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Louis-Philippe Carignan
lpcarignan@gmail.com
Mar 29, 2021
The class was wonderful
The class was wonderful! I learned so much!!
Beth Robb
Mar 25, 2021
Feedback - PSK I
Un contenu de cours tres interessant et enrichissant.
De belles interactions
Beaucoup d'apprentissage
Recommande fortement ce cours
Fatima Sidiabed
Feb 28, 2021
Game changer
A very good class that challenged my knowledge and beliefs. If you feel you "already know it", this class will challenge that. Also, great teacher that takes the time and listens to the group. Even online, this class was very participative.
Dave Jacques
Feb 28, 2021
Un cours tel qu’on les aime
Un cours tel qu’on les aime, sans « lecture de Powerpoint » mais en nous faisant participer et discuter, ce qui nous garde alerte et interessé tout au long.
De plus, l’expérience « sur le terrain » de Louis-Philippe nous permet d’obtenir des trucs bien pratique pour notre réalité d’équipe.
Pour terminer, il est super sympathique!!
Christian Bisson
Feb 27, 2021
Très dynamique malgré un environnement…
Très dynamique malgré un environnement de formation à distance.
Claude II Guy
Jan 18, 2021
Excellent Classe
Excellent Classe
Louis-Philippe brings us through the Scrum Master role easily and with precise examples. He lets us discuss as a team and we were able to share our experience with Agile. I really appreciate the discussion we had during the classe, that provides real life examples.
The balance between theory and exercise was very good and we were able to apply what we just learn.
Louis-Philippe has managed the Virtual Class very well and has kept our attention during these 2 days.
Will recommend this classe to my collegues.
Sylvain Houle
Jan 16, 2021
Recommandation sans réserve
Excellente formation, très complète et avec un souci de donner un maximum de contenu utile aux participants et d'adopter un rythme adapté au groupe. Louis-Philippe est très à l'écoute, propose des références, exemples, et exercices très pertinents. Les échanges ont été très enrichissants et les réflexions à la fois bien appuyées et nuancées. Super préparation à la certification et à la pratique sur le terrain.
Stéphane Lévesque
Dec 3, 2020
Excellente formation
Très bonne formation avec beaucoup d'exemples. Il y a aussi beaucoup de discussion ce qui nous permet de bien assimiler le contenu de la formation. Le formateur est très expérimenté et connais bien son sujet.
Je le recommande.
Marc-Olivier Duval
Dec 2, 2020
Très intéressant
Très bon pédagogue, plusieurs mises en situation qui ont grandement aidé à ma compréhension !
Étant dans un contexte Scrum au day-to-day, voir comment Kanban peut contribuer à notre processus actuel avec de nouvelles métriques et de nouvelles façons de se projeter dans le futur est très bénéfique.
Merci Louis-Philippe!
William Garneau
Nov 9, 2020
Amazing trainers!
The trainers are very knowledgeable, and fun. They made this virtual class very entertaining and interactive. The day just flew by! I would definitely recommend this course, and these trainers!
Valerie Drainville
Nov 3, 2020
Great Training! More tools for any Scrum Master.
As an experienced Scrum Master, I wanted to learn new ways to serve my dev. teams, product owners and scrum organisations. The PSK training with Louis-Philippe helped me better understand Kanban; now I can see how it could positively impact my Scrum practices. I strongly recommend you add this class to your agile journey.
Alex Gbaguidi
Oct 20, 2020
Excellente formation PSK1
Excellente formation. Louis-Philippe rend les choses simples à comprendre et s'assure d'être bien compris. Malgré les contraintes du "tout en ligne", la formation reste dynamique et amusante à suivre. Si vous êtes un scrum master, cette formation va vous ouvrir les yeux sur les pratiques Kanban qui vont changer votre quotidien ! Si vous êtes déjà familier avec Kanban, le contenu reste pertinent notamment pour vous arrimer avec des équipes Scrum.
Une formation que je recommande sans hésitation :)
xavier lasserre
Sep 28, 2020
Je suis vraiment content d'avoir suivi…
Je suis vraiment content d'avoir suivi le cours de Kanban avec Scrum avec Louis-Philippe. Il a une excellente maîtrise sur la matière, beaucoup d'exercice qui nous a permis de mieux maîtriser le contenu.
Il est à l'écoute des participants et il s'ajuste et accommode son auditoire.
PS : Nous avons reçu le cours en ligne et on est resté motiver et engager jusqu’à la fin du cours. Il a su adapter le contenu de la formation afin qu’il soit intéressant même à distance.
Je le recommande fortement :-).
Anis Boutouria
Feb 3, 2020
Excellent Class - Worth Taking
A fantastic 2-day training. You will learn how to incorporate the practices and metrics of Kanban into your Scrum framework to achieve a better cadence and increase the predictability of delivering value to the stakeholders. In case you happen to work in an organization that exhibits a preference for evolving in a structured way, this course is a must. A very good blend of theory and practical simulations.
Louise-Philippe Carignan is an excellent instructor. He masters this topic and is very passionate about it. Very helpful and able to inspire and motivate.
Alexandra Ursea
Jan 28, 2020
A must for anyone working with the Scrum Framework
Integrating Kanban's strategies for optimizing the flow of value throughout product development just makes sense, period. Add to that meaningful metrics that improve the overall predictability of your process, what more could you ask for...It's a natural evolution for Scrum.
Louis-Philippe's approach of meaningful discussions and practical simulations make it easy to understand, and more importantly apply all the key concepts of this class. It was an enlightening class that I highly recommend...
Francis Calderisi
Jan 27, 2020
Excellente classe de Louis-Philippe
Excellente classe de Louis-Philippe. Il connais bien son sujet, et est très pertinent. Réussi toujours à nous faire comprendre avec des exemples de cas réels. Il n'hésite pas à nous faire focuser sur ce qui compte, en nous écartant de nos cas d'exception. Il suis bien le rythme du groupe, et prends le temps de nous faire comprendre tant que ce n'est pas claire.
J'ai adorer qu'il nous fasse comprendre comment on peut optimiser le famework Scrum en ajouter les statégies du Kanban.
Francis
Jan 23, 2020
Formation inspirante !!
Excellente maitrise de son sujet; excellent tact; un bon investissement de suivre cette formation avec Louis-Philippe.
MARTIN FROMENT
Jan 20, 2020
Really helpfull for my work + great trainer
Really usefull for me who needed a good reset on kanban + scrum. I really like how the trainer approached the different subjects. I'm more into getting the knowledge and unlocking the necessary tools to improve my work, less about the certification (which is a great bonus, but a bonus nonetheless).
I think this trainer is like that as wel but he's flexible enough to answer the needs of the trainees. I'm saying this because some people are all about passing the test and less about aquiring the knowledge.
Great training and lots of fun and new connections!
Frederic Brochu
Jan 18, 2020
J’ai vraiment apprécié la formation PSK…
J’ai vraiment apprécié la formation PSK de 2 jours avec Louis-Philippe. J’ai aimé son style calme et posé et sa façon de bien expliquer la théorie tout en répondant aux interrogations des participants. Les différentes activités réalisées au cours de la formation ont permis d’éclaircir et d'assimiler rapidement tous ces nouveaux concepts.
Caroline G.
Nov 10, 2019
The class had a lot of information
The class had a lot of information, however we asked to mix some martial from the Kanban class and as a result I feel that we didn't get all the information about Nexus. Still, this was a choice we made. Going forward, I will resist mixing two types of classes into one.
Pros:
- Interactive class
- Interesting
- Teacher knows his material
- workshops were excellent
Cons:
- teacher was sticking to class martial too much, should expend on real life scenarios more and case studies.
- Impact Mapping would be better if we did it from scratch (without filling the blanks)
Overall, I left the class wanting more, so I started to read more, the teacher provided an excellent list of books, and links to follow up on, enough to keep me busy for a while. However, unfortunately, I didn't feel the class got me 100% ready for the assessment, topics on architecture, Sprint goals, Nexus+ were not fully covered in the class but the material provided covered it.
to make the class better, I would mix more scenario based situations and how to solve them.
I would like to acknowledge, that our group sometimes went off topic, and the teacher, was always pleasant and polite but sometimes should be more assertive.
Overall a good experience, and will recommend for more classes.
Mike Peretz
Oct 26, 2019
Required knowledge if you're a scrum master
Louis-Philippe partage l'information avec une grande justesse et générosité. Il le fait au rythme du groupe.
Je vous recommande cette formation car elle remet en perspective le cadre Scrum et permet d'optimiser un impact positif sur les équipes.
Hakime Bezza
Oct 12, 2019
Learned a lot thanks to Louis-Philippe.
Being an active PSM I since 2011, I learned a lot from this class and was able to add so much more to my toolbox. I came in with a few major challenges from my practice in mind, all answered with next steps to undertake. The balance between sharing, real examples, clear theory and practice through games was awesome.
The guides were also properly used as reassuring and supportive references. We ran the open assessment in an effective manner. I was also happy to having done it a few times prior. I hope to be able to pass the upcoming certification exam; thanks to LP for having prepared us so well.
Marco Miller
Jun 19, 2019
Awesome class!
Excellent trainer, He really focus on the understanding of each person. I really liked the concrete examples of integration into real project. I learned a lot of interesting concepts that i plan to use in the near future for my day to day job.
Samuel Joyal
Louis-Philippe's Certifications
Louis-Philippe's Bio
Louis-Philippe Carignan first discovered Agile while toying with test-driven development and continuous integration in 2004. He then encountered XP, Scrum and never looked back after. With 15 years of Agile experience, Louis-Philippe is a seasoned Agile trainer and consultant who can navigate from business agility all the way down to team agility. As a trainer, he has taught Scrum.org classes to more than 500 people over the years. As a consultant, he helps teams, departments, and SMBs achieve their business objectives through the help of Agile.
Languages
- French
- English
Courses taught by Louis-Philippe
See What My Students Say
Mar 29, 2021
The class was wonderful
The class was wonderful! I learned so much!!
Beth Robb
Mar 25, 2021
Feedback - PSK I
Un contenu de cours tres interessant et enrichissant.
De belles interactions
Beaucoup d'apprentissage
Recommande fortement ce cours
Fatima Sidiabed
Feb 28, 2021
Game changer
A very good class that challenged my knowledge and beliefs. If you feel you "already know it", this class will challenge that. Also, great teacher that takes the time and listens to the group. Even online, this class was very participative.
Dave Jacques
Feb 28, 2021
Un cours tel qu’on les aime
Un cours tel qu’on les aime, sans « lecture de Powerpoint » mais en nous faisant participer et discuter, ce qui nous garde alerte et interessé tout au long.
De plus, l’expérience « sur le terrain » de Louis-Philippe nous permet d’obtenir des trucs bien pratique pour notre réalité d’équipe.
Pour terminer, il est super sympathique!!
Christian Bisson
Feb 27, 2021
Très dynamique malgré un environnement…
Très dynamique malgré un environnement de formation à distance.
Claude II Guy
Jan 18, 2021
Excellent Classe
Excellent Classe
Louis-Philippe brings us through the Scrum Master role easily and with precise examples. He lets us discuss as a team and we were able to share our experience with Agile. I really appreciate the discussion we had during the classe, that provides real life examples.
The balance between theory and exercise was very good and we were able to apply what we just learn.
Louis-Philippe has managed the Virtual Class very well and has kept our attention during these 2 days.
Will recommend this classe to my collegues.
Sylvain Houle
Jan 16, 2021
Recommandation sans réserve
Excellente formation, très complète et avec un souci de donner un maximum de contenu utile aux participants et d'adopter un rythme adapté au groupe. Louis-Philippe est très à l'écoute, propose des références, exemples, et exercices très pertinents. Les échanges ont été très enrichissants et les réflexions à la fois bien appuyées et nuancées. Super préparation à la certification et à la pratique sur le terrain.
Stéphane Lévesque
Dec 3, 2020
Excellente formation
Très bonne formation avec beaucoup d'exemples. Il y a aussi beaucoup de discussion ce qui nous permet de bien assimiler le contenu de la formation. Le formateur est très expérimenté et connais bien son sujet.
Je le recommande.
Marc-Olivier Duval
Dec 2, 2020
Très intéressant
Très bon pédagogue, plusieurs mises en situation qui ont grandement aidé à ma compréhension !
Étant dans un contexte Scrum au day-to-day, voir comment Kanban peut contribuer à notre processus actuel avec de nouvelles métriques et de nouvelles façons de se projeter dans le futur est très bénéfique.
Merci Louis-Philippe!
William Garneau
Nov 9, 2020
Amazing trainers!
The trainers are very knowledgeable, and fun. They made this virtual class very entertaining and interactive. The day just flew by! I would definitely recommend this course, and these trainers!
Valerie Drainville
Nov 3, 2020
Great Training! More tools for any Scrum Master.
As an experienced Scrum Master, I wanted to learn new ways to serve my dev. teams, product owners and scrum organisations. The PSK training with Louis-Philippe helped me better understand Kanban; now I can see how it could positively impact my Scrum practices. I strongly recommend you add this class to your agile journey.
Alex Gbaguidi
Oct 20, 2020
Excellente formation PSK1
Excellente formation. Louis-Philippe rend les choses simples à comprendre et s'assure d'être bien compris. Malgré les contraintes du "tout en ligne", la formation reste dynamique et amusante à suivre. Si vous êtes un scrum master, cette formation va vous ouvrir les yeux sur les pratiques Kanban qui vont changer votre quotidien ! Si vous êtes déjà familier avec Kanban, le contenu reste pertinent notamment pour vous arrimer avec des équipes Scrum.
Une formation que je recommande sans hésitation :)
xavier lasserre
Sep 28, 2020
Je suis vraiment content d'avoir suivi…
Je suis vraiment content d'avoir suivi le cours de Kanban avec Scrum avec Louis-Philippe. Il a une excellente maîtrise sur la matière, beaucoup d'exercice qui nous a permis de mieux maîtriser le contenu.
Il est à l'écoute des participants et il s'ajuste et accommode son auditoire.
PS : Nous avons reçu le cours en ligne et on est resté motiver et engager jusqu’à la fin du cours. Il a su adapter le contenu de la formation afin qu’il soit intéressant même à distance.
Je le recommande fortement :-).
Anis Boutouria
Feb 3, 2020
Excellent Class - Worth Taking
A fantastic 2-day training. You will learn how to incorporate the practices and metrics of Kanban into your Scrum framework to achieve a better cadence and increase the predictability of delivering value to the stakeholders. In case you happen to work in an organization that exhibits a preference for evolving in a structured way, this course is a must. A very good blend of theory and practical simulations.
Louise-Philippe Carignan is an excellent instructor. He masters this topic and is very passionate about it. Very helpful and able to inspire and motivate.
Alexandra Ursea
Jan 28, 2020
A must for anyone working with the Scrum Framework
Integrating Kanban's strategies for optimizing the flow of value throughout product development just makes sense, period. Add to that meaningful metrics that improve the overall predictability of your process, what more could you ask for...It's a natural evolution for Scrum.
Louis-Philippe's approach of meaningful discussions and practical simulations make it easy to understand, and more importantly apply all the key concepts of this class. It was an enlightening class that I highly recommend...
Francis Calderisi
Jan 27, 2020
Excellente classe de Louis-Philippe
Excellente classe de Louis-Philippe. Il connais bien son sujet, et est très pertinent. Réussi toujours à nous faire comprendre avec des exemples de cas réels. Il n'hésite pas à nous faire focuser sur ce qui compte, en nous écartant de nos cas d'exception. Il suis bien le rythme du groupe, et prends le temps de nous faire comprendre tant que ce n'est pas claire.
J'ai adorer qu'il nous fasse comprendre comment on peut optimiser le famework Scrum en ajouter les statégies du Kanban.
Francis
Jan 23, 2020
Formation inspirante !!
Excellente maitrise de son sujet; excellent tact; un bon investissement de suivre cette formation avec Louis-Philippe.
MARTIN FROMENT
Jan 20, 2020
Really helpfull for my work + great trainer
Really usefull for me who needed a good reset on kanban + scrum. I really like how the trainer approached the different subjects. I'm more into getting the knowledge and unlocking the necessary tools to improve my work, less about the certification (which is a great bonus, but a bonus nonetheless).
I think this trainer is like that as wel but he's flexible enough to answer the needs of the trainees. I'm saying this because some people are all about passing the test and less about aquiring the knowledge.
Great training and lots of fun and new connections!
Frederic Brochu
Jan 18, 2020
J’ai vraiment apprécié la formation PSK…
J’ai vraiment apprécié la formation PSK de 2 jours avec Louis-Philippe. J’ai aimé son style calme et posé et sa façon de bien expliquer la théorie tout en répondant aux interrogations des participants. Les différentes activités réalisées au cours de la formation ont permis d’éclaircir et d'assimiler rapidement tous ces nouveaux concepts.
Caroline G.
Nov 10, 2019
The class had a lot of information
The class had a lot of information, however we asked to mix some martial from the Kanban class and as a result I feel that we didn't get all the information about Nexus. Still, this was a choice we made. Going forward, I will resist mixing two types of classes into one.
Pros:
- Interactive class
- Interesting
- Teacher knows his material
- workshops were excellent
Cons:
- teacher was sticking to class martial too much, should expend on real life scenarios more and case studies.
- Impact Mapping would be better if we did it from scratch (without filling the blanks)
Overall, I left the class wanting more, so I started to read more, the teacher provided an excellent list of books, and links to follow up on, enough to keep me busy for a while. However, unfortunately, I didn't feel the class got me 100% ready for the assessment, topics on architecture, Sprint goals, Nexus+ were not fully covered in the class but the material provided covered it.
to make the class better, I would mix more scenario based situations and how to solve them.
I would like to acknowledge, that our group sometimes went off topic, and the teacher, was always pleasant and polite but sometimes should be more assertive.
Overall a good experience, and will recommend for more classes.
Mike Peretz
Oct 26, 2019
Required knowledge if you're a scrum master
Louis-Philippe partage l'information avec une grande justesse et générosité. Il le fait au rythme du groupe.
Je vous recommande cette formation car elle remet en perspective le cadre Scrum et permet d'optimiser un impact positif sur les équipes.
Hakime Bezza
Oct 12, 2019
Learned a lot thanks to Louis-Philippe.
Being an active PSM I since 2011, I learned a lot from this class and was able to add so much more to my toolbox. I came in with a few major challenges from my practice in mind, all answered with next steps to undertake. The balance between sharing, real examples, clear theory and practice through games was awesome.
The guides were also properly used as reassuring and supportive references. We ran the open assessment in an effective manner. I was also happy to having done it a few times prior. I hope to be able to pass the upcoming certification exam; thanks to LP for having prepared us so well.
Marco Miller
Jun 19, 2019
Awesome class!
Excellent trainer, He really focus on the understanding of each person. I really liked the concrete examples of integration into real project. I learned a lot of interesting concepts that i plan to use in the near future for my day to day job.
Samuel Joyal
Upcoming Classes by Louis-Philippe
See all upcoming classes-
Professional Scrum with KanbanDetails Register
Live VirtualApr 19-20, 2021
8:30 AM - 4:30 PM
America/New_York
French -
Professional Scrum with KanbanDetails Register
Live VirtualMay 6-7, 2021
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
America/New_York
English -
Professional Scrum with KanbanDetails Register
Live VirtualMay 27-28, 2021
8:30 AM - 4:30 PM
America/New_York
French -
Professional Scrum with KanbanDetails Register
Live VirtualJun 16-17, 2021
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
America/New_York
English
Classes Attended by Louis-Philippe
Latest Blogs by Louis-Philippe
See all blogs
Louis-Philippe Carignan
With the launch of the Kanban Guide for Scrum teams in 2018, its 4 flow metrics have gained more popularity amongst the Scrum community.
Aug 17, 2020
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
The Old Farmer’s Almanac is the oldest continuously published periodical in North America. It was first published in 1792 by Robert B. Thomas who wanted an almanac “to be useful with a pleasant degree of humor. Many long-time Almanac followers claim that its forecasts are 80% to 85% accurate.
Mar 16, 2020
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
The emergence of the Kanban Guide for Scrum teams has given new metrics and practices to Development Teams on how they can augment their Sprint Backlog to manage their work.
Mar 4, 2020
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
This is a post explaining how to do throughput-driven sprint planning using throughput and Service Level Expectation (SLE).
Feb 17, 2020
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
If there is one trend that has surpassed Agile in our profession over the last five years, I would say DevOps would be a good culprit. As we’ve seen an explosion of tools to implement CI/CD in our Scrum teams, we’ve also seen some of our Agile practices being challenged by this new reality.
Dec 16, 2019
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
I’ve been teaching the class Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) for the last year now and I strongly believe parts of its content will send some of our current practices and books to the Agile museum.
Dec 10, 2019
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
The Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) course has now been out for more than 6 months at Scrum.org. As one of the first few trainers who wanted to teach this course when it came out, I find it is a great way to combine the Scrum framework with Kanban as a strategy to deliver value to your customer.
Jan 14, 2019
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
DevOps is all over the place nowadays. The toolset is exploding. Companies are offering a large variety of products to suit the needs of customers. Looking at Google Trends, the keyword devops has doubled in popularity in the last two years.
Acting as an Agile coach, I’ve been steadily working with DevOps teams for the last year where I’ve seen some downsides of being DevOps. Sorting through other blog articles, I didn’t find a lot of content on two downsides that I’ve witnessed with my teams. I thought I would share this experience to give readers another perspective to DevOps.
What is DevOps for us?
That’s a good question and it varies a lot depending on what you read. If only the founders of the term would have captured their definition in a manifesto (wink to Agile). For the rest of this article, our DevOps teams follow the mantra “You build it. You run it.”. They support the system they code. They are responsible for the entire lifecycle of the code. Once they start writing it, they know they will also debug it when it breaks in production.
Developer fatigue
While it is a thrilling experience to know that thousands of people are using your system, it is not as thrilling to get woken up in the middle of the night to handle a system failure. While the reader could say we should build more stability into our system to avoid this problem, this isn’t an overnight fix in our thriving startup that is ramping up more than 30 new hires in the last year months. Developers make mistakes like anybody else and these cause bugs in production.
In the meantime, our DevOps teams have to share call rotation as well as having a backup in case our first response team member is running into an issue. We’ve had people going out for a bike ride on a sunny Sunday morning turning back to their laptops as they had to debug code that had failed in production. We’ve even had in our interview process candidates asking how we handled call rotation as we presented our teams as DevOps.
User fatigue
It is great to have a continuous deployment train that can automatically push new features in production. It is not so great to read customer feedback telling us they are exhausted with learning new features every other month. Who would have thought! We were so happy to push features, automate our deployment process to speed up things that we completely forgot about the customer at the end of the production line.
I define User fatigue as customers who can’t keep up with new features. Features roll out just to frequently for a user to discover and adapt them to their current ways of working with the software. It might be hard for software developers to understand this as we are always in the gist of it. Think about field technicians or customer service representative that have a different relationship with software. Their main focus is not the piece of software we are passionately working on so their level of interest on new features isn't as high as our desire to deploy new features as soon as they are build.
I have experienced first-hand this user fatigue through the numerous releases of Visual Studio Code (VS Code). As I sometimes write a bit of code, I can open up the tool a few times per month. In the first few months back in early 2017, I was excited to get an indicator telling me a new version was available. I would read the long and descriptive readme file to discover how the tool improved. Two years later, I don’t really bother reading the file. There’s always a ton of new features. Animated gifs are there to speed up my learning. But I’m just to busy to take the time.
Conclusion
While I cannot neglect the tremendous value that the DevOps tooling brings to our profession, I would say that a well-educated decision about how you want to operate your DevOps teams is necessary.
Before jumping on the DevOps bandwagon, I would advise that your team ask itself the following questions to tackle some of the downsides of DevOps:
How will we respond to system failures in production when they occur outside office hours?
What are our delays to acknowledge this system failure? Do we let our customers know?
Do we have a procedure to find the root cause of the system failure to avoid the problem from happing again in production? Do we set an ETA on those post-mortems to force us to learn from system failures?
Do we have beta users who are more willing than others to opt-in to the frequent release of new features?
Nov 12, 2018
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
I have an important favor to ask to Scrum practitioners who are asking their team to commit themselves to their sprint backlog at sprint planning.
Oct 22, 2018
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
According to the Scrum guide, sprint retrospectives are "an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint."
In my early career as a Scrum Master, I used to follow this definition quite stricly. Time was taken to look for our problems and create improvement plans. Unfortunately, as I advanced in my role, I learned that people would get tired of always looking for ways to improve. Trying to dig deeper into problems, sometimes organisational, sometimes professional, would drag the team motivation down. On the other hand, just being told that they were good seemed to give better results. Surprisingly, it brought ideas as the mood of the meeting was positive. People felt good about themselves and worked toward getting better.
I've also found that positive retrospectives were better when they are started with an activity to launch conversations. Simply starting a positive retrospective by saying we will praise each other felt kind of awkward.
To initiate these conversations, I have found that the niko-niko calendar and the mood board were good instruments to articulate positive conversations.
The niko-niko calendar is a very well documented tool where you follow the mood of the team. Bernd Schiffer has a great post explaining it. It basically consists of tracking the team's feeling at every day of the iteration with smiley faces.
If you did not set in place such a tool, the mood board can be an alternative. The mood board is basically a graph where the X axis is the timeline of the project while the Y axis is the level of happiness. As this is a very scientific tool, notice how the top level of happiness is a big smiley face.
In the picture above, notice how each line is of a different colour. As I had multiple team members, and whom got on board at different moments of the project (removing other team members), we used a color for each person and the line would start at a different place for each person. I then asked people to recall positive events around this artifact.
In my example, we were in a slump around iterations 5 and 6. While we could have complained about what was going wrong around that time, the objective was to talk about positive interactions. So we started talking about how we got out of this slump. And praises started surfacing. John (the green line) underlined how the arrival of Martin #2 (the purple line) helped the project. And things just flowed for a while ... postitively.
There were no tangible action plan out of this meeting. Just good vibes because of our appreciation of each other. And sometimes, team moral is the thing to knock on during a retrospective.
Dec 1, 2015
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