Tuesday, March 18, 2014

“Thinking in F#” and “Software Craftsmanship and Agile Code Games” Slides

I’ve posted the slides from my recent presentations at Utah Code Camp 2014.  If you missed it, I’ll be presenting “Thinking in F#” at Boise Code Camp 2014 on April 5th and “Software Craftsmanship and Agile Code Games” at Mile High Agile 2014 on April 18th.

Check out these and previous sessions on my Sessions page.

Friday, March 7, 2014

StrengthsFinder Team Activities

While I was at Ancestry.com, we used the StrengthsFinder assessment to give us insights into ourselves.  If you haven’t taken it, I highly recommend it.  You can purchase a code, or you can get one with a copy of StrengthsFinder 2.0 or Strengths Based Leadership.

While it’s interesting to know about yourself, when in a team setting it’s equally important to know about your teammates in order to work effectively with them.  To help my team with that, I designed some activities for us to do as a team.  Here are my notes to facilitate the activities.

StrengthsFinder Team Activities

Team Top 5 Grid

Team Top 5 Grid - Google Sheets version

A few months later, we did an activity with multiple teams in order for those other teams to get to know each other better and the teams to know and understand each other better.  This includes many of the same individual team activities while adding some activities that have the teams interacting.

StrengthsFinder Multi-team Activities

Again, many of these are to help team members understand and appreciate each other.  Also as you do these activities, keep in mind that the debrief (the questions and conversation after the activities) are where the real action is.  The point of the activities isn’t to teach but to facilitate learning.  You’ll want to give clear explanations (possibly have slides to show instructions) and then walk around, listen to what’s going on, answer questions and offer gentle suggestions.

Hope these are helpful to someone!  Feel free to use all of these, cherry pick and/or remix with your own ideas.

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