Retrospectives – Leading Answers

June 21, 2019November 3, 2025Agile Project Management, Leadership, Personal Agility, Planning, Retrospectives, Tailoring Approaches, Teams, Warning Signs

Innovation: Running Experiments and Learning

In my last article on Incubating Innovation, we explored the culture and mindset of accountable experimentation. This article focuses on actionable tools and approaches. Within agile frameworks, the team retrospective is the primary workshop for planning and evaluating experiments. Yet most team retrospectives I see are broken. Teams spend too much time recording viewpoints and information—but not enough time reviewing or planning experiments. It is common to see the majority of the time spent gathering what went well, what did not go well, and appreciations. Yet where’s the focus on experiments, the learning process and trials for the next iteration? To make things worse, some teams do not take the retrospective seriously. Maybe after the potential stress of the sprint review, […]

June 19, 2019Agile Project Management, Leadership, Personal Agility, Retrospectives, Teams

Incubating Innovation

If success goes to those who can innovate the fastest, how do we nurture innovation? The basics are simple to understand—but difficult to implement and stick with in the face of adversity. We need to create an environment that encourages experimentation while also tolerating, investigating and learning from the inevitable failures. It may sound easy, but executives and shareholders demand results, not “learning opportunities.” We need an approach that fosters experimentation and learning in a defendable way, with a bias for results. To innovate faster than our competitors, we need to maximize our learning potential. This means that by design, 50% of our experiments should fail since we are seeking knowledge expansion, not validation of things we already know. The […]

December 21, 2017Agile Project Management, Books, Leadership, Retrospectives, Teams, Warning Signs

Government Lessons in People Over Process

My first opportunity to create and run a large agile team did not start well. Having had good successes with small to medium sized agile teams I was keen to unleash the benefits on a bigger scale. I was working for IBM at the time and was able to persuade my account manager to pitch the approach on one of our government projects. A clean-sheet development opportunity with a smart team and engaged business group – what could go wrong? As it turns out, plenty due to my ill-advised approach. It was the early 90’s and we were trialling techniques that would later become the agile approach DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method). Taking ideas like James Martin’s RAD (Rapid Application […]

May 18, 2017Agile Project Management, Leadership, Metrics, Retrospectives, Teams, Warning Signs

They are “Lessons to be Learned”, not “Lessons Learned”

The suggestions, observations and ideas we capture at retrospectives are not Lessons Learned. That would imply we have already learned from them and will not make that mistake again. Instead, they are Lessons-to-be-Learned which is subtly different but stresses the most important part, which is we now need to learn something. Learning involves several steps. David Kolb, an educational theorist, describes a 4-step learning process: Concrete Experiences (What we already know) Observation and Reflection (What our retrospectives help us identify) Abstract Conceptualization (Thinking about the problems and designing potential solutions) Active Experimentation (Trying something new) These stages act as part of an experimental learning cycle. The last step, Active Experimentation, creates new concrete experiences and builds on what we already […]

April 27, 2017Agile Project Management, Books, Certification, Events, Games, Leadership, Lean, Metrics, Planning, PMI-ACP, Retrospectives, Risk Management, Teams

New PMI-ACP Workbook

I am pleased to announce the availability of my new PMI-ACP Workbook. This new workbook focusses on a smaller subset of 50 key topics. My original PMI-ACP Exam Prep book distilled all the relevant content from the 11 books on the PMI-ACP recommended reading list in a common voice. The workbook is also different by providing lots of exercises and many situational questions like you will find in the exam. So, while my PMI-ACP Exam Prep book covers all the background and theory – ideal for a comprehensive coverage of everything in the exam, the new PMI-ACP Workbook is a practical, hands-on study tool that focusses on the core topics needed to pass the exam. If you already have your […]