I just started a new venture!

Are you tired of trying to get the perfect product shot for your online store? Does the thought of managing every aspect of product photography stress you out? Well, have no fear! E/SHOOTING is here to take the hassle out of your e-commerce photography needs. We specialize in one thing: e-commerce product photography. We handle …

How To Build Trust In Negotiations

Trust is an essential part of negotiations for knowledge workers. It is so important, that it may even be considered the true goal of the 8 principles I describe in Extreme Contracts! In 2011 I had a horrifying “clients from hell” experience that pushed me to investigate how I could craft better agreements with my …

My article on how to build trust on Scrum Master Toolbox blog

Hey folks! On 14 February I published a guest post on Vasco Duarte’s Scrum Master Toolbox website. It is about how I like to build trust with my customers even before the relationship has started. Enjoy! How to build trust with clients and stakeholders while getting what you deserve for your work: a story about …

Eventstorming as a cultural probe

Eventstorming is an amazing technique/tool invented by Alberto ‘Zio Brando’ Brandolini to investigate a software process, which I also use to investigate an organization’s culture. I wrote this article to introduce a video in which I describe some Eventstorming nuances I had the chance to play with on a few real customer projects.

Late acknowledgement of a late acknowledgement

In last Steve Denning’s article on Forbes titled “Can The 21st Century Corporation Operate Without Agile?” we read: The new industrial revolution may be enabled by technology, but it is not being driven by it. […] Trying to exploit digital technology or the Internet with the management practices of hierarchical bureaucracy that is pervasive in big corporations today …

Make yourself a valuable employee by measuring your Net Promoter Score

As a freelance, I often face the request to report on my delivery, to assess the effect of my actions and suggestions. During my years spent as an employee, though, I learned to ask my colleagues for an assessment with the aim of becoming more valuable to them. If we all agree business must be …

LEGO Serious Play facilitation training: mission accomplished.

On May 8 I joined Juego Serio, Sparkling Strategies and Cocoon Projects in Barcelona to attend a LEGO Serious Play (LSP) Facilitation training. I had been waiting that moment a lot. I met the method in 2013 when I had the chance to help my friend Stelio facilitating some LSP- based workshops designed by him. …

#NoEstimates: knowing the difference between an estimate, a forecast and a promise

A few weeks ago I attended a NoEstimates workshop held by Woody Zuill and Vasco Duarte in Helsinki. It has been an intense and fruitful day and here is the main insight I brought back home. The day was led with a very nice pace, the two speakers showing a very different style in explaining …

The whole IT thing is about talking to humans

It was only yesterday that I incurred into this old tweet by Kent Beck: the *craft* of programming begins with empathy, not formatting or languages or tools or algorithms or data structures — Kent Beck (@KentBeck) February 13, 2015 This message resonates with many reflections I have been through lately. Tree huggers First, this made …

I am back from XP2015

It has been an intense May and among the several nice things happened to me I had the chance to attend XP2015, in Helsinki, to talk about LiquidO, the open governance model shaped within Cocoon Projects. The XP conference series is among the top conferences worldwide about agile methods and lean thinking. What do I …

Agile Contracts workshop in Bologna on June 23 2015

After the rewarding premiere held in last March, on June 23rd I will be holding again a full-day session about agile contracts in collaboration with Alberto ‘Zio Brando’ Brandolini’s Avanscoperta. It is going to be a very important day for me, considering the chance I am having to re-think the workshop based on the super …

People talking extreme contracts, people using extreme contracts

After the chat I recently had with Greger Wikstrand about Extreme Contracts, another nice video was made by Greger with Joakim Lindbom, both Enterprise Architects from Capgemini. In the video they discuss the nice behavioral and economical patterns emerging with the use of such contracts which I forged a few years ago when I was …

Extreme Contracts

The goal As I wrote some time ago, we want our deals to be compliant with three main criteria: We want to reach a wise agreement, in order to generate value for all the parties involved. We want the deal to be efficient, because time spent searching for a good deal is not generating value: …