Agile retrospectives are a great way to continuously improve your way of working. Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve. An overview of things that you can use to get value out of your retrospectives.
Together with Luis Gonçalves I have written the pocket book on Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives which can be downloaded from InfoQ and Leanpub. This book is based on our blog posts on retrospectives (see Luis blogs on retrospectives and Ben’s blogs on retrospectives). We value your feedback, feel free to contact me and let me know what you think of this?
If you have a look at our facebook cover picture, you might already imagine it. Being a Global IT Staffing Company, this does not only mean that we do business on an international level. For us, operating in and between …
Do your teams want to know how agile they are? And what could be the possible next steps for them to become more agile and lean? In an open space session about Agile Self-Assessments organized by nlScrum we discussed why self-assessments matter and how teams can self-assess their agility to become better in what they do.
Two months back, I visited the lean startup conference in San Francisco. One of the talks that I loved was with Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. He built wordpress step by step in the past years. Today, he has …
The past weeks I often get questions about Ukraine from people. They wonder whether we notice anything of the unrest in Ukraine and whether it affects the work our nearshore teams do.
From my perspective, it’s simple: as long as nobody barricades our office or cuts the internet or power lines, business can go on. Our developers love their work and as long as they can do their work, they will. On the longer term, a change in government might affect laws, which may have an impact on the way nearshoring is organized. But the past years, Ukrainian government has discussed changing tax laws and only a very small new tax was added last year. So I am not worried about our office in Kiev and Odessa.
We recently launched our new ebook about offshoring and nearshoring: ‘How to prepare for managing a remote team?’ We found that many people skip some very important steps when they move work offshore. Most companies spend a lot of time on country and supplier selection and once that’s fixed, they get going. Many problems in communication and collaboration can be prevented, by focussing on some essential steps before ‘doing it’.
Where do you start when you plan to move work halfway across the globe, to a country and culture you don’t know, several time zones away? What can you do to prepare your company and your people to make offshoring a success? What have other people done in order to prepare for their offshore journey? Typical questions that come up while preparing, are:
Any (company/individual) Project Manager cannot execute a project to meet three goals at once like “High speed-Low cost-Best Quality”! Any comments?
Scrum is an agile software development framework for managing software projects or application development. Agile just means an iterative, incremental development approach with realistic calculations and self-planned approach. A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need.
I’ve worked in a multi-site Process Improvement Team that adopted an Agile way of working.The team used a set of “Golden Rules”. These rules helped them to understand the agile approach, and to work together in a smooth, efficient and positive way. These golden rules were formulated based upon principles from the Agile Manifesto, EVO, Open Space Technology, Solution Focused, Root Cause Analysis, and Retrospectives.
Due to the low wages in Eastern Europe, Dutch companies like to work with them. Yet there are pitfalls discovered by Hugo Messer.
Sometimes, accidental meetings are the start of a successful company. When Hugo Messer worked eight year ago in a printing office, he could not imagine that a meeting with two IT guys from Odessa (Ukraine) would turn his career upside down. ‘I already had seen enormous opportunities for IT-outsourcing in India. I just started my own company when those guys told me more about Ukraine. A country with 47 billion residents and a huge offer of highly educated IT-professionals. Every year, 7.000 to 10.000 young people graduate from technical universities. Next to that, there was no sight at all that the country would join the EU very soon and that is favorable for the wages.’
IT is viewed by many people as being something technical. They have a vision of managers with lot’s of plans, documents and spreadsheets, and nerds that are sitting behind their computer doing the “real work”. It may be out there, but I don’t see that often. What I see are people working together to deliver software solutions that work, which help their customers in their daily work, and deliver business value to the company. Communication and collaboration is essential to make the people that are doing this successful. So for me, soft skills really matter in IT! What do you think?
Last week, I wrote an article about lean distributed startups. The past months, one of the startups within our company that has taken most of my attention is ‘hire a nerd’. The main goal of this project is making a product out of our current core service (building offshore and nearshore dedicated teams for software firms and departments). Yes the name is provoking, we’re also contemplating launching a second version under our Bridge brand. We try to achieve two things for our customers: