21 May 2019 | Leadership
No sprints, releases, recent significant events, or even a common thread of problems with a group I’ve never met is the backdrop for a recent retrospective that I facilitated. I refer to a scenario like this as facilitating a blind retrospective. Did I mention this was their first retrospective?
17 Apr 2019 | Leadership
My wife and I sometimes joke that 2019 is the year of Ryan. My career seems to be accelerating very rapidly, and I’m exploring new ideas and activities with success. I think one of the reasons that are happening is because of a few key things that I started in 2018.
26 Mar 2019 | Leadership
One of the most important skills for any organization to develop is meeting facilitation. Ever see an invitation pop up on your calendar without a clear statement as to what the meeting will be about? Ever walk into a meeting where discussions happen for an hour and the result is another meeting to try and understand more of what was talked about? What about a meeting where lots of small decisions were made, but the net result is everyone leaves with a different idea of what is going to happen?
21 Mar 2019 | Leadership
The deadline is approaching and there is still so much to do. Workdays get longer, the rigor that normally applied to design and testing begin to slide in favor of cranking out more features. The technical debt card starts getting swiped.
18 Mar 2019 | Leadership
There is a tendency in me to look at things as right or wrong, black-and-white, or on-or-off. I know better than to think this way, but I find myself falling into this way of thinking with enough regularity that I thought I’d write about it.
15 Mar 2019 | Leadership
A new developer shows up to a team. They are eager to contribute and start writing code but have a lot of questions. Where is the source code? How do I set up my environment? How do I build the software? What is the development process here? Where do I look in the code to get an idea of where to start?
