Notes from the secret agile playbook, creating a coaching agreement

I have been working with some good coaches recently, but the were not very comfortable with the agile paperwork and coaching bureaucracy areas of coaching. Advertisements

Clarifying agile roles – speed dating?

I went through this quick meeting with an agile class recently and I said I would post this for the crew to refer back to. In agile teams there are a couple of core roles and then the rest depends on the kind of work the team does. But we can give some more clarity […]

Is it enough to say that the BA is the “universal translator” between business and IT?

I often hear that we need a business analyst to translate what the business people say, so that technical people understand them. Then, I am told we need the BA to then translate what the technical people say, so that the business people understand them. I guess it goes something like this: It sounds good, […]

Analysing stakeholders – beyond the basic communication plan

A basic map of our stakeholders Quite some time ago, I wrote an article on “creating a basic communication plan” and for many projects that is all you need. But sometimes it is worth analysing your stakeholders in more detail. This article explores a couple of approaches that I like to use when I need […]

Defining the value of your internal consulting team part 2 – your services

In my last article, I described an approach that you can use to define the purpose of an internal consulting team. I used Sophie and her BA team as an example and I will continue to do so here. This time I will talk about the “Service catalogue” or list of services that your team […]

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 […]

Using a moments of truth analysis to assess a team’s readiness for change

I have previously blogged about a number of approaches to assessing a team’s readiness for change, including the 7-S framework and the arenas of change approach, but today I thought I would explain a less well known approach – the “moments of truth” assessment. Actually I made it up so it is not too well […]