Dennis Mansell

I've written a blog post on our company blog about 'Scrum Studio' - a developing idea about how to re-think your teamwork to be simple,  end-to-end and with ways to adopt it.  In short: my take on the missing bits of Scrum.  A special shoutout to Gunther Verheyen and the rest of the Scrum Caretakers - as well as the fantastic members of Studio 800 and Team Oranje at Mirabeau . Click here for the blog post.

I wrote a LinkedIn article after being inspired by Joost Icke's original piece . Johan Cruijff had some amusing sayings but also had a very deep understanding of team performance as a system.

A not-so-recent post by user story god Mike Cohn drifted into my timeline today. I had just finished a user story mapping session at a client.  We ended our user story mapping session with three user stories as candidates for top-of-backlog that would clearly bring huge value to our client and a whole wall full of user stories that ranged from pretty cool to utterly pointless. In the evening I also received a bunch of time-sheets telling me how each team member had spent their hours. How are these two related? Being a workaholic Hi, I'm Dennis and I'm a recovering workaholic. I've had some pretty bad binges. I once worked so hard that I forgot when I had last eaten. My wife had to tell me that it had probably been more than 36 hours as I had left for the office the day before without breakfast and I hadn't left the office except for a quick cat-nap in between. I had a headache and was a bit dizzy but she had to point out to me that that proba

Hello, I am privileged to be asked by Dennis Mansell to write a guest post about this fascinating and important topic: Agile Retrospective . Agile retrospective plays an important role in team building and should be performed at the end of every sprint. The process helps the team identify what worked and what didn’t so that they can make improvements in the next Sprint. For teams’ new to the process, they can do these easy exercises to help facilitate their meetings. The Sailboat Retrospective In this exercise, the facilitator draws a sailboat in the middle of a whiteboard or large poster paper. To represent the team. Team members then write on post it notes what they felt was an anchor (something that held them back) and what was the wind (parts of the project that worked and moved them forward). After place the anchors and wind on the board by the sailboat, the team discusses their findings. The Starfish Retrospective The facilitator draws a starfish shape to div

I contributed to a blog post on Luis Goncalves' Blog . Check it out: Scrum Master Interview Questions . Luis Gonçalves is an Organisational Transformation Coach and he loves to write about Agile Retrospectives ,  Scrum , the role Scrum Master , and Agile in general. Luis has created a Scrum Master Training for the agile community. If you are interested in knowing more or even working with him you can find him here: Agile Coach München .

How do you transition your company to something that you would want to call 'agile'?  Spoiler: there isn't a way, at least not a single one.  I wrote this whitepaper for my employer Mirabeau , for managers and directors to consider: Whether you need to improve your agility How that works How to manage/govern/control this The associated costs, risks, resources and re-organisation Read More >>