Not everything in coaching is based on complex psychology and systems thinking. Sometimes you just want want a quick way to make a group decision, assess data or gather people's reactions to an idea. One of the quickest ways to assess an idea is to ask for a show of hands. I leaned this one… Continue reading Thumb based voting
Category: Decisions
A rough and ready presentation on agile governance
I recently gave a presentation on agile governance at a Gartner conference in Australia. A couple of people asked for a copy of my slides – but they don't make a lot of sense without some explanation, so I created a short video of the presentation: The original scrappy version is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLf1RFwQpFc&feature=youtu.be A cleaned-up,… Continue reading A rough and ready presentation on agile governance
The humble trade-off matrix
I have been doing some business analyst training recently and I spoke about a "trade-off matrix" a couple of times. A couple of people have asked for a good link to explain what one is and why they are so cool. So I looked on the web and couldn't find anything decent enough to send… Continue reading The humble trade-off matrix
The dark art of office politics for IT leaders (part one – why is it stressful?)
Apparently office politics is a horrible thing that other people do. But many of the emerging IT leaders I speak to get told they need to be better at "soft skills" and "influencing at a senior level". What this often means is get good a politics. Sadly a lot of office politics seems to involve… Continue reading The dark art of office politics for IT leaders (part one – why is it stressful?)
Stealing ideas from Stand Back and Deliver
I am running an “advanced BA course” next week and as part of the course we will be exploring the concept of strategy from a business analysts point of view. One of the trainers I work with (Shane) recommended we provide the participants with a book called “Stand Back and Deliver” by Pollyanna Pixton, Niel… Continue reading Stealing ideas from Stand Back and Deliver
Would you hire a project manager to plant a tree?
Many great ideas fall on deaf ears. So organisations bring in project managers to make sure we implement good ideas properly. Good project managers define and clarify the idea, break the idea into features and then deploy the features into production. But quite often, people just don’t make use of the shiny new features they… Continue reading Would you hire a project manager to plant a tree?
The one thing you can’t outsource is innovation – or is it?
This blog is normally a collection of my own thoughts rather than a source for links to other people's thinking. But it seems a lot of companies are now deliberately asking others to do their thinking for them, so it seems fair enough for me to do the same. Here is an interesting link to… Continue reading The one thing you can’t outsource is innovation – or is it?
The “what would someone else suggest” technique
Today I ran a workshop on workshops and predictably one of the things we did was brainstorming. But one of the participants was a little bit bored with putting post-it notes on the wall, so we replaced our standard brainstorming with "what would someone else do"". This approach can work really well in either a… Continue reading The “what would someone else suggest” technique
Estimating the impact of technical debt on stories – heat maps
I have been in several conversations recently about how we take refactoring and technical debt into account when estimating work on IT projects. For those not up with the jargon - refactoring involves improving or simplifying your code without changing the functionality. This means that the code can run faster and more reliably, be better… Continue reading Estimating the impact of technical debt on stories – heat maps
Finally launched my agile training game
We set up a stand at the recent Software Development Conference to run the Agile Release Planning Game I designed. It seemed to go down really well, so I have decided to make the game available publicly if anyone is interested in using it. In the game, participants are a group of scientists and engineers… Continue reading Finally launched my agile training game
James King 