- Por Manu López
A tool for assessing the success of a change
How can we determine whether a change will be successful and thus get a team, a person or a department to willingly accept changes that affect their work systems and produce an optimal outcome for the organization? We believe that this tool could help us have more criteria in responding to this challenge.
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- Por Steven Wallace
Manager O3 cheat sheet
We have worked with hundreds of managers in many countries and we've decided to create a One on One or O3 cheat sheet to help managers get the best out of those meetings. Hopefully your direct reports will be grateful also.
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- Por Manu López
A very energetic Summer
In previous newsletters we've been telling you about our retrospectives, the vision we've been developing and how we plan to improve our business lines to cause even bigger impact. So, the next step has been to find the ideas.
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- Por Steven Wallace
Agile Lean Ireland experience
“What does a Swede, a toaster and a gaelic stadium have in common?” No, it’s not a joke, it’s actually part of my Agile Lean Ireland experience on 26th April in Dublin. Here are my thoughts and what I took from the day.
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- Por Steven Wallace
Do you have an impact?
Can you measure the impact you have in your job? If you have metrics associated, this should be straight forward. However do the metrics tell the whole story?
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- Por Steven Wallace
Investigating our values - Respect
In Drive To Improve we value values :-). We want to share how we use the values that we have as a company and give an idea of how we developed them. They are not just empty slogans we put on the web page to hopefully impress someone.
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- Por Steven Wallace
New Year Resolutions
Have you made your New Year’s resolutions? In case you didn’t know, it’s the time of the year when people make resolutions for the year ahead. So if you haven’t made them yet, it’s too late and you have to wait until next year to change something in your life. Sorry! ;-)
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- Por Daniel Terrin
What are the challenges of your organization?
What are the main challenges of your organization? What do you expect from your manager? If I ask you these questions, what would you answer me? In every Management 3.0 course that we organize, we ask...
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- Por Steven Wallace
Skills every Manager should have - Delegation
Delegation. It’s easy to say but maybe not as easy to do. For managers to be truly successful, they need to delegate. Even if you are not a manager in a company, delegation is something that you should be aware of it and how it can help you.
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- Por Daniel Terrin
Why should you have goals?
I recently had a few conversations in which goals became the central topic. In some cases, it was about the way that they are defined; in others, the way that they are imposed; or communicated; or even the absence of them entirely.
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- Por Steven Wallace
Lego workshop
Imagine the scene where you have just joined a new company and you are in a team of 5 people. You look around the team. The other 4 members have a lot of experience, as you allegedly do, and you’ve all worked in various other companies in a variety of roles as individual contributors, managers and directors. Apparently, you’re going to improve how the team works together and to do using ... a Lego Workshop?
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- Por Daniel Terrin
Embracing Agile with The Incredibles
Yesterday my 4 year old daughter and I were watching (again) one of our favorite films, The Incredibles. And then Steve Denning’s post about embracing Agile came to my mind. But what do these two things have in common?
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- Por Steven Wallace
Sketch Thinking in Barcelona
At the last minute, on a typical warm, sticky Barcelona summer evening in August, I decided to go to...oh, wait a minute, that’s the same line I used from the blog post on a Lean UX talk last year. As it happens, it was exactly the same sticky Barcelona weather in August however it was a Sketch Thinking workshop this time with Jose Berengueres (@harriken) held in Vistaprint offices. Another difference was that Dani and Nino came along to learn how to draw stickmen with me.
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- Por Nino Dafonte
Lego Serious Play is hard fun
First time I heard about Lego facilitation I had the feeling most of you had: That’s for kids .... until the day I entered in the room, in my first day of the Lego Serious Play Facilitator’s training.
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- Por Steven Wallace
Working environment for developers
For the past several months, a client we are working with has been having problems getting their testing environments stable. Some days it works fine, some days someone changes something and it stops working, but it’s a different problem. The developers become frustrated, Product Owners become frustrated and Scrum Masters are trying to solve the problem from various angles (and are also frustrated).
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- Por Steven Wallace
Summary of Lean UX talk by Jeff Gothelf in Barcelona
At the last minute, on a typical warm, sticky Barcelona summer evening in August, I decided to go to Jeff Gothelf’s Lean UX talk at the Mobile World Center. It was announced as “Better Product Definition with Lean UX and Design Thinking” and as I’d read parts of the book, I thought it’d be interesting. I was especially looking forward to the better product definition part.
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- Por Steven Wallace
Laptops and unproductive meetings
After spending a lot of time with people from many different departments in various meetings, I’ve noticed that nearly everyone comes to the meeting with their laptop. Later they comment that the meeting was not very productive. Is it really necessary to bring the laptop?
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- Por Manu López
How to build successful teams
Today I would like to talk about the best and the worst experiences working in Teams, and how these experiences can help to build successful teams. To get a wide and more collaborative vision for this post I ask some friends and coworkers about their experiences. In the following paragraphs I will describe how they have enjoyed working with high performance teams and how on some occasions, they would have preferred to work alone due to inefficient teams.
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- Por Steven Wallace
Participation in coaching dojos - your guide on how and why to use them
Inspired by Coding Dojos, the coaching dojo is a great way to practicing active listening, empathy and a possibly different way of conversing with people. This method can be used by anyone to improve the aforementioned skills but I think it is particularly useful for those people in management positions or those that have to drive changes within a team or organisation. At the end of the day, we want to have people actually listening, not just nodding their heads while thinking of their next comment...
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- Por Manu López
What is a high performance Team?
Before starting to define what a high performance team is, I would like to explain what a team is. In my point of view, it can be defined as a small number of people working together to accomplish the same purpose.
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- Por Steven Wallace
Introduction to Coaching
In an introduction to coaching post, it's not normal to hear the writer complain about coaching itself. The term "coach" is extremely overused and abused. There are various bodies of accreditation to attempt to have a minimum level of standard, but sometimes it's not always possible. There are some fantastic coaches out there, but there are also some that have room for improvement.
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- Por Nino Dafonte
Scrum Master as People Manager
At the beginning of my career as a Scrum Master I transitioned, as many others, from a Project Manager position. This is the kind of role where you “own” a team. You are not part of the team, you “manage” the team: performance reviews, career development, vacations, salary adjustments, all this kind of things. From one day to another, you have an agile team. Roles are supposed to be functional; titles don’t matter here, right?
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- Por Steven Wallace
What skills make a great facilitator?
Think about a time when you have had a team or departmental session and really accomplished the objectives. Go on, close your eyes if you have to. It must have happened sometime. You have come out of the meeting with concrete actions. Everyone has expressed their opinion and while a consensus was not reached, the group have bought into the decision and moved forward.
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- Por Nino Dafonte
Trust as a requirement
These days, after some years of improvement with lean, agile, Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming and so on, you can find tons of blog posts talking about “the best of Scrum”, “why Scrum doesn’t work”, “how to do …”, well, you name it. In my experience, after quite a few companies and teams, I came to a point where you have to realise what are you talking about. You can think about reorganizing your department, your team, and the way you plan or execute, … that’s great but did you see a pattern behind all these movements?
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- Por Steven Wallace
Are Retrospectives real continuous improvement?
Are retrospectives used for real continuous improvement? Having worked with Scrum for more than 4 years, I've seen the benefits of the retrospective. For me, it's easily the most important meeting.
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- Por Steven Wallace
Perfection Challenge
"It has to be perfect, I won't accept anything less". "It can't have any mistakes". "It should have 0 bugs". Searching for perfection can be dangerous. Do any of these phrases sound familiar? Have you ever said any of them?
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