James King

What you do next matters.

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  • Facilitation tip – introducing new ideas

    I gave a friend some feedback on his facilitation style recently. I suggested the he “introduce new ideas really well and stuff.”  Great advice, but perhaps not very specific or useful. Then I ran a facilitation related course and gave people feedback on, among other things, presenting ideas to the team.  There seemed to be…

  • My keynote at the Melbourne BA development day

    I went to the IIBA professional day in Melbourne and I gave the morning keynote for the day.  There were about 270 business analysts their to learn about all things BA. I thought I would publish the talk because a couple of people asked me about the content.  Apparently there is still some confusion about…

  • Is it really that hard to learn agile?

    I work with people going agile.  Sometimes it is an awesome experience and sometimes it is quite depressing. For example, I worked with some good, experienced people a while back.  They were were pretty sad before I turned up and pretty happy that I came to help them. This is the part of the agile…

  • “What why how” coaching for skills

    I recently wrote an article on coaching where I suggested building a toolkit of different approaches to use when coaching people and teams in different things. This is my (very basic) tool for teaching a skill – it is called “what why how”. I use it when I want to help someone develop a specific skill…

  • Quick view: Is 2 speed IT a good thing?

    I was talking to someone today about “2-speed IT” and whether it is: An excuse to avoid going agile, while still hoping to be invited to all the cool “go digital” fun projects; or A recognition that different types of technology require different approaches, requiring IT teams to adopt a strategic view. I started to…

  • Use the river diagram to communicate data

    I run a lot of workshops, including planning workshops and retrospectives.  Sometimes the crew votes on things like “what is the best feature, or how did we go this time.” But sometimes we collect data and then want to discuss it as a team.  And this presents a challenge – I like data in a…

  • Somehow I missed agile going mainstream

    I recently stumbled on this article again – Original article talking scrum. Actually someone posted it in LinkedIn . The ideas seemed so clear and so right when I read the article. In fact it seemed like something “the old guard” had ignored in their ignorance. This was fresh, free thinking that the old guard…

  • The cause and effect clock for agile coaches

    I wanted to introduce you to the cause and effect clock as a workshop tool for coaches

  • Would you prefer coaching or coaching?

    I ran an agile coaching course recently and, naturally, we spoke a lot about coaching. We ran through a lot of different techniques and approaches to coaching people in agile teams, but we discovered that both “coaching” and “agile” might mean different things to different people in different teams. Then someone asked how they would know…

  • Notes on story walls – longer term planning

    I have been writing about story walls and how agile teams might use them to manage their work.  But some agile teams feel rushed because, although they can see what needs doing today, they don’t know what is coming next. So in this article, I will extend the idea of using a story wall to…