to make: I think fun in retrospectives is overrated. And I never bring cookies, when I facilitate. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer having a good time to moping about and yes, I...
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What is an Agile Mindset? Six years later
At the end of 2011 I wrote about what makes an agile mindset (in my opinion) and even made a fancy infographic about it: It concentrates on how people think about their colleagues as humans vs. cogs;...
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Expect turnover – Agile transitions and changes in the work force
The other day, I’ve had 3 visitors from a large corporation. Since one of them was from HR we talked a lot about these topics and exchanged our hiring processes. One hidden criterium of theirs is that...
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Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches need an Emergency Fund
Scrum doesn’t fix an organization’s problems. It makes problems glaringly obvious so that they have a chance to fix them. Except that “glaringly obvious” is relative and sometimes you still need...
View ArticleAd-Hoc Leadership
[This topic in German will be part of the upcoming 2nd sipgate book \o/]. We don’t have any middle management at sipgate. In our teams nobody is anybody else’s boss. Hearing this, visitors often assume...
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“How can I motivate people for retrospectives?” or Retrospectives are Step 1...
“How can I motivate people to do retrospectives?” is a question I used to hear frequently. If you ask me, that’s the wrong question. It’s wrong because you don’t have to motivate people to do something...
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Improve your Retrospectives with this 1 weird trick: Liftoffs
When health is concerned, preventing issues altogether is often easier than treating them once they’ve manifested. The same can be said for retrospectives: Either Deborah Hartmann Preuss or Steve...
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Agile is about usability. So is Clean Code.
Maybe it’s because usability was such a strong focus of mine for such a long time but I feel like most good ideas boil down to usability. It’s kind of my “grand unifying theory of good practices”. To...
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Story Cubes for Retrospectives
Sometimes we have guests over who want to learn more about our Open Friday and see it in action. Lately we’ve been asking for a session in return so that visitors add to our pool of knowledge. These...
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5 more things I learned at Agile on the Beach 2016
From Kat Matfield’s session “User Research in an irrational world”: 1) If at all possible, look at records of what people actually did in the real-world situation, (screen recordings, chat logs, …)...
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