A slightly modified release planning game – the lost alphabet 2018 version

I invented a release planning game many years ago and I have used it in training quite a few times. Then Eduardo Meira Peres invented a much simpler version. Teams must use sprints to recreate the alphabet after society forgot how to spell words. The game covers concepts like sprints, velocity and adaptive planning in […]

Agile versus knowledge part one – stories are great

Last week I gave a talk for business analysts in Sydney on “documentation for agile teams” My talk did not really contain anything too radical, but it did draw a reasonable crowd, with 80 business analysts making time to come after a full day of work. So why did 80 people turn up when, being […]

Why are people backing away from agile? Theory one – losing sight of craftsmanship

Agile approaches are great and I even tell my friends to use them. But recently I have noticed some organisations backing away from their agile implementations. It got scarier when I noticed that Ron Jeffries, one of the original signatories to the Agile Manifesto, wrote an article titled “Developers should abandon agile.” It’s a good […]

Where have all the agile coaches gone? Ping me if you find one.

A couple of months ago someone asked me if I know a good agile coach in Sydney Australia. I thought I would be able to say yes because I am a hip dude who is in contact with the in crowd. But it turns out my language is dated and a bit out of touch. […]

Quick update – where to find techniques on my blog

I often write about approaches that teams have used to solve problems, get going in their agile journey and similar things. But it can be hard to find things in a blog. So here is an index with links to many of the approaches and suggestions that I have shared over the years. Kings Guide […]

Agile project management patterns

In my last article I used a home made leadership model to look leadership in a self-managed (agile) team. I then used this as a basis to look briefly at how project managers might help or hinder an agile team. Here I take that concept a step further by looking at how people use project […]

Leadership and project management in a typical agile team

In my last article I claimed that you can have an agile project manager who ran agile projects. But the projects I described did not involve “typical” agile teams. So now I want to show that a project manager can work well with a typical agile team.