Apr 3, 2024

Team Performance

“How do I know if my team is performing well?” This is a question that every manager, and every team member, should ask themselves. A better question could be, “How do I measure my team’s performance?” or even better, “What is team performance?” Answering these questions is not as simple as it seems. Team performance is a large domain with many models, metrics, frameworks, and books available on the topic. I found Troy Magennis’ model of 6 competing forces to be a great starting point for examining team performance.

Mar 25, 2024

Agile fatigue, where has the fun gone?

I’ve started to catch myself raising my eyebrows whenever someone mentions “Agile” accompanied by an inner voice loudly protesting, “Oh no, not again—Definition of Done, Story Points, Velocity…” How did I get here? Since Agile crossed my career path in 2014, I’ve been deeply passionate and interested in it, diving into books, blogs, and videos, finding much of it facinating. In 2015, I earned my Certified Scrum Master badge and embraced a dual role of Team Lead/Scrum Master for my team.

Dec 12, 2023

Mentoring

What over 1000 minutes of mentoring has taught me In 2023, I took my mentoring to the next level and actually reserved a weekly time slot to mentor within Red Hat but also through the adplist.org platform. In that time, I have mentored people from 14 different countries, with varying levels of experience and backgrounds. Here is what I have learned from these amazing people. Recurring themes The first thing I have learnt is that there are a few recurring themes that as a mentor you will encounter.

Aug 11, 2023

Flock 2023

This year was the first in person Flock conference since Budapest in 2019, the event was held in the charming city of Cork, Ireland and despite a few hiccups while traveling (flight delayed and canceled) it was great to be able to attend Flock and have to opportunity to connect with so many people in the Fedora Community. Below are some of my key takeaways and highlights from the conference.

Feb 7, 2022

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

I’ve recently had a few good conversations about the desire to coach Scrum teams to complete their stories by the end of each sprint. I’ve always felt that this was not a good goal for a team as there is a risk that it will focus too much on that goal, to the point where it becomes a target and ceases to be valuable. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

May 12, 2021

Courage

I have recently watched this great TED talk by Michael Brody-Waite. Michael is talking about 3 principles: be authentic, surrender the outcomes and do uncomfortable work. These principles resonated with me and made me think about myself and How I am doing against them. In his talk, he also tells us about how he has been using the quite famous “What is your greatest weakness ?” interview question to get people to be authentic and talk about themselves.

Mar 8, 2021

Starting with Why

This post was inspired by Colin Walter’s blog post on why he works on OpenShift and Fedora/RHEL go and check it out 😄. Understanding our “Why” is usually a process that a team will go through. Why, as a team, are we together? What problems are we solving? How are we solvings these problems? There is value in asking ourselves why we show up to work every weekday and what motivates us.