Once again, I helped out with the volunteer bag packing at the Agile2011 conference, and as usual we had great fun and broke records. This year we completed 1600 bags in just under 4 hours packing time, with an hour preparation/breakfast and an hour for lunch. Christopher Avery took some video footage and interviews, which I hope to be able to link to here soon.
For the retrospective, run by Eric Willeke, we asked participants for things that they had learned which were relevant to software development. Here’s the list:
- Focus on quality
- Communication is essential
- Let go
- People and process
- Experience is useful
- Being prepared
- Its important to know why
- Improve through collaboration
- Practice makes perfect
- People are responsible
- Ask & listen – don’t assume
- Redistribute work
- Power of whole team
- Lots of communication
- Simple visual metrics
- Integration is hard
- Don’t be attached to your process
- Knowing good enough
- Allowing for variance
- Be engaged
- Do it – inspect and adapt
- Variety is motivating
- Understanding impact of change
- Change is disruptive
- Shut up!
- Dress appropriately
- Common purpose
- Relentless improvement
- Communication without words
- Reacting to reality
- Be lean – JIT happens
- Building relationships
- Rhythm is fun
- Visualising progress
- Visualising WIP
- Adaptability in context
- People – not resources
- Cross functional to eliminate bottlenecks
- Single point of failure
- Self organising team
- Focus on the work
- Good communication
- People self-organising
Update: Eric has written his own post of the experience
Love this list. A great reminder of what we must be prepared for!
[…] Karl captured them here. [2] Specifically, Karl and I as facilitators were able to keep our mouths pretty well […]