Adapting Steven Covey’s concept to retrospectives
In Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey describes the concept of circles of control, influence, and concern. Succinctly, this concept states that you should only focus on the few things you can control and influence, and not on the many for which you are powerless.
This article describe an innovative retrospective process that one can use to help focus a Scrum team on the items they can control or influence.
This is a nice idea.
On the road to Competence
How can one improve competency in a software development team? This is a critical question for a software development manager and this video of a presentation given by Jurgen Appelo at the 2010 Norvegian Development Conference provide an insight that attempt to answer this question.
You may also want to view the slides for this presentation.
Agile Anti-Patterns
I believe that Agile is a great tool to help development teams achieve more, improve, and reach their next level in effectiveness, productivity, or creativity. However, like any tool, it can be misused or misapplied. You can shoot yourself in the foot if you are not applying a certain level of discipline or hygiene.
Mike Griffiths posted a short and sweet article on this subject that he entitled Agile anti-patterns. He classifies those anti-patterns as follow:
- Agile as a silver bullet
- Agile as an excuse for no discipline
- Agile without explanation
- Shallow Feedback
Drilling for oil
With the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico, there never was that much interest from the public on how a well is being drilled in over 5,000 feet of water. The video below is a presentation given by some colleagues from Shell at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
The presentation describes the different processes that take place during drilling and the barriers that are inherent part of any well.
Make sure to listen to the Q&A session after the end of the presentation. It provides additional insight on this terrible incident.
The surprising truth about what motivates us
You may have seen the video below as it was quite popular in the last few weeks. If not, I really encourage you to watch it as it is food for thought if you hold a job where you have to manage other individuals.