James King

A story wall helps us to focus our attention on the present, by allowing us to take a snapshot of the state of our work in any given moment. Doing so allows us to see bottlenecks and priorities and generally take better control of our work in progress. But in my last article I mentioned…

Back in my day times were hard I don’t want to shock you, but my corporate life began last century, before even Twitter and Slack existed. You can imagine how slow moving and inefficient we were, but we knew we could do better and so we focused on improving. We came up with many new…

I have been looking at patterns for “agile release approaches” and in this article I will be looking at some more patterns that I have observed. But I got a bit distracted by the philosophy of value and so I will be meandering for a little while before I get back on topic. If a…

When I first worked with an agile team, we released our work into production whenever we wanted to. We were able to do our own testing, our own release control and our own communication with users. We also supported our own work. We released some things during the day and others outside normal hours, where…

When I first became a coach it was great. I really enjoyed coaching and people told me that they found me really helpful. But I noticed that, while I was able to help people solve problems and gain “aha” moments, I seemed to be having the same conversations again and again. People seemed to be…

One of the quintessential things about being agile is that you get to have a story wall. Increasingly the team are not co-located, so they keep their wall online. Hopefully though it is still visible to the whole team, so they can all see where things are at, where the bottlenecks are, etc. This creates…

I saw a great movie a long time ago. It was called “The Princess Bride.” It had so many great quotes and absurd scenes that I could write an entire blog article about it. There was one thing though, that I am reminded of now when I am talking to people about coaching teams (agile…

Now that Agile has gone mainstream, I often find that people are concerned about the performance of the members of an agile team. In particular people seem interested in how we measure the Product Owner and Team Facilitator (Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Celebrity Post-it note Artiste etc). When working through this, I came up with…

When I see a great interview on TV, it seems to flow very naturally. The person being interviewed opens up and tells us some really interesting things while the interviewer laughs, nods, sighs and gasps. But when I see a bad interview, it looks really painful. Sometimes the interviewer seems more interested in talking about…

I recently went through a coaching assessment to make sure my skills are at the standard required to run an agile coaching course. We do this for anyone running the course since all of us trainers hold ourselves out to be accomplished coaches and when people come to a coaching course they expect a lot…