Friday 23rd November at 12:30 (UTC) / (GMT) (check your local time)
Notes from the meetup
Discussion topics
- I have a team where there is a lot of discord and almost hostility. What methods have other people used to ‘name the elephant in the room’ without provoking a war? – Jamie 🙋🏽 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- How to prioritise from Organisation level down – Org level goals/impacts down to what the delivery teams work on to help achieve that impact/goal. At what level do you prioritise – story level seems to detailed. – tracy 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- Managing the managers (and execs incl C-suite) when told empowered but get controlled – Andrew RH 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- Does anyone have a retro format they particularly think is suited to exploring ideas and opportunities while staying away from solutions. Steve Walker 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
Topics we didn’t get a chance to discuss
- How do y’all join up the value teams deliver to the value organisations deliver – Adrian Howard
- 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽Your best resources/videos on metrics and how to get teams excited and interested in tracking them for performance (when they fear the leadership team) – Emma 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- Reinvigorating a tired team into using scrum (bonus points: how to deal with difficult deployments that slow the team down)🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- Anything you want to know about communities of practice, but didn’t have anyone to ask (until now) – Emily 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
- Scaling agile in a traditional/waterfall environment and culture – May-N 🙋🏽
- Roadmap, releases and status progress report – Diogo Ribeiro 🙋🏽🙋🏽
- I have just spent the morning discussing what a BA should do for an apps team. The result was not all that firm. Any ideas/experiences/thoughts? – Michael May 🙋🏽
- Does anyone have a good idea about how to get everyone involved in a roadmap and engaged in the aims/objectives? 🙋🏽🙋🏽
Notes and links from the group:
Topic 1
Diogo – Temperature reading https://retromat.org/en/?id=22 and
Chris – https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lw4gTz0eUmlM_e4qKfNyoofuJGZcav8j-WLn4Vg5Q5E/edit#slide=id.g4609cc84e1_0_0
Andrew – Happiness Radar (may be similar to temperature reading); and also setting time aside in every retro to ask team who they would like to say thank you to (on team and wider)
Adrian – http://www.funretrospectives.com/happiness-radar/
Rob – Similarly, I’ve used a ‘moodometer’ across a number of things that the team have already identified as important to them. Did it every month or so to see trends
Emily – An empathy building exercise https://emilywebber.co.uk/the-team-manual-a-exercise-to-help-build-empathy-in-teams/
Michael – There’s also the brute force approach: take everyone out for a few drinks…see what happens when people relax and are not in the office.
Topic 2
May – OKRs – https://weekdone.com/resources/objectives-key-results
Adrian – Some general OKRish reading
1) A brief overview at http://eleganthack.com/the-art-of-the-okr/
2) A strong recommendation for Christina Wodtke’s book “Radical Focus” https://amzn.to/2PdIfzT
3) A bunch of random links of various quality on the topic over at https://pinboard.in/u:adrianh/t:okr
Richard – I described our business planning & prioritisation approach at the FSA at this public meeting: https://www.food.gov.uk/about-us/fsa-board-meeting-december-2017
Richard – On OKRs: hear are the key things I’ve learnt about them: https://medium.com/@mcleanonline/4-key-lessons-ive-learned-about-okrs-3f4b902ae9f8
David – Re OKRs: we’re doing it where I’ve just started: https://medium.com/ingeniouslysimple/a-coaching-experience-with-okrs-fe484be01b53
Richard – And here’s a reading list on OKRs: https://medium.com/@mcleanonline/the-best-okr-reading-list-in-the-world-4344fb4781f7
Emily – Some stuff I wrote on portfolio walls a few years ago https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/08/30/scaling-agile-practices-to-the-the-gds-portfolio/
Emily – Roadmapping and walls at GOV.UK https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2014/07/experiments-roadmapping-gov-uk/
Topic 3
Chris – http://nngroup.com
Diogo – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqmdLcyES_Q Captain David Marquet’s talk on Greatness – based on his book, Turn the Ship Around!
Adrian – My Product Management Toolkit => https://amzn.to/2AgoTzv
Chris – https://blog.chrisadams.me.uk/2018/04/02/book-review-my-product-management-toolkit/
Topic 4
Richard – Earlier this week I came across loads of ideas for retros here: https://digitalhealth.blog.gov.uk/2018/11/21/a-rota-for-retrospectives/ There might be something in there for you Steve
David – Impact mapping https://www.impactmapping.org/
Emily – https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/design-process-what-double-diamond
Adrian – https://gamestorming.com/pre-mortem/
Emily – Premortem https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/pre-mortem
Steve L – http://tastycupcakes.org/tag/retrospective/
Tracey – http://seriousplaypro.com/2014/12/09/the-lego-retrospective/
Chris – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fifty-Quick-Ideas-Improve-Retrospectives-ebook/dp/B017A5HZWS
“ Hey what an awesome meetup that was! ” – Andrew
“ Agreed ” – Michael
“ thanks everyone, that was totally awesome. feel like I should be paying for this :) ” – Jamie
“ Lovely to meet everyone, thanks!! ”– Tracey
“ Thank you!!! ” – Liz
“ thanks for sharing all the good ideas, and well run and set up Emily” – Rob
I love that everyone is so open about sharing ideas and experiences. And what a great set of links to things to read and watch!
Thanks a lot everyone!
Some tips from Geoff Watts, which I spotted in a recent tweet from him, that might help Jamie with that first topic about a team conflict situation — https://youtu.be/fN7l1mwiU4c
Thank you all for the hints, tips, further reading. There is so much out there so hearing about experience, context and scenarios is amazing.