Part 1: Have you thrown your customer out the window yet? Initially, when I step foot inside an organisation, I try to get a snapshot of what the business looks like. I look at how the business is managed, how is it structured, what does it value? I do this because I believe that the success of any Agile endeavour is primarily dependent on its…
https://youtu.be/wr1jyPqBuHk As promised, I will be running a series of one hour webinars later this week focusing on Motivation. It is perfect for anyone who is working with teams and wants to better understand how your mind works with motivation and how to understand motivation in a team environment. I have two time slots Friday 20th of Dec at 14:00 GMT Saturday 21st of Dec…
Rolling out Scrum is not exactly rocket science. But people are. A few thoughts on bringing relationships front and centre I read an article recently that stated that in the UK, productivity has increased by 2% over the eleven years since 2008. Before 2008, it was averaging 2% per year but now we are looking at 2% per decade. It led me to thinking about…
Recently, I have undertaken a number of roles as an Agile Engagement Lead and Coach, working with large corporates as they began the journey of migrating their operations and delivery to agile ways of working. In most cases, I was starting with entirely new teams who had absolutely no agile experience. It was challenging, but interesting as I had to develop a systematic approach to…
many of the places that I have worked, both as a consultant and as a part of a product delivery team, it is usually a case of keeping the Enterprise Information Security team (EIS) at arm’s length. Truth be told, many teams hold to the old adage that the less EIS get involved, the better. Even more so with agile delivery, as the focus towards…
So, let me talk about a word that crops up a lot when people are talking about Agile product development, the term “Waterfall”. Agile (and Scrum as a subset of agile) started in Software development. But before agile practices began to take hold, people used other ways of delivering value. They often talk about what we call “traditional project management methods” and this is used…
When we talk about prioritization, we are fundamentally talking about prioritizing the backlog, as this is the single source of truth when it comes to the product. We also know that it is the Product Owner who is accountable for prioritization. But the Product Owner is not alone in this activity. In fact, for backlog prioritization to be a success, it must incorporate the views,…
User Stories 101 – The format of a story There is an accepted format for user stories, and though there are variations, the fundamentals are widely used. AS a I want so that Example: As a registered user, I want to log into website A, so that I can access my online courses Do you remember, our initial user story in yesterday’s post: Mum says to…
When I began in project management, before the evolution of agile, we used waterfall methods. In practice, this meant that we started by doing our analysis, then our planning. When we completed planning, we progressed to building our product. The problem was, that we were making all our decisions up front, when we knew the least about what we wanted to do. (BTW: I just…