Blog

13 Feb

Who killed Velocity?

A detective

During an update of our courses at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, I was told that we would no longer be teaching about planning poker in Scrum projects. Apparently, measuring velocity was no longer part of the orthodoxy. I found this puzzling, as I had taken the rituals of estimating and measuring velocity to be part of the core processes of Scrum. Had I misunderstood the framework, or were there other forces at play?

Read More
07 Oct

Cursed problems in facilitation

What happens when we take the analytical work of a game designer and feed it back to a group of people working on real-life collaboration problems? 

Thanks to the invitation of Myriam Hadnes I was able to put on my mad-scientist hat once more and create a workshop for the Never Done Before community of facilitation professionals. By definition my workshop had to be something new and for this one I thought I’d use as a starting point a talk from Alex Jaffe called “Cursed problems in game design“. 

Read More

Popular posts

13 Jan

Why is Scrum so much fun? Part 1: The Goal

Short term goals

In the past few years I had the opportunity to explore various uses and dimensions of Scrum. On projects working with Scrum and the Agile philosophy, I always felt more energized, accomplished and enthusiastic. The atmosphere in my team was better, we were more productive, engaged, and overall we experienced much less stress. To put it simply: Working on projects with Scrum was fun. I started to ask myself why it was so much better to run a project with Scrum than without.
Read More

18 Mar

Holacracy: How does it work?

Holacracy dynamic organisation

By Fabien Bataille

This article was originally published in French on Fabien’s blog Agile, Lean et Compagnie

As part of my research on new ways of working in organizations, which currently abound, I recently discovered Holacracy. It is used by Zappos, the
largest online shoes seller, in the United States
(see here [FR]). Closer to us in France “SOPRODI” (SME in industry in Clermont-Ferrand) and Antonutti-Delmas (SME transport, near Paris).

This new mode of business management, which was invented by the American company “Ternary Software”, then sold under license through the structure “HolacracyOne“, is now spreading around the world.

Read More
21 Mar

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

5 dysfunctions of a team

Fabien Bataille is the owner of the blog Agile, Lean et Companie (in French), which contains many insightful articles and book reviews. I invited him to be the first guest on this blog, with a translation of our favorite articles from his site. Today, a review of a classic management book.
-Coline Pannier

Among a bunch of books that a former colleague of mine left behind, I was especially interested in this one about team spirit.

After a first experience as a manager that didn’t go so well, where I had the feeling to always improvise instead of really managing, I’ve been looking for the best way to manage people (if this really exists).

Read More