A blog about people, teams, culture, organisations, agile delivery and other things
The term outcome is a brilliant way of describing the impact and value of doing something. I also like to use outcomes to help describe the capabilities of people and practices or disciplines. Let me explain why it’s so helpful.
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This week, I have been back at the Agile Cambridge conference with Agile on the Bench with my co-host, Cara Bermingham.
Agile on the Bench is a friendly, low-fi, lunchtime, outdoor, agile meetup. A mix of 10min, mostly analogy-based talks about all things agile, people, teams, users and getting things done… outside, on a bench, in a park.
One of our speakers had to pull out last minute thanks to covid, so I went to my blog archives to find something suitable as a fill-in.
So here it is, updated and ready for a re-read.
* Photo of Mark Dalgarno speaking just before me, taken by Cara Bermingham
In my recent post, Why Can’t we all get Along, I discussed the value of overlapping roles in multi/inter/transdisciplinary teams and referred to using the broken comb shape to describe skills and capabilities. In this post, I’ll expand on that theory and add an approach for using it to help teams build empathy, understanding and opportunities for contributions.
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I recently had the opportunity to work with the awesome people at Citizens Advice, guiding them in creating a capability and progression framework for the newly formed design, data and technology (DDaT) function. Being a forward-thinking organisation, they were open to trying something a bit different; this post describes the approach I used to help them do that.
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A little while back I wrote a post on skills and capability mapping with communities of practice, I have been developing this work further into an organisational-wide approach, under the name of Capability Profile Mapping.
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I first wrote about skills mapping in my book Building successful communities of practice. This post digs a little deeper into identifying skills and capabilities with communities of practice.
Skills and capability maps help organisations identify gaps and where to invest in skills development. So it makes sense that many want to create them.
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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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**Post updated Sept 2023**
I have recently taken up knitting (as anyone who follows me on Instagram will know), and as well as helping me build an increasing collection of brightly coloured hats, it’s helped remind me about the process of learning and how this relates to people learning in general. This post covers five concepts and tips to remember about learning.
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Last week I spoke at the awesome new meetup Agile 25×20 which is run by Mike Pearce of Moo.
The event is based on pecha kucha, speakers have 25 slides, all of which auto advance after 20 seconds. So 8 mins 20 seconds in total, with a chance for questions at the end. For the audience, this means that talks are short and to the point, there isn’t the time for speakers to dwell on slides. For the speakers, this means being prepared; 20 seconds can seem like a really short time when you have a lot to say, or a long time if you run out and you’re waiting for the slide to progress. It also means being really clear in what the focus of your talk is. As a speaker, I like the weighting on questions as I prefer a conversational style and the relaxed group (and beer) help the post talk conversations too.
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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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