Author Archives: Brett Henderson

Retrospective Deltas

Category: Agile
Published on June 18, 2007 by

I was recently reading a post on InfoQ, "Frequent Retrospectives Accelerate Learning and Improvement". As it's title suggests, the key messages in the article is about having frequent retrospectives to aid in the learning and improvement process.

When we adopted XP (eXtreme Programming) we undertook to have a retrospective at the beginning of each development iteration, preceding the planning game. With weekly iterations, we have a chance to reflect on the previous weeks pluses and to formulate some changes/improvements (deltas) identified from the week.

Continue reading →

→ 2 Comments

Tagged

Blame has no place in retrospectives

Category: Agile, Management
Published on June 8, 2007 by

While writing a post about retrospectives and deltas, in response to an article by Deborah Hartmann on InfoQ (Frequent Retrospectives Accelerate Learning and Improvement), I noticed a disturbing comment mentioning the "traditional blame party".

Deborah's post referred to and quoted from an article by Rachael Davis entitled "How To: Live and Learn with Retrospectives". The quote from Rachael's article included the following sentence.

Without these in place, conversations are likely to be full of criticism and attributing blame

Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Management Reading List

Category: Management
Published on June 5, 2007 by

As I mentioned in my first post one, of the reasons for this blog is to help engineers new to management. 

When I first started in management, I went looking for books that would help me develop the skills necessary to be a good manager. On the "Management Books" page you will find a collection of books I've read so far.

These range from management and leadership in the form of the "One Minute Manager" series, to the "Fish! philosophy", a way to drive productivity while maintaining a sense of fun.

→ Leave a comment

Management and Development Balance

Category: Management
Published on June 3, 2007 by

I mentioned the other day that I had recently attended the first session in a course on leadership. While waiting for the session to begin, I chatted to one of the attendees. Like many technical people in management, after many years in development, they are promoted to a management role with little to no training or management experience. As such he was struggling with the balance between managing people and development.

More importantly, because he had been with the company for a number of years prior to his promotion, he knew the code base intimately. As such, when one of his engineers had something complex to do, he would inevitably do it himself, in case they failed to do it right.

He realized that as a result he had becomes the bottleneck of his team. In addition he is failing to give opportunities to his team to develop skills.

Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Leadership Course – “What is a Leader”

Category: Management
Published on May 29, 2007 by

ACS recently started a new course entitled "Growing Team Leaders" that I feel might compliment my management reading and learning. This post is the first in a series associated with the course.

The first session, "What is a Leader", presented by John Ware of Dale Carnegie Training was on this month. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of skills I was already aware of and am doing as part of my role. There were however a few points that I can continue to work on. One I particularly liked was "Micro manager yourself, macro manage your team". What this essentially means is manage your own time and tasks in detail and provide guidance to your people, trusting them to do their job.

Continue reading →

→ 3 Comments

Tagged