The Art of Changing | Confessions of a Pragmatic Intellectual's Mind on The Constant in Life, Change!
Everyone has an idea of what Agile is and what it will look like. It depends on their journey, what they knew before introduction to Agile, where they want to go with it, what they like about it, how they are using it and so many more factors. Some people might not even use it…
Have you ever been in a meeting that was a complete waste of time? Have you ever wondered how did that happen? Why did such meeting take place? Have you ever heard that meetings are not effective and we should avoid them? Being in the software world for quite a while, I can assure you…
You are going to facilitate a session. The session has a large number of people attending. You are not confident with your facilitation skills for large meetings. You are not sure how to ask them to come to an agreement on the next steps, what to work on, what, as a team, they need to…
It happened on a Saturday morning at 8:30, in Financial district of Toronto on the first day of October. It was nice to see new faces and the old mates. It was a rejuvenation of the old habits and learning new techniques on coaching. At the core, as always, it lived the same great spirit of…
What always puzzled me was how to improve on a feedback culture within a team. Once, I had a pleasure to run a 360 feedback retrospective for a team. It was a bad decision to call it 360 feedback, please don’t do that. However, the result was very dramatic. It was a huge culture change…
During one of the retrospectives, I asked the team to write a postcard to one of our ex-team members. Amer left the team to pursue new endeavours in Montreal. I thought this would be a great opportunity to write him back and send him some postcards. Having that in mind, I asked him to write…
It was a very unhappy time when I had to run a retrospective for a team that their Scrum Master let go the day before. I had to show up and run the retro. It wasn’t that easy to talk to people about what has happened and brought up the discussion. What I decided to do…
In every team, there have always been one or two people that are tight-lipped. It is not easy to get them talking and participating in team discussions. You need to rely on your facilitation skills to get them involved in. The more experienced you are in understanding different personalities and dealing with them, the easier…