Turtle Powered Party

Posted on August 13, 2015 by jayhyett

Last weekend was my son’s 5th birthday party and being a child of 5 years of age he absolutely loves the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Each Sunday morning we watch the classic 80’s cartoon version on television, much like I did when I was his age.

When it came time to choose the theme for his birthday party it was a pretty quick decision to go with the Ninja Turtles, and upon reflection it’s a pretty easier but really effective theme to go with.

If your interested in this theme for your child or for you here are some things you can do to create to add some Turtle power to the party:

  • Green plastic cups dressed with coloured ribbon bands and eyes for drinks, or to hold thank you lollies for your guests.
  • If you like Lemonade or Sprite dress the green bottles up with coloured crepe paper and eyes.
  • Green hanging lanterns dressed with coloured crepe paper and eyes
  • Green table cloth on all the tables.
  • Hang a green plastic table cloth over the entrance door for your party and dress with colour streamers and eyes. Your guests will definitely know that this is where the party is at.
  • Green apples dressed with coloured crepe paper and eyes. The kids loved these and it also provided a health option as a snack.
  • My wife also made masks for us and all of the guest so that everyone could be their favourite Ninja Turtle on the day.
  • Food wise we ordered pizza because that’s what Ninja Turtles like to eat.
  • Green, Red, Blue, Purple and Orange balloons.

Here are some photos from the day to give you some inspiration.

TurtlePower1TurtlePower2

Finally I’d like to just thank my wife Lauren who was the creative mind behind my sons awesome 5th birthday. If you’d like to get in touch with her to find out more please leave a comment in this post or contact her via twitter – @laurenhyett.

Posted in 80s, Dad Stuff, Kids, Parenting, Party Ideas, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, TMNT | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Cricket Themed Retrospective Revisited

Posted on August 5, 2015 by jayhyett

I was thinking of a different themed retrospective for one of the teams I’ve been working with recently. We’ve been together for roughly three months and majority of the retrospectives we’ve had have been following the what’s working, what’s not and what puzzles us pattern.

I remembered the Cricket World Cup themed retrospective I facilitated with another team earlier this year, and with the Ashes currently in full swing I thought we’d give another cricket themed session ago and make some changes to it.

What’s involved?

First off we drew a cricket pitch the middle of the whiteboard, with a batsman at one end and a bowler at the other. You can do this as nice or as rough as you’d like.
Given the time constraints we had on this particular day I drew a pretty rough pitch as you can see in the picture below.

Ashes Themed Retrospective

I then asked the team if they’d like to add anything to the drawing to add more context to the cricket theme. We had people draw a crowd and the batsman hitting a six, as well as a box off to the side to display the third umpire.

Once the finishing touches were made to the picture we decided that the sections on the board would be:

  • What did we hit for six this iteration (what worked well)?
  • What bowled us out this iteration (what didn’t work or isn’t working)?
  • What do we need to go to the third umpire for (what is puzzling us or unknowns do we have)?

People then wrote their thoughts and reflections on post-it notes and placed them on the whiteboard. We then grouped the common thoughts into bubbles and begun discussing each one from the third umpire, to what bowled us out and finally what did we hit for six, taking actions were we needed to so that we could follow up before the next retrospective.

What did we learn?

Overall this theme worked quite well again and I thought the adjustments added from last time (crowd and the third umpire) made a big difference to the conversations we had in the session.

The retrospective itself was time boxed to one hour with five minutes at the start for drawing and context setting and five minutes for thoughts and reflections.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts mixing up your retrospective theme is a great way to tweak the conversations your team are having when they are reflecting together, and it’s a great way to get people involved early.

If you have any other themed retrospective suggestions it would be great if you could share them in the comments section of this post.

Posted in Agile, Digital, Kaizen, People, Projects, Retrospectives, Teams | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Brief thought on adopting the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

Posted on July 29, 2015 by jayhyett

Tonight we hosted the Melbourne Agile and Scrum meetup at our office with the theme being reflections on the Agile Australia 2015 conference. The concept was open space  which allowed everyone to self organise into groups and for the conversation to flow into what the people present wanted to get out of it.

The hottest topic of conversation was around SAFe or the Scaled Agile Framework, with a lot of people wanting to know more about it and how it works. It was an interesting conversation overall and towards the end I was ask by a couple of people if they think it’s worth adopting. My suggestion to them was that like all agile methodologies SAFe is a framework and you should adapt it to how it can work best for you.

Posted in Agile, Projects, SAFe, Teams | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Submarine Themed Retrospective

Posted on July 11, 2015 by jayhyett

Agile Australia was a couple of weeks ago and one of the key note speakers was David Marquet. David is a retired U.S. Navel Captain of the nuclear powered submarine the USS Santa Fe and the author of the Turn the Ship Around.

David’s talk was one of the highlights of the conference from my perspective and gave me the idea to run a submarine themed retrospective with my team.

Submarine Retro

Much like the other themed retrospectives I’ve written about this one was largely about focusing on the things that are holding us back or that we could improve and the things that are working well and that we should keep doing.

For the submarine retrospective we first drew a picture of the boat and placed it submerged in the water to represent the distinction between what is and isn’t working. We then drew some mines underneath to visualise that the submarine wasn’t in a position to dive as our focus area for what we could improve.

The team then spent 5 minutes writing and sharing their thoughts on what we could improve and what we should keep doing coming out of our last iteration. We then grouped the thoughts into themes and worked our way through discussing them, taking actions where appropriate.

This was a really good retrospective, not particularly because of the theme but largely because we focused on the things we are doing well and how we could keep improving on them (as per the picture in this post). There wasn’t a steer to make this happen it was just that the team was feeling good overall.

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Watching you watching me.

Posted on June 2, 2015 by jayhyett

A couple of months ago whilst I was out running, I was listening to a podcast (The B.S Report) where the host Bill Simmons was interviewing Doug Collins about his playing and coaching career. During the interview (around 51:00) Doug talks about watching his children and grandchildren playing sport and ensuring that you are in the moment with them whilst they are participating. Which in today’s world means watching, not having your head down staring at a mobile device.

Both of my children do swimming lessons each week. Whilst my daughter still requires me to be in the pool with her, my son has been been swimming without Dad’s assistance for a little over a year. I take my son to his lesson most weeks and before listening to the Doug Collins interview I often spent part of his lesson with my head down starring at my phone rather than watching my son’s progress (guilty parent).

Doug’s comments really resonated with me. “Your child needs to know that you are in the moment with them and supporting their every move”.  They are watching you watch them and often look for your encouragement, even you if you don’t realise you are giving it.

Since listening to that podcast (a few months now) every lesson I attend I make sure that I leave my phone in my pocket (on silent). My son has really come on in leaps and bounds (or strokes) and a lot of that I would have missed because my thoughts would have been somewhere else.

An interesting further observation is that I haven’t been alone. Since listening to that podcast I’ve noticed that the majority of other parents (I’d say 8/10) spend the lesson with their heads in their phones, rarely looking up. I often think about how much they are missing as their children are also making good progress.

The world we live in has never been more connected and everyday technology brings us closer together. Sometimes however, we need to switch off and focus on the things and people that matter the most to us. Make sure they know that there is no one more important than them, as you can’t get that time back.

Posted in Dad Stuff, Parenting, People, Social Media, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Finishing retrospectives with a positive vibe

Posted on May 30, 2015 by jayhyett

We run our team retrospective on a Friday afternoon and it’s usually the last thing we do as a team before we start our weekends. To ensure that everyone has the opportunity to start their weekend in a positive way we like to structure our retrospectives in the following way:

  1. Focus on the constructive, challenging or negative discussions first – this might be your what’s not working or what’s confusing to us streams, if you’re running what I like to call an “old school” retrospective. Take actions (if there are any) out of each discussion and remember to share them with them team, or make them visual on your wall or board.
  2. Focus on the good news at the end – this might be your what’s working well stream. By doing so it’s gives everyone an opportunity to share the things they’ve learnt, as well as pass on positive feedback to other members of the team.
  3. Finally we go around the room and ask what people have planned for the weekend. This gives everyone an insight into what people get up to outside of work and is a really nice way to close out the hard work we’ve all done over the iteration.
Posted in Agile, DevOps, Digital, Kaizen, Motivation, People, Projects, Retrospectives, Teams, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

If you don’t schedule it, it won’t happen.

Posted on April 30, 2015 by jayhyett

I can’t quite remember where I heard this saying, but it has been something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately.

You can think about what needs to be done or you can make the time to turn those thoughts and ideas into plans and plans into actions. 

So stop dreaming and start doing – schedule that workshop, book that holiday, make a time to catch up with friends and family. 

Whatever it is, if you schedule/book it, then it will go from being a thought, idea or dream and begin to become reality and the outcome your looking for.

Posted in Motivation, People, Projects | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Cricket World Cup themed Retrospective

Posted on March 14, 2015 by jayhyett

The Cricket World Cup is in full swing at the moment, and therefore I thought it would be a good idea to bring a cricket theme to our team retrospective yesterday.

First off we drew a cricket bat hitting a ball and some cricket stumps (see the picture below). Then we split the board down the middle of the cricket bat. On one side the team shared what they hit for 6 this iteration and on the other what might have bowled us over or got us out.

Once the team shared their thoughts they grouped them into topics and discuss them, taking actions for improvement where required.

Something that has worked quite well for us, unrelated to the theme itself but worth mentioning, is discussing the negative or constructive side of the board first. This allows you to focus on the positives at the tail end of the session and hopefully finish on a high.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts mixing up your retrospective themes is great way to keep things fresh as well as getting people involved and present. 

If you have any other themed retrospective suggestions I’d love to hear them.



Posted in Agile, Kaizen, People, Projects, Retrospectives, Teams | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Story Graveyard

Posted on February 25, 2015 by jayhyett

Do you have user stories hanging out in your backlog that seem to always get deprioritised at planning meetings?

As a team with a semi operational function to it we have this problem quite reguarly, with stories that don’t fall into the scope of a release, an MVP or the nice to haves for a feature quite often being left hanging out in our backlog.

To help solve this problem we introduced a story graveyard to our wall to help change the conversation we are having around stories that are hanging around in our backlog.

The idea behind this is to move stories that have been hanging around in our backlog for a couple of iterations (usually around two iterations) to the graveyard. At either our weekly grooming session and our iteration planning meeting we discuss the cards in the graveyard and from there determine this they should be put to rest or kept alive and replayed in a future iteration.

One of the benefits of doing this is having conversations around why a piece of work or functionality is no longer required, and what the impact of not doing it might be. 

Are you doing something similar? Leave me a comment if you are, I’d love to hear about it.



Posted in Agile, Agile Board Hacks, Digital, Kaizen, People, Projects, Teams, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Run Run Run

Posted on February 19, 2015 by jayhyett

This week I took part in another Fitbit challenge with some colleagues from work. The challenge was who could finish a 24 hour period with the most steps.

Having lost my previous two challenges I was determined to not let this one slip and set my alarm for 5:20am to kickstart my day with a 5km run, and take an early lead.

Throughout the day the reminders from the Fitbit app on my phone encouraged me to keep moving as my colleagues were catching up. As well as plenty of banter in the group chat for the challenge.

When I arrived home from work that evening I went for another run and walk and by the end of the day I finished with over 30,000 steps, 26.5 kms complete and a victory.

As I mentioned in a pervious post the Fitbit is a great way not only increase your fitness but also a great way to get to know the people you work with.

IMG_6107

Posted in Fitbit, Fitness, Motivation, People, Teams, Wearables | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment