Have you heard the expression “context is king”? It’s very true if you work with teams because many of the things that can affect a team negatively can be found outside of the team itself. How good is your understanding of your team’s context? When the world around our teams is messy, it’s natural to […]
Author Archives: Tobias Fors
The Value of Recreational Programming
If you’re a manager, an agile coach, team lead or scrum master with no programming background, that might not be a problem. It may even turn out to be something you can use as a strength, but only if …
Some Pitfalls In Experiential Training
Training classes using an experiential approach has more and more become the norm in agile leadership trainings. Check if some of these pitfalls are something you need to design around as you prepare your next class. Many trainers in the agile world are really good at using interactive exercises to engage participants. I’ve been a […]
Learning About S3
Sociocracy 3.0, or S3 for short, is a collection of principle-backed patterns for more effective collaboration. It can be seen as an attempt to reduce hierarchy while at the same time providing an alternative type of structure.
Rolling Out Scrum – How Hard Can It Be?
The belief that an idea like Scrum can be easily and predictably rolled out in an organization is still wide spread. It’s a tempting fantasy and a potent recipe for problems. Scrum is not about installing best practices – it is about activating curiosity, using all of the brains we do have, and giving experience […]
Efficiency Is Not the Only Value
Not too long ago I was teaching a class at a client company. During the morning of the second day of the class, I had reserved a block of time for diving into some of their specific challenges. I usually do this, because while I have an agenda I’m supposed to cover, I know that one of […]
Introducing: a Software Development Canvas
Those who know me know me or have taken one of my classes know of my keen interest in helping people go beyond method – towards a deeper understanding of why we are getting the results we are getting. Lately, I’ve been working on a thinking tool that might help in that regard. First, a little background. […]
Why Task Assignment Sucks
You may be like me. Some things at work suck the life out of me. I can’t always explain why. Most of the time I can learn to live with it, and therein lies the crux. I accommodate things that I really should refuse outright. Here’s one such thing: task assignment. See if you agree. […]
Bringing In an Agile Coach
Agile coaches are everywhere these days. The nice thing about that is that agile has become so popular. The sad thing is that there is now a greater risk that you end up a with an agile coach that doesn’t really make things better for your company. Here’s what you need to think about before […]
Copy-Paste Management
Developers sometimes engage in copy-paste development. If you’ve never written code, this is when a developer copies, pastes and possibly slightly modifies some existing code – instead of following the cleaner practice of reusing the code by (for example) turning it into a single function that can be called from multiple places. Copying and pasting […]