James King

Some people have amazing leadership skills such as communicating a clear vision or aligning people to a cause. I did not receive those awesome gifts, but I did inherit a super power that often comes in handy – managing Bureaucracy. For example, I like to have meetings that are effective. This probably does not seem…

Previously in “teachers assessing agile teams” In my previous post, I derived a lightweight model for building team and product metrics from the Kirkpatrick model, which is normally used to assess training effectiveness. A key theme was that we should think about what, specifically, we want to learn from our metrics before adopting any typical…

I have been thinking about how we measure our performance and how we track our goals at work. Specifically, I want to look at how we would use assessment in the teams that are customer focused, product led and/or agile. There are plenty of good books in each of these domains and they have a…

I have been talking to people at work about measuring performance lately and it got me thinking about how we use metrics to understand our work in an agile context. In some ways, results are results and impediments are impediments, so maybe the way we measure things is based on what we measure and not…

The tennis is on in Australia and I guess people are being distracted by a lot of things that have nothing to do with the game. I assume though, that the players are staying focused on playing the best game that they can – and hopefully winning if they are good enough to have a…

When I was a schoolboy, I used to catch the train to school. Every day I walked past a paper factory, or it might have been a warehouse (I don’t really know exactly what they made, I assume it was exercise books, big rolls of paper and stuff). There was a big sign next to…

It is a new year and so I am returning to my blog, which has been neglected for a couple of months. Perhaps I should set myself a typical goal to keep me focused, something like Write 2 blog articles a month; or Publish 2 blog articles by the end of February 2022 These are…

When I first started work, many years ago, people spoke a lot about “leader as coach,” and “Self-directed careers.” The idea that any team leader and any senior technician, administrator or artisan was also a teacher of others became ingrained into my expectations myself and those that I worked with. Similarly, the idea that we…

I like to think that I am a good storyteller. I use stories in teaching, coaching and in presentations. Some of my skill comes from my education at school and some from being surrounded by good storytelling as I grew up. But what if I wanted to learn about storytelling now, as an adult. Where…

I have been telling people that if they go to meetings, which most of us do, then they should get value from those meetings. This is even more important in agile where the processes and tools (meetings, workshops, ceremonies, rituals or whatever you call them) are supposed to support the individuals and their interactions. It…