Why are people backing away from agile (theory 2) – who is the tool?

I recently ran a coaching session for a team who have been adopting agile. They were struggling to gain value from some of the practices and felt a little guilty, but I was impressed with how they collaborated, focused on what mattered and took accountability for delivery. I told them that they were actually pretty […]

Agile starting in kindergarten?

Earlier this year my daughter came to work with me. Although she was only 6 years old at the time, she came to co-deliver a day in the agile coaching course that I was running. It was interesting to watch as she explained the growth mindset, “golden conversations” and the importance of mixing both persistence […]

A slightly modified release planning game – the lost alphabet 2018 version

I invented a release planning game many years ago and I have used it in training quite a few times. Then Eduardo Meira Peres invented a much simpler version. Teams must use sprints to recreate the alphabet after society forgot how to spell words. The game covers concepts like sprints, velocity and adaptive planning in […]

Agile versus knowledge part one – stories are great

Last week I gave a talk for business analysts in Sydney on “documentation for agile teams” My talk did not really contain anything too radical, but it did draw a reasonable crowd, with 80 business analysts making time to come after a full day of work. So why did 80 people turn up when, being […]

Why are people backing away from agile? Theory one – losing sight of craftsmanship

Agile approaches are great and I even tell my friends to use them. But recently I have noticed some organisations backing away from their agile implementations. It got scarier when I noticed that Ron Jeffries, one of the original signatories to the Agile Manifesto, wrote an article titled “Developers should abandon agile.” It’s a good […]

True confessions. I was an agile project manager

I was once an agile project manager. In fact I did it more than once. If that is not shocking enough then maybe I should also confess that I have coached, trained and enabled others to be agile project managers. In this article I will share my experience of being an agile PM without a […]

What does an agile coach actually do – is it really that simple?

In my last article, I explained what I think agile coaches do in practice. But I did not reveal some of the complications and messy bits that get in the way of adopting the model in any sensible way. So in this article I will explore some of the complexities and messy bits.