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Showing posts from December 28, 2014

Back to the future

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Hola amigos! It's been a long month and finally we are about to complete the last day of these 31 days agile blog experience! Since today is the last day of the year I'll get a Victoria beer ! I was thinking of what is the best way to end the blog. What about inspecting and adapting the blog itself so I can take actions to improve if this experience is repeated in the future? Sounds like a retrospective! Trying first of all to be constructive...  The Prime Directive "Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand." Should I raise my hand to and say: "I agree". Quite obvious. So do I :-) What went wrong? Most of the entries were not deepened. In order to keep the easy-going style, not very long, I feel that some of the posts could have a longer content.  Difficulti

Example Manifesto

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Hola! Time for an early evening coffee! I've just had an amazing lunch and I need my espresso! Few weeks ago I attended a Kanban Training which allowed to acquire an interesting insight of the change management method.  As a personal experiment, I'm just trying to remember everything I learned from those days... Many concepts came up within the two days. But to be honest, I've just visualised kanban from a picture in a example-game we played. That's what I really recall. We are like babies. We are still babies. We understand things better from examples. Real-life ones if possible - since Agile is a way of life, right? Try to provide lots of theories, lots of references or many "speeches". If you take 10 minutes of your time to explain something that can be done using an example in less... You are wasting your time. You won't get anybody's attention. It doesn't matter how precise is your explanation if you don't "get" the peop

You and I

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Hola once again! Wow! It's nearly the end of the month! Reaching the 29th entry of the month! Posting stuff 29 consecutive days! Let's make room for a cortado ! Few days ago, I posted something about how useful attending conferences can be. Check that out  here . Today I'd like to illustrate one example of a learning experience. A mechanism that I brought back to my team in Athens. " Resolving conflicts ". As a non-native English speaker, I took the liberty of requesting a bit of consideration from the audience in case they couldn't understand me well so that I could try to rephrase it, repeat it or just speak up. That's how I created my safe environment. I was protected. We could start off at that moment. This was just a simple example on how to accept other needs in order to contribute to someone else's safe environment creation. Why is that important to me? It is easy to discern that any attack to my speaking English could have killed my c

Get to know your team

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Hola amigos! Sunday in Malaga! What about a coffee after a yummy lunch! Time for espresso! We have been discussing here about introducing changes, inserting a new culture, improving our process, etc. Historically there is a need in knowing a team for leading reasons. This is what I call "hierarchical information." So you can lead your team better because you understand their needs, their skills and the areas they need to improve. You lead their needs. See this article:  http://smallbusiness.chron.com/team-leading-35635.html Traditionally, this is line-management oriented method. So you could also be able to be honest and sincere when reporting your guys performance year reviews. Is this a match in Agile teams? What we really need is our team knowing the own team. And we need to reinforce mechanisms so everybody can understand everybody's circumstances, hobbies, likes, dislikes, provide an atmosphere full of trust or anything that can make the team to better coe