A KALEIDOSCOPE OF NOISE
Are your tools helping you with insight or just providing more noise?
You Can’t Question your way to a better Architecture
Coaches need to know when to let a more experienced person help the team.
Dojo Coaching for Building Technical Skills - InfoQ Podcast
We were guests on Shane Hastie’s Engineering Culture podcast.
Topics include our latest book, “Coaching for Learning”, the dojo model, roles in the dojo, and key principles for creating effective learning experiences.
Seven principles for creating effective, Immersive learning experiences
These seven principles are at the heart of how dojos and other, similarly immersive learning experiences work.
Dojos and Coaching for Learning Beyond Facilitation - Mob Mentality Show
We enjoyed the conversation we had with Chris Lucian and Austin Chadwick on their Mob Mentality Show.
Chris Lucian and Austin Chadwick discuss all things #agile and product development from a #MobProgramming perspective. What would happen if your team kept working on its current production tasks, but switched the top priority to learning while doing so?…
Jess Brock is Speaking about Dojos and agility.us is Giving Away a Dojo Experience
Jess Brock is speaking on dojos at an upcoming event on September 21st. More details can be found here: https://agility.us/spark-dojo/spark-dojo-event/
Anti-Patterns to Avoid When Growing Your Dojo
Dojos are a significant investment in people, time, and learning. It can be tempting to shortcut the team’s experience in the dojo when faced with organizational pressures.
Let’s look at three common anti-patterns when scaling your dojo.
How Do We Scale the Dojo?
When launching a new dojo, we start with a few pilot teams. There’s an intentional pause after the pilots so we can assess what’s working, what adjustments we want to make, and how we can be most effective in the future. Often, after demonstrating success with the pilot teams, a question that comes up is “How do we scale the dojo?”
Reflecting Back on the First Dojo Consortium Event
Last week, we were proud to be a small part of the Dojo Consortium Event. From the humble, insightful speakers, the engaging question and thoughts shared by attendees, to the general energy at the conference, the event felt like something special.
Lessons Learned From 5 Years in the Dojo - Part 2 - Focus on the Value Stream
In our last post we discussed how Dojos require a sound overarching strategy. In this post we talk about why Dojos provide the most value when they address the whole value stream.
lessons learned from five years in the dojo - part 1
Having helped organizations with Dojos for five years, we felt it was the right time to share what we’ve learned so far. In this series of blog posts, we want to offer you our “best tips” for starting your own Dojo or for improving your existing Dojo. We’ll wrap up with our thoughts on where Dojos are going next.
Without further ado…
Reflections & Learnings from Continuous Learning Event
Last week, we (along with Mark Graban) had the pleasure of spending 2 days with 40 individuals focused on looking at continuous learning and improvement. If you missed the event, it is archived here.
We posted a little while back about why we were excited about the event. Now that the event has passed, we wanted to quickly share some of our ‘A-ha’ moments.
Continuous Learning - Talking, Improving, and Learning across Domains
We’re excited to be partnering with Mark Graban in presenting a new “conference” on creating learning organizations. Mark is and is an engaging speaker. We look forward to learning from him ourselves (see his book Measures of Success).
The event is on September 26th & 27th. As we write this, there are only 5 seats left. More information and registration details are available here.
Why are we so excited about this conference?
Growing Coaches in the Dojo
Skilled coaches are critical to the success of any Dojo. The specific skills needed will vary. A Dojo focused on DevOps requires one set of coaching skills. A Dojo focused on agile and product discovery capabilities needs different coaching skills.
Staffing a Dojo with coaches can be a challenge. There’s an abundance of agile coaches but many of them know only process. The Dojo can be an effective place for improving development processes. But, the investment required to run a Dojo should return a bigger payoff. Most organizations want to improve engineering and product discovery practices. Coaches who can help teams improve these skills are hard to find. You may need to hire skilled engineers and product managers and develop their coaching skills.
Here are four ways we help grow coaching skills in the Dojo.
Six Reasons Why We Do Two-and-a-Half-Day Sprints in the Dojo
When we’re explaining the Dojo model to people who are unfamiliar with it we often get a lot of head nods and other indicators that people understand the model. They see how it’s different from other approaches to learning. Sadly, most of us have had experience with inadequate training programs...
Measuring Impact In The Dojo
Last month at Agile Day Chicago, I (Joel) had the pleasure of listening to Mark Graban speak about separating signal from noise in our measurements. Mark referenced Process Behavior Charts, a technique described in the book Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J. Wheeler. This simple tool helps us look at metrics over time and understand the difference between naturally occurring variations (what Wheeler calls “The Voice of the Process”) and signals, or variation in the metrics representing real changes. Signals can be indicators that a desired change is manifesting, or they can be indicators that something is wrong and requires further investigation.
Dojo Metrics - Moving From What is Easy to capture to What Matters
A fair question to ask when starting a Dojo (or any initiative for that matter) is “how do we know this is working?” Invariably, right on the heels of that question somebody always brings up the idea of capturing metrics. Then they turn to us and say “What are the right metrics for the Dojo?”.
Empowering & Enabling Responsibility
Empowering teams is a topic the DevOps and Agile communities frequently talk about. But it is easier said than done. Here is one simple approach to empowering teams you can do right now.
But first a little background...
Technical Debt - Learning in (and With!) the Face of Debt
Technical Debt has a few definitions ranging from 'the previous person's bad code' to 'the shortcuts taken to hit a deadline' to my favorite - Technical Debt is 'the gap in the code between what we knew when we started building our product and what we know now'.