Agile in 31 days

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 there! I am about to take a flight that departs to Málaga and just realized that i haven't posted a single coffee picture! Big mistake! Thinking further, I ended up with Twin Peaks !   Most of you 70s and 80s born people remember it. A story about Laura Palmer's brutal homicide surrounded by mysteries and strange stories based on freak people from Twin Peaks, extraterrestrial stuff, dwarfs and spirits. " A town where noone is innocent ". Wow! What a summary! Well, along with The Wire, this is my favorite series have ever seen in TV. Not my intention to spoil it if you haven't had a chance to see it. It's a must-see. The story's main character is and FBI agent - Cooper - who can delay whatever important business just for a cup of coffee. True love. That's how I came my mind into it.  Then thinking further. How the hell David Lynch (co-creator) came up with this story? Who knows. This is when I start linking it to agile stuff. I...

Hola amigos! Do you know that even in McDonald's you can order coffee? It's true. Surely not the best one but I have to confess that I have ordered once. I remember in Prague where the coffee in general is just "not the best in the world". Of course it didn't improve but I had to try with it since I had no better choices. I am bringing the (or one of) biggest fast-food restaurant for a reason. Few people that I know believe that we should not call it "restaurant" but this is not why I am talking about it. Think yourself on what actions do we execute when we just want to eat food (as in other places). 1. Nobody gets us a seat. 2. You have to stand-up to order the food. 3. You wait for the food to be cooked and you pay immediately before being served. There is a difference now from the pubs. You don't provide a table number. You just wait to get the food. We don't provide with tips. 4. The food "shows up" and you find a place to ea...

Hola my friends! Bit late for a coffee I think. Maybe a no caffeine one? It's Monday and I'm in love as The cure used to say. Yesterday we talked about the distributed teams and how to find the gaps. Today I want to talk about one of those exclusive co-located tools. The whiteboards. As a former boss said: "everybody loves drawings, graphs". Whiteboards is the essence of the agile manifesto. Who wants a fully-documented State diagram in Uml when we do have simple whiteboards?  Posts ago we  focused on the importance of the focus . What's important? How can our mindset acknowledge that easily? I don't think we can find any other powerful tool in Agile implementations to make visible what do we need to do. Just walk around, go for a coffee and come back. You will come across the whiteboard all day long. I don't need to remember what are our goals! They're just there! I will have a look at the whiteboard to check again on further implementati...

Hola! Very good morning folks! I am having my second coffee of this lovely and cold day in London! I like watching  BBC News  on Sundays while I am checking out how my beloved football club performed the day before in "La Liga". Malaga FC won yesterday . These are real good news to start off the day. It is also sad that I have no other option to follow my team up remotely. Sign of the times, I guess. Well, suddenly the BBC presenter introduced us  'Wi-Fi Orchestra' . This is basically a live music experiment with 11 people performing at the same time music on 9 different subway stations in NYC (tube if you live in London) thanks to the free Wi-Fi (and Skype). All of them conducted by a director called Ljova. Maybe this is a campaign organised by Skype to sell us the advantages of using Skype as a tool to collaborate remotely. In any case, this is a real demonstration of a good cooperation, an excellent level of communication and a big understanding on where are ...

Every now and then, few Spanish people from my company arrange a pub and few beers to talk about anything we feel in regards "Agile". Self-organised. No rules. We just talk about anything that worry us or not. Today we brought the micromanagement as one of the biggest issue on agile teams :)

Hola amigos! Please take a seat and have a coffee! First of all, thanks for reading this Blog. Hope you enjoy this as much as I am doing! The day I attended the past Agile Conference in Cambridge back in October 2014, that day, changed my life. Yes, that day. I had a wide experience in "Agile". I have worked in many different companies, teams assuming different roles such as developer, Tech lead, scrum master or agile trainer. We can say that more or less I thought "I know stuff". Then I met Portia Tung and yes, everything blew up. Her presentation titled as " The power of play " was a fantastic surprise. To briefly sum-up she believes that " play at work can improve relationship and can fire up creativity ". Bringing positive and a break to our day-to-day routine to finally deliver better values. I remember one of the definitions from one of the examples on the slides she provided. Portia said that day in Cambridge: "To me playing is w...