Team Communication

Tally sheets might help your team

There is a simple tool to let your team reflect on their communication. It might help you, if there is somebody on your team who talks very much and some people who remain mostly silent. The tool is: a sheet of paper and a pencil. Just participate on a teams meeting, search a quiet corner and make a tally sheet of who in the team spoke how often. After the meeting is over, offer the team to share your observations and let the team decide, what to make of this observation. Maybe a very healthy discussion will follow...

If there is no discussion coming up, there is eventually no problem with this fact or the team is not ready to tackle this at the moment. You might try it some time later again.

The Agile Coach Journey

Over the course of an agile project, the role of an agile coach changes massively. I tried to draw a little comic on the agile coaches change on the path to agile.

Honestly - I somehow do not like this drawing as much as I liked the "What is Agile" drawing. After all - I am obviously still in heavy practicing mode ;-)

Great Teams!

Last week, I attended the ALE 2013 unconference. This is definitely one of the most awesome conferences I have ever seen. There is lots of energy, ideas and passion around there and it is an extremely inspiring environment.

I used the opportunity of open space to facilitate a session on "Great Teams" there. I will share the result of this session here. The format of the session was very simple. Every attendee got the opportunity to tell the story of a great team he was part of or has seen. After the story was told, I asked something like "If you should pick out one thing, that made this team a great team, what would it be?". Many attendees told great stories and we finally came up with the following list of things, that make teams "great".

Do you have stories to tell? What is the one thing, that makes your team great? Feel free to use the comments section!

I Have a Dream

I have a dream that one day, in our industry where business people are seen as mercenary beasts and product developers as assembly line workers, those business people and product developers will go hand in hand and together deliver the greatest possible value for customers, they can.

I have a dream today!

;-)

Do you have a dream, too?