Category: General
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Managing Time
When I searched for “time management” on google this morning, there were 238,000,000 results. So, we could consider that it’s not necessarily useful to add one more. A quick look at the first page of results, and we can already see divergent opinions. From the rigid daily structure to the statement that time management is…
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Team Identity
The sense of belonging is an important experience to have. Belonging means that we are accepted as part of, as a member of the group, the team, the company. We want to be part of a team because what defines the team identity is appealing to us. The team is defined by its vision and…
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Town Hall Meeting
The term Town Hall Meeting is often used inside a company to characterize a meeting organized by a highly ranked executive and gathering a large part of the company employees, or even all of them. Usually, the meeting is meant to give a short status on what the executives are working on for the future…
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Why Transformation Efforts Fail?
Thanks to a push email from Harvard Business Review, and discussions around ongoing transformation efforts, I read again an old article from John Kotter: Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. The first lesson is that change is not an event, it’s a process. The second lesson is that change takes time, and not following the…
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Fight Club Retrospective
You probably remember the first 2 rules of Fight Club, right? Let’s review the rules: “Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells…
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How to measure our life?
A colleague recommended me to look at the work of Clayton Christensen. This is an article to encourage you to do the same. We are living in a nested system. In the world, there are nations, and in nations, there are corporations. In corporations, there are business unit, in which there are teams. And in…
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How to start when managers are stuck in uncertainty and fear
How to start when managers are stuck in uncertainty and fea? That was the question I asked to my peers that participate to the Happy Melly Coffee. This was the first day I was able to participate to the Happy Melly Coffee since when I moved to Boston. Uncertainty and Fear were the main questions.…
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How Agile and Open Source work together in (nearly) perfect harmony
This article is based on the talk I gave for the Red Hat Agile Day in Raleigh on October 11, 2016. The conversation about agile and Open Source usually starts with an interruption in this form: Agile will not work in an Open Source context because… That’s usually how a conversation will start, and that’s…
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Autobiography
25 years ago, a friend told me that I should read the autobiographies of famous people to understand how they found their way to achieving great success. I did not understand this advice. I didn’t appreciate the difference between autobiographies and cheap magazines that followed the life of the “rich and famous.” I was wrong.…
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Contribute to the Success of OpenStack
During the OpenStack Summit in Austin, Mark McLoughlin and I delivered a talk titled: “Contribute to the Success of OpenStack”. Our talk was meant to explain how we were inspired by agile values and principles to improve our internal organization, and how we thought it could impact our ability to contribute more effectively to the…
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Happy or not?
Tracking the mood of the team is something that agile practitioners are doing for quite a long time. For example, in 2006, Akinori Sakata, explained in this article the use of Niko-niko calendar. The idea is to tighten the feedback loop, and to detect problems even before they become really conscious to an individual, or…
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Sequence vs Priority
There’s sometimes conversations within teams about the responsibility of prioritization of backlog items. The problems is the end result of this conversation. Whoever could have this responsibility, that could be the Product Owner or that could be an agreement within the team, the results will look like: 80% of the items in priority 1 15%…