A blog about people, culture, organisations and teams.
Posts about Agile and Lean thoughts, tools, events and methods.
My friend and work associate Ian Ames has generously offered to sponsor two places on my new course, Building Successful Communities of Practice for underrepresented and marginalised groups within the digital industry.
I asked Ian to tell me more about why he wanted to do this, and this is what he said. If you or someone you know would like to take him up on the offer, jump to the end of the post to find out how to get in touch with him.
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Exciting news! After lots of slide making, video recording and testing, I have just launched a new online course called Building Successful Communities of Practice.
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This week I ran a short retrospective to close a two-year-long project; I had limited time and ten willing participants. This post covers the approach I used to create space for reflection.
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This post is about something important, which is why it’s taken some time to put together.
Earlier this year I was fortunate to work with Doteveryone. We created a new agile event that frames team conversation about the potential wider consequences of what they are building.
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I run a remote meet-up called Agile in the Ether. A while back I asked twitter followers if I should extend it out to a conference and they said yes, so I did and it was great. This is what happened and what I learnt.
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I have a habit of bringing people and communities together, this means I can’t seem to help myself setting up or getting involved in running meetups (my current count is at six*). Faced with not enough time to devote to my existing meetup, I naturally decided to start a new one. This time a remote one.
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Many people use the term “Agile ceremonies” as a collective term for activities like standups, retrospectives, reviews and planning.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the word “ceremony” in this context. It’s never sat well with me and I don’t like using it with people who are new to agile ways of working.
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This is a quick blog post with some tips for effective stand-ups that a friend asked me to write so he could share it with someone else. So here it is Mark.
These 4Ps came to life when I was working with Amy Wagner creating and delivering some training in Brussels. The training was intended to help a team get better at the way they worked together and stand-ups were an area that needed attention. This isn’t uncommon for digital teams, they may be having regular stand-ups, but the real value can sometimes get lost.
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I do a fair bit of training with organisations that want to become more agile. The conversation often starts with “can you give agile training to our staff?”. This is a starting point for a conversation but needs a bit more digging before I can understand what the real need is and what outcome we should be aiming for.
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The realtime retrospective is a way of capturing feedback or information to help improvements in realtime. I recently tried it out at Agile in the City Bristol with some great results.
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I was recently invited to talk at the Turing Festival on the Product / People day. Here is that talk that I gave:
Firstly it’s worth me explaining why the title Embracing Change or Bracing for Change. I often give Agile training for people and teams new to Agile, one thing that I tend to cover is the Agile Manifesto and its principles. I talk about agile teams embracing change and ask people if they embrace change. All too often the answer is along the lines of “change is thrown at us all the time and we deal with it”, I’ve come to explain this as bracing for change rather than going out and seeking it (embracing change).
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After my talk and post in May, I have now turned the Team Onion (formally the Agile Team Onion) into a free ebook.
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Over the last few weeks, I have found myself explaining the role of delivery manager a lot, so I thought I would share that description here to help others understand it.
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As I mentioned in my last post, I have been writing a book called ‘Building successful communities of practice: Discover how learning together makes better organisations’, which is due to be published in early 2016. I wanted to share more about how I have gone about writing it using agile tools and techniques.
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Recently I blogged about the Agile on the Bench conference, a minimum viable conference in a campsite that I ran with David Lowe. It happened last Saturday, 25th July and it was an awesome day. The speakers and audience were fantastic and, much like our lunchtime events, the sun came out, despite the heavy rain the day before. In my last post I talked about what we were trying to achieve and here I’ll talk about the successes, what we learnt, where we could improve and share the conference budget.
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Those of you who read my blog, or follow my twitter account will have seen that I co-run a meet-up called Agile on the Bench. This summer we are taking the idea forward to a one day conference in a campsite.
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There was a great turn out for the third, chilly but sunny Agile on the Bench last Wednesday lunch time, thanks for everyone that made it along and contributing to the discussions.
We had three great speakers, Craig Strong talking about value, Darci Dutcher on goals and the psychology writing things down and John V Willshire talking about flow engines.
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After a successful first Agile on the Bench, we decided to do it all again, who would have thought standing in the cold listening to people talk about Agile related topics, without any tech would be what people wanted to do with a lunch time in December, but it was!
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I recently embarked on a new project with David Lowe to run low cost, low effort meet-up over lunchtime on a park bench, called Agile on the Bench.
It started, like so many good ideas with a random chat in between meetings, what if we did a low cost, very social agile event on a park bench over lunch time?
Continue readingThis week I had the great pleasure of talking about communities at Agile Cambridge, a fantastic 3 day conference set in the grounds of a Cambridge college. My talk was specifically about building a community of practice and how we have built the agile delivery community at Government Digital Service. Communities is a topic close to my heart and I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people that were either trying to build their own, or whose organisations had realised the huge value of them and were tasking people with building one.
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This is a post that I wrote for the Government Digital Service Transformation blog on Agile training which originally appeared over here: https://digitaltransformation.blog.gov.uk/2014/08/11/best-agile-training-just-do-it/
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That’s the conclusion we came to when we asked our practitioners the question we get asked most often: how do I know how to get the best training in agile project management?
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I wrote a post over on the Cabinet Office technology blog about how IT service design maps to the GDS service design phases.
The post originally appeared here: cabinetofficetechnology.blog.gov.uk/2013/12/02/making-an-it-service-design-phases
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Much like any project at GDS or on the digital transformation programme the Cabinet Office Technology programme, which will deliver modern, flexible technology services that are at least as good as those people use at home, is following the service design pattern of: discovery, alpha, beta and live.
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I have been looking around for the right digital tool that will support my physical project wall. I want something that allows me easily to back up information for reference, but more importantly outputs the useful metrics that are important for continuous improvement.
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I have a second post on the GDS blog, this time it’s about a project that I have spend some time on whilst at GDS. I have added the full post below and you can read the original over here: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/08/30/scaling-agile-practices-to-the-the-gds-portfolio/
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Here at GDS, agile thinking and techniques inform how we do what we do, this extends from delivering projects, programmes and the GDS portfolio of work. I’ve been working with a team of people to implement and run an agile portfolio management function at GDS and this is an overview of how and why we did it.
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I have been experimenting with Personal Kanban. I do a lot of things in my spare time, including managing a community website, running a photo blog, writing a book and helping to run meet-ups. Now on top of that put the other everyday chores, things like fixing stuff in my flat, renewing my motorbike insurance, taking my cat to the vet etc etc.
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