Tag Archives: collaboration
A Manager’s Guide to Self Managing Teams
An agile team that finds its groove is a precious thing. A group of smart diverse people, passionate about their shared purpose, openly collaborating and continually experimenting can do amazing things. They don’t need managing in the traditional sense so what can leaders/managers who work with these teams do to help them? Don’t tell Ask? […]
Don’t Wag The Dog
Why does the dog wag its tail? Because the dog is smarter than the tail. If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog. When I ask any development team what’s the hardest thing about agile development they almost invariably say it’s the business. It’s the “Us and Them” that’s the hardest to break […]
Finding the courage to come together
I work with fantastic people and I have done for a long time. I’ve not always appreciated them, I used to blame and judge them, unable to recognise the real causes of the problems. I don’t do this anymore, something has changed and it isn’t the people. For most of my working life I have […]
When a team comes together
When a team comes together there can be a fundamental change. The friendship becomes more important than defending our existing beliefs and we allow multiple viewpoints to coexist and contribute to a more complete whole. I’ve never seen this happen consistently, except in the team I have worked with for over 10 years. The team […]
Creativity needs collaboration
When I started working in an office, there was little opportunity for creation. I followed instructions as I tried to replicate the methods approved by management and avoid risk. In my second office job, I worked alone developing solutions. There were few rules and I fumbled around with the mass of options available to me. […]
Collaboration
I always dreamt of being able to collaborate more at work. Perhaps it’s a lack of confidence in my own abilities or a desire to be close to others, either way I’m happy and more motivated working with others. Working in an office surrounded by other developers each of us trying to solve the same […]
7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Collaborate
Software Development is creative work. Creativity thrives on teams collaborating effectively. Multiple perspectives focus our minds on doing the right thing. Critical dialogue teaches us to do things right. Collaboration requires honesty and openness and gives us mutual learning in return. Managers often prioritize efficiency. Efficiency has no time for learning or questioning this leads to waste and stasis. […]
10 drawings about Promiscuous Collaboration
In order to protect our agile teams from interruptions we have unintentionally created a bubble for ourselves. Disconnected from the rest of the organisation we sub-optimise doing things right but without effective collaboration with stakeholders and customers struggle to improve doing the right things. The difficulties in making the Product Owner role effective and being truly cross functional have […]
Guerrilla Collaboration
The toughest thing about becoming an agile team is setting yourself free from the development bubble. To be effective we need to collaborate with the people in the value chain that in a hierarchical structure you probably don’t normally meet. Guerrilla Collaboration is really simple. Guerrilla collaboration is when we ignore the official organisational channels […]
Frustration drives Change – Empathy trumps Greed
<idealism><personal> I’ve always felt a frustration in my working life that I struggle to leave behind when I’m away from work. I’ve always felt the need for change. The status quo has always seemed very wrong. Scrum gave me a taste of a micro society with values that felt right. But the team still works […]
Diary of a ScrumMaster 