Polymorphic Rants

Two days ago I attended a workshop leaded by Rachel Davies and Diana Larsen on Agile Retrospectives.

The day had been absolutely interesting, and I left the workshop with some new ideas on how to manage better an heartbeat retrospective.

I came out from the day with one concept: I don’t have to expect a proactive attitude from all the people involved in the retrospective. Part of the people can just follow the flow, avoid to take ownership of any of the actions decided as outcomes of the retrospective, they can simply be there without taking part at the actual improvement.

What ???

This at the beginning resulted really odd to me, due to the fact that I strongly believe that the whole team should be involved in every decision. How can a team be really agile if part of it does not take actively part at the adaption of the process ?

But, in my experience as facilitator in a real world project, this is also one of the biggest problem to cope with: every person has different personality, different culture, different attittude toward the daily job: expecting that everyone acts proactively is at least a bit utopistic.

The suggestion from Rachel and Diana was: live with that, just obtain the best from the part of the team that really wants to improve.
This sounds a bit scaring from a pure agile point of view but incredible pragmatic: how many teams are so lucky to have all the members committed at the same degree and with exactly the same agile attitude ? few, very few.

In the future I’ll try to keep the focus on who has the willingness and the attitude for changments, always trying to involve the whole team in the decisions but seeing less as an issue the lack of participation from some of the members.

There are always a lot of discussions around the right length of an interation: in general the suggested length in the agile community is 4 weeks but recently a lot of  teams are pushing really hard working with two weeks iteration.

WOOOW!! 2 weeks ??? 10 working days ??!?!?

In order to be able to work with such short iteration the team should be really smart in finding the right granularity of each story and keep the whole process incredibly lean; and this is something that is not free, takes quite a lot of time in order to master such skill.

In my experience 4 weeks is a good length: a longer iteration doesn’t give the necessary pressure on the delivery while shorter, as I was saying before, is really difficult to manage due to the complexity on defining the granularity of the tasks.

Only some days ago I was talking about Rife, and yesterday I spotted this interesting interview to Geert Bevin (Rife creator) about Continuations in Java.