Author: Cory Foy

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a large scale retrospective I facilitated to get some rapid insights from a large team in just one hour. This week we were able to bring in a fuller set of the team, but were still under time constraints – just 3 hours. We needed to solve…

Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools Responding to Change over Following a Plan When teams and organizations look towards better agility, they generally start with one of the known frameworks out there – most often Scrum but also SAFe or many of the other agile methods. But one of the key principles from the…

I like sharing things I’m working on. When I’ve searched for a solution, and not found one, I hope that sharing what I did find will help some other poor schmuck like me in the future. In fact, more than once I’ve done a search for a problem, and found a solution – in one…

Yesterday I ran a largish retrospective for about 60 Program Managers, Product Owners, ScrumMasters and Team Leads. Since a couple of people had asked me on Twitter about how I ran it, I wanted to go through a mini-retrospective of it. Background In this program, there are about 25 teams working together on a large-scale…

One of the unique things that consultants get is a view of the dysfunctions of lots of organizations. We know which dysfunctions are normal, and which are, well, special. It’s easy to pick out the challenges, because not only are you a fresh set of eyes on the problem, but you are also not integrated…

One of the holy grails of agile software development is the concept of “Self-Organizing teams.” This can be seen in the principles of the Agile Manifesto which says “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” While much has been said about the misconceptions of self-organizing teams as well as the role of…

It’s Friday afternoon. Team Plaidpants is finishing up their sprint, but trying to understand why they struggled so much to complete their stories. “It really seemed like we had the stars aligned this time, ” said Yvonne, “but somehow those two bugs got in the way. And I have no idea why this story took…

Early in my career, I worked at a startup where I learned a phrase that has helped drive me to understanding faster in more situations than I can count. The developer (I guess he would be considered a DevOps guy now) was named Dave and I came to him with a question one time. I…

Success. If one were to look at the key elements to success across teams, organizations, groups, even ourselves, one element would be common – a vision of where we are, and where we want to go. Some can be short and sweet, like Amazon’s Vision Statement: Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric…

Meet Jill. Jill just wants to be able to get to work. But every day, she faces a giant traffic jam. She does her best to avoid it however she can – leaving early, leaving later, trying alternative routes – but every day she struggles to make it to work on time. Jill’s boss, Sarah,…