Category: General
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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%…
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What science knows about happiness that could tranform OpenStack
A short article to publish the video recording and the slides of the talk I gave today at the OpenStack summit in Austin. Header picture is from Ryan McGuire.
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The after meeting feedback
I usually ask for feedback regularly during the meeting I facilitate. I use several techniques to do so depending if it’s a short feedback before a break or if we have more time at the end of the meeting. One of those techniques is the ROTI, the Return On Time Invested. I ask the participant…
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Beyond Measure
Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes is a book by Margaret Heffernan published by TED. And it starts with: Trust The author suggests an exercise for team members. Form pairs in which one will ask a real question and listen for 5 minutes: “Who you really are?”, “What do you want in life?”.…
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I am still standing
Some time ago, I add a card in the inbox column of my personal GTD kanban board (I can share the model if needed). The card was labeled “Standing Desk”. During the next review, I moved this card in the “Someday / Maybe” column. And the card sat there for… nearly ever. During the same…
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Let us code!
I started this article a long time ago. And that’s a comment from a person I work with that triggered the sense of urgency to contribute to solving this problem. He said: Stop interrupting us! Let us code! I became sensitive to interruptions when I discovered the Pomodoro method, subject that I covered in this…
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Work Rules – Insights from Google that will transform how you live and lead
Work Rules is a book from Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google. You will find that the “People Operations” that could be called “Human resources” in other organizations is really different in its way to operate. Main difference is the focus on data, not on opinion, and to be careful with natural human…
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LessPass – password management
LessPass is a password management system based on a completly different idea compared to existing solutions. Most of the solutions are based on a centralized storage of password protected by a master one. The centralized storage can be basic, like a spreadsheet on your own computer or on a server. It can be a little…
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The Chimp Paradox
The Chimp Paradox is a book from Steve Peters subtitled: The Science of Mind Management for Success in Business and in Life. I used the model proposed to represent how our brain is working during conferences I gave on the Search for Happiness, and I had some positive feedback. In this article, I would like…