Agile in 31 days

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

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

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

Hola! Coffee and collaboration! Yum yum! Collaborate. Innovate. It has been a great year cooperating and learning from many people from many different areas and companies.

Hola! A long fun weekend is coming! So I am preparing myself with a big cup of coffee! Education is important. I assume that we agree in this and I don't have to bring valid reasons on why this is important. So, sticking to the point, there are several methods: - Self-teaching . Reading, writing, webinars, researching, attending meetups for instance... the world is not enough! - " Microwave-teaching ". While working is another way if you are under a company that has a nice "try" and "fail" culture in the atmosphere. "We can make the invest of trying something that nobody knows what it is, but we can assume the loss in learning and trying, no matter if it doesn't help us". The action of stimulating your creativity is indeed a success by definition although it is just you alone in the dark. - Training (external or internal) . No discussion on how useful they are. Just a comment. You may have spent your last 8-10 years on a topic th

Hola amigos! Have you ever tried Bonka coffee before? It's just great! I am having my second of the day! Yup! Energy! From the day 0 (zero) I had the idea of using this blog to illustrate that "Agile is way of life" and can be applied to our day-to-day. This also means that when it comes to move companies into the Agile direction that is not exclusive of IT companies. If you have come across my previous posts, there is one in particular " Sa-tis-fac-tion " which I brought it as one of the basics when introducing an Agile coaching into organisations. If you read it meticulously, there is not a single reference to Unit Tests,  Java, or any technical stuff. So today, we did a similar first "encounter" and we faced few minor improvements that we could implement into a wine shop in Marbella . "Agilizing" it  as in a Kaizen way :-) Your wine shop in Marbella These are our few ones: 1. Adding metrics to be able to better evaluate