What you do next matters.

  • Agile is actually really hard videos

    I have included some agile is awesome videos. But to be fair, agile is not always awesome.  So here are a couple of great videos that show the pain of going agile – from the point of view of an passionate agile PM. The first video shows his attempt to go agile in a large…

  • Do you really need to celebrate failure to improve continuously?

    Last century I learned about something called TQM which was all about empowering teams and improving processes. Now I am learning about agile and design thinking concepts. These are great approaches and we have learned many things over the years, but some things have not changed. For example, one thing common to all of these…

  • Some comments on story collaboration sessions

    I recently ran a course for product owners and said that the product owner or BA facilitates the elaboration, slicing and general understanding of stories WITH THE TEAM. Some of the crew asked how to do this and the following is what we came up with in the class.

  • When did the buses in Perth go agile?

    It is commonly accepted wisdom that agile development is an IT thing, now making its way out into “the business”. But it appears to me that the bus drivers in a city called Perth went agile without the IT guys showing them the way. (warning – this is a bit of a long read).

  • Do you do any upfront design in agile projects?

    When a small team is working with great rhythm, it often looks like there is no upfront planning or design … and sometimes that is in fact the case. But more often than not, that small team is integrating into an existing “ecosystem” of products, services, internal processes, team structures and IT systems. And generally…

  • MVP is a minimum viable product. But what does that actually mean?

    I have had many discussions with people who are working on an “MVP.”.  But they seem to mean different things.

  • What are the typical role descriptions in agile?

    I am supposed to be doing some  blogs on scaling agile, but I was distracted by being very lazy. But sort of on topic – people often ask me “what are the roles in agile and what are their responsibilities?” I usually say there are three roles – product owner, team assistant and team member. …

  • Where would an agile coach start if they wanted to help my organization become agile?

    I am still pondering the problem of scaling “agile” and whether it is a real thing or not.  But this is my summary of where a coach will start … Essentially, they will ask some questions like: Who am I working with? What do they do? Who do they do it for? Then they might…

  • If you want to scale agile you should use a coach. But watch out – some are working for evil agile

    If you want to scale agile beyond one team you should probably use an agile coach to help you on your journey But watch out – some have signed the agile for evil manifesto and might not be a good fit for where you and your team want to end up. This is the manifesto…

  • Hang on. Agile is an adjective

    I just looked it up in the dictionary: Agile is an adjective. It means “able to move quickly and easily”.