Valentines Day themed Retrospective

Posted on February 15, 2015 by jayhyett

Last Friday we held our end of iteration team retrospective. We like to mix up the themes as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. This time two members of the team suggested a Valentines Day theme.

Quite simply the guys drew a picture of a heart with an arrow and from that we decided that we’d focus on what we loved this iteration and what we didn’t.

As we normally do we focused on what we didn’t “love” first which were all the groups of post-it’s  outside of the heart. This allowed us to finish the session focusing on the things we “loved” (the groups of post-it’s inside the heart) which gave the team a good positive vibe heading into the weekend.

We also had donuts for afternoon tea and who doesn’t love donuts!

valentines_retro

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Do you or your team use symbols on your board?

Posted on February 5, 2015 by jayhyett

We recently introduced a legend and some new symbol avatars to our board to clearly visualise the state of a user story inside it’s relevant swim lane. The reason we did this was that we wanted to help the members of our team and our stakeholders understand the state of a story just by looking at the card.

Here are the symbols we are using:

Board Legend

  • A play button symbol to represent that a story is ready to kickoff.
  • An i for information to represent that someone needs more information or to clarify something about the story. This is handy if a stakeholder or peer is not available to answer a question.
  • A stop symbol to represent that a story is blocked and can’t proceed until further action is taken.
  • A pondering face to represent that a story needs estimation. As we are a DevOps team there is an element of unplanned support work that comes in mid iteration which can sometimes require estimation.

These symbols have begun to work well for us and all of this has got me thinking – do you or your team use symbols on your board? What are they?

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Did you really take time off from work on your holidays?

Posted on January 20, 2015 by jayhyett

This article in The Age caught my attention yesterday as it’s actually something I’ve been quite conscious about recently.

Did you really take time off from work on your holidays?  http://www.theage.com.au/executive-style/management/did-you-really-take-time-off-from-work-on-holidays-20150118-12s140.html

Late last year I decided to remove my work email from my mobile device, and it’s probably been the best decision I’ve made in sometime.

Why? Well it’s given me back control back of my personal time, the time I spend with the people I care about the most. I found that because I was carrying my work with me everywhere I went that I had a really bad habit of checking in and doing work, when I should be spending time with my family.

Over the Christmas period I had 2 weeks leave and a complete hiatus from my work – no email. It’s probably the most relaxed I’ve felt in recent memory and has been my springboard launching into 2015.

But what if I miss something important?
I thought long and hard about that before removing my work email from my mobile device. My conclusion was that if it’s really important someone will either call or SMS me, otherwise it can wait.

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Keep on walking

Posted on January 15, 2015 by jayhyett

Like a lot of people I received at Fitbit for Christmas last year. In the short time I’ve been wearing it I’ve noticed that it’s changed a couple of things day to day…for the better.

1. I’m more aware of how active (or not) I’ve been each day and motivated me to walk, run and increase my fitness overall. I try and get to 10,000 steps and 30 active minutes each day.
2. How much water I drink (or don’t) – you should try and consume at least 2 litres and my Fitbit helps keep my honest.

Last week I was invited to take part in a Fitbit daily challenge with a couple of work mates. The goal of this challenge was to see who could finish the day (24 hours) with the most steps. Being a competitive person this inspired me to do all that I could to win.

I started the day at 5:30am with a brisk 4 km walk before work, getting the jump on my mates and putting me 5,000 steps ahead before they got out of bed.

Whilst at work and with the challenge in the back of my mind, I was motivated to take the stairs instead of the lift between floors, take regular breaks and to go for a walk at lunch time to maintain my lead. I returned from my lunch break to a desk covered in post-it notes telling me to stop walking!

I spent majority of the afternoon in meetings and on the train ride home later that evening I watched as my lead on the pack got smaller and I was ultimately overtaken. After a bit of banter between myself and the person who overtook me (she went for a run and to a step class at the gym) I decided that I wasn’t going to be beaten and went for a 4.5 km run to regain my lead.

By 10:30pm that evening I was feeling pretty confident in the fact that I had a 2,500 step lead on one of my work mates and over 10,000 steps on another and decided that I’d call it a day on 18,934 steps.

At 11:15pm and alert was sent to my phone that Chris (the person once 10,000 steps behind me) had taken the lead. It turns out that Chris went for a 2 hour walk and pounded out 13,000 steps in the process. I thought about getting out of bed and trying to make the near 5,000 steps required to regain the lead, however time wouldn’t permit – I’d have to settle for second place.

The next day we had plenty of laughs recapping the events of challenge – beware of the person who you think has quit.

I’ve found my Fitbit to be a great motivator to get active in the short time I’ve had it. It can also help to build cross team and company collaboration.

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Christmas Tree Retrospective

Posted on December 24, 2014 by jayhyett

Last Friday we had our last team retrospective for 2014 before heading off on our Christmas breaks. As it’s the festive season we decided to try out a Christmas tree retrospective, which was done in a similar way to the Hot Air Balloon theme.

With all of our retrospectives this year our focus has been to get people to contribute and share in some way. Trying different themes and getting people involved has helped towards building a collaborative environment, where people feel they can share new idea’s and things they’d like to improve.

To start we got a member of the team to draw the Christmas tree on our white board and then got everyone else in the room to draw a decoration or two.

We then drew a horizontal line in the middle of the board to separate out our thoughts. As one team member had drawn a star at the top of the tree and another had drawn the South Park character Mr Hankey at the bottom we decided the focus of the retro would be:

  • The Star – things we enjoyed doing and want to do more of (this iteration).
  • Mr Hankey – things we could improve or could have done better (this iteration).

We then gave everyone 5-10 minutes to write down their thoughts or comments (on post it notes) and place them on the board, aligning to the Star or to Mr Hankey.

Following that we grouped the comments and then discussed each grouping and came up with actions (where appropriate) for us to work on next iteration and beyond. The time box for this iteration was 1 hour in total.

Overall this was a really good retrospective with plenty of laugher whilst drawing our Christmas tree, and with a lot of conversation and some really interesting idea’s shared.

The take away for me from this retrospective was that once again getting people to contribute early makes the environment (room) more relaxed and allows people to be more comfortable to share their thoughts.

I had to remove the content from the board due to it's sensitive nature.

I had to remove the content from the board due to it’s sensitive nature.

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

#IceBucketChallenge

Posted on August 24, 2014 by jayhyett

On Friday night I was nominated by Kiran Sham to complete the ice bucket challenge to support and raise awareness for Motor Neuron Disease (MND) which is also known as ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

In Australia alone, MND kills two people every day – https://www.mnd.asn.au/about_mnd.html

Here is a video of me completing the challenge and nominating Justin Trotter, Gary Trawn and Steve Napoli to go next.

If you’d like to donate to support MND please click here – https://www.mycause.com.au/events/icebucketchallenge

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Hot Air Balloon Retrospective – The Follow Up

Posted on August 2, 2014 by jayhyett

In my last post I mentioned that we tried the Hot Air Balloon retrospective at the end of an incident (which was more like a PIR – post incident review).

Yesterday we tried it again and this time it was at the end of our iteration.

Once again we kicked off the session with people taking turns drawing the Hot Air Balloon. This is a really good way to get everyone involved in the session early.
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Once we were done with our art work, I asked the team to think back over the events of the past two weeks (our iteration length) and using post-it notes place their thoughts on what will carry us forward (fuels) and what will hold us back (ropes) on to the board.

We drew a dotted line through the middle of the board to represent the boundaries between fuels and ropes and grouped the post-it notes into themes for discussion.

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I’m not able to share the board with all of it’s post-its due to the confidential nature of the content.

What was interesting was that there were a number of topics that were closely linked to both fuels and ropes. This allowed us to easily talk about both the positive and negative aspect of those themes and get really clear actions for the things we wanted to stop doing and keep doing in our next iteration and beyond.

I’d highly recommend this retrospective style if your team is looking for a way to improve the way they work as it really exposes their likes and dislikes.

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Hot Air Balloon Retrospective

Posted on July 27, 2014 by jayhyett

I attended the LAST conference in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago and got to listen to some amazing people talk about Lean, Agile and Systems Thinking.

One of the talks I went to (by Ryan McKergow) was on breaking the mould of the traditional Agile retrospective – discussing what went well?, what didn’t go so well? and what puzzles us? and trying new formats to achieve different results.

My team and I have been running the same old retro for the past 13 Iterations (or since the team adopted an Agile way of working late last year) and I’ll be the first to admit that running the same format has pretty much given us the same outcome each time…. and has become boring for all involved. 

So coming back from LAST I decided to mix things up and try one of the new formats that Ryan shared with us.

The first one I tried with the team was the Hot Air Ballon Retrospective – Ropes & Fuels.

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How does it work?

The aim of this retrospective is to discover what carries the team forward (fuels) and what holds the team back (ropes).

First, I got team participation early in the piece by asking everyone to take part in drawing the Hot Air Balloon. Once they had finished we time boxed 5 minutes for people to place their thoughts and idea’s on the board.

We then grouped the notes into themes (for both fuels and ropes), discussed each grouping and took actions on the things that move us forward (keep doing them) and things that hold us back (how do we cut those ropes and take the team forward).

We discussed each group of notes in no particular order as we had time, but you could also try placing a dot point vote on each grouping and discuss the hot topics if you are pressed for time or have a lot of thoughts and idea’s to get through.

The outcome?

Overall I’d have to say that trying something new added a different dynamic to the retrospective. The discussion had a different tone and everyone was able to get involved (by drawing) even if they didn’t have much to say.

We ran this particular retrospective at the end of an incident (kind of like a PIR – post incident review) as we were keen to get some learnings from it. I’d be keen to run it again at the end of an Iteration to see how the conversation changes.

If you’d like more information on different types of retrospectives I highly recommend checking out the slides from Ryan McKergow’s talk at LAST – Retrospectives Strike Back 

 

Posted in Agile, Kaizen, Projects, Retrospectives, Teams | 3 Comments

When was the last time you went to a video rental store?

Posted on July 26, 2014 by jayhyett

When was the last time you hired a movie? Not from your couch but actually went to a video rental store and hired a movie over the counter? I sure can’t remember.

I walk past a rental store a couple of times a week on my way to and from work and it’s extremely rare that I actually see people inside.

This particular store has probably been around as long as I’ve been alive…. or at least as long as I can remember. On a Friday and Saturday night (before the internet went main stream) you wouldn’t be able to move inside and would quite often have to pre order a new release movie weeks in advance.

The old family tradition of Saturday night at the rental store picking a movie to watch is dead and buried. Not that I think that is a bad thing because trying to agree on one movie between four people was a frustrating experience.

It’s quite amazing to think that I’ll have to explain to my kids (who are 3 and 18 months old) what a video rental store was, what a video was and the fact that we waited weeks to see a new release movie. They’ll be frustrated if they have to wait minutes.

It’s actually rare to even find a video rental store these days. They have actually been physically replaced by vending machines that sit outside supermarkets, like the one I saw today at Melbourne Central.
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Netflix and online streaming are now the dominate players in the family home entertainment business. The decline of the video rental business is just another example of the disruptive technology revolution that we live in.

Like many other business (newspapers, travel, photography to name a few) it’s time to adapt or die.

 

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What is the most important agile practice?

Posted on July 25, 2014 by jayhyett

If you and your team only adopts one agile practice then it should be retrospectives.

“Agile retrospectives are special meetings where a team steps back, examines they way they work, and identifies ways they can improve.”

Retrospectives should be a safe place for people to share feedback with one another with a focus on how we can collectively get better at what we do.  

I recently attended both the Agile Australia and LAST conferences where I picked up some valuable insights into how other businesses and teams run their retrospectives. I’ll be looking to adopt some of them with the teams I work with and share and insight here. 

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