I re-visited my notes from QCon and Boris Gloger’s speech on Heartbeat Retrospectives. I have often referred to the similar values of coaching and agile methods. Actually the agile retrospective is a great way to perform a team coaching session. The purpose of the retrospective, as well as coaching, is to create awareness and making the team take responsibility for improvement. It is actually also a method of implementing the Deming cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act).

Retrospectives are a way to look back to move forward and is often used to evaluate the recent iteration or project. But actually I like to start an improvement project or a coaching cycle using a retrospective. That way you get a good starting point if you get answers to questions like What do you do well? What could be improved? Who is in control?

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I have this simple presentation slide on Scrum that I call Scrum in One Minute, trying to make a reference to the Scrum in Five Minutes booklet we did. It has simplified Scrum down to something that is easy to remember and easy to explain.

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I haven’t been posting for a while because I’ve been extremely busy preparing for a process improvement initiative for an international telecom company. I’m at the moment at their Indian site in Bangalore, trying to understand their present software development process, both how they describe it in documents and also how they practice it in reality.

We have identified a number of potential areas of improvement and our approach is to start building an agile foundation from bottom up, by introducing Scrum and a few XP practices to a pilot project and spreading this to more and more teams.

To some extent we will also look at particular areas from a top down approach, trying to implement some LEAN principles. They have some issues with long lead times, especially in their requirements process. However it seems that it will take some effort to get management to realize that it actually takes some effort from their side to change this, it will not happen just because of our presence.

In this case major changes is needed to get major improvements and minor changes will only produce minor improvements.

Like I told them: We will not do any changes for you, you have to do that yourselves, but we will be coaching, mentoring, educating you.

Other difficulties with this project are that the teams are widely distributed over the world and that even the organisation is structured according to the waterfall model that they claim they are not doing.

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