Videos

Teamwork as an individual skill.
Have you ever been inspired by a lecture, an article or a book? Maybe you even decided to try some of the ideas out? If you are like me, most often it all just faded away over time and in the end you did not change that much.

After reading a fair share of (self) improvement books and working with teams trying to improve, I would say that there is one place where you should start before you have any chance of success with applying any other improvement ideas! It is with the "Responsibility Redefined" model taught by Christopher Avery.

As far as I know this is the first time he published a free video explaining the concept. Don't miss one!

Heartbeat Retrospectives
Boris Gluger presents his solution to performing heartbeat retrospectives really fast. This presentation does a really good job of explaining the purpose of the various components of a standard retrospective meeting.

Boris likes to keep retrospectives really short by stopping right after when issues have been identified. The idea is that issues will resolve themelves when being made visible and/or that you can ask for time to work on solutions during the next sprint planning. I think this may make sense. Proper root caues analysis, through A3 thinking or other means, usually takes to long for a short meeting like this anyway. If I would add one thing to his approach it would be a short check-in activity such as asking everyone to describe the iteration with a word or two.

The Road from Project Manager to Agile Coach Part1 Part2
Very nice, short, presentation from experienced project manager Lyssa Adkins about the road from being a project manager to being a coach/scrum master for an agile team. Great explanation of the new role for leaders in an agile environment.

Ken Schwaber at Google. One hour about Scrum basics and dead cores. Every company seems to have a dead core, some central part of a system that no one dares to touch anymore since it breaks so easily. So where do dead cores come from, can you buy them... Ken reveals the answer in this presentation.

State of the art hyperproductive distributed Scrum teams. If you have a distributed organization or are considering outsourcing, you should really check out this presentation by Jeff Sutherland. In addition to outsourcing, he also covers some other areas such as why any customer would want to pay for software development by hour, even though it is well known (?) that hours spent in development is not at all correlated with amount of delivered working features. He also talks about his classification system for Scrum teams and how that is correlated to accelerating profits of companies. If you want to see how Jeff Sutherland would rate your implementation of Scrum, take a look at our free Nokia Test

Money for nothing, change for free
In this video Jeff Sutherland covers a simple type of modified contract. These contract modifications can be used to make it possible for both agile (possibly hyper productive) companies and their customers to mutually profit from the new level of performance. This is a related conference presentation.

Agile Estimating and Planning part 1 and part 2. Mike Cohn has written the
reference book on Agile estimating and planning. This is a 90 minute video of him presenting these topics.

Prioritizing Your Product Backlog In this presentation Mike Cohn shows some techniques to use when working with the product backlog to put together release plans. For prioritizing he groups user stories/requirements into themes. Then he shows four different methods to pick a set of themes for a release that will please users/meet other company goals. Kano analysis is described also in his book, the other three techniques - theme screening, theme scoring ands relative weighting, are not.

A one hour presentation of FIT/FITnesse
FIT/FITNesse is the standard solution for getting customers involved in creating automated acceptance tests. In agile development these types of tests are used instead of written document to document detailed requirements.

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great One hour about agile retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen.

Having retrospectives after each iteration is a key component of agile development. The retrospective is where the team takes the time to reflect and adapt with regards to their work methods. If this does not happen, there will be no continuous improvement (kaizen) and it is very likely that the team will get stuck with modest (say 50%) improved performance. Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, in their book and in this presentation, provide plenty of tools you can use to make sure your retrospectives do not get dull after a few iterations.


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