A Miro workshop, created with Jamie Arnold, that takes you from vision to measures, identifying your outcomes along the way.
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Five Questions to Measure Outcomes (a Miro board)
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Category: Tools
Some tools that I have created for myself and others to use for their own projects and programmes. These are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Why have difficult conversations when you can talk about tools instead?
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A while back, I created this sticker and was reminded of it this week during a meetup, so I thought I’d share it here.
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The Team Onion model now has a new home
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In 2016, I first introduced the Team Onion model (as the Agile Team Onion). Since then, it’s had a few iterations and now has a new website home of its own at teamonion.works.
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Think Links icebreakers a Miro board template that you can use
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In a previous post, I wrote about Quick icebreakers for online meetings, (that don’t suck). In that post, I mentioned that I love using the Think Links game created by Edward de Bono to get people to think creatively and get the ice broken.
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A short retrospective format to close a piece of work
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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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Consequence Scanning – an agile event for responsible teams
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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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Facilitation feedback tool
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Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement
Helen Timperley and John Hattie
Many of us facilitate workshops or agile habits regularly and we know if a workshop has gone well if the outcomes are useful. There are also lots of elements of facilitation that we don’t often get feedback on. So here is a tool I use to help think about and frame facilitation feedback.
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Posters to show how awesome communities of practice are
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Update, the posters are no longer available, but you can learn more about communities of practice in my book and you can download my community of practice tools and templates here.
If you regularly read my blog, then you will know that communities of practice are my specialist subject and core to a lot of the work that I do. I help lots of organisations who are building their specialist skills in digital and agile delivery and those communities form an essential foundation for just that.
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The team manual, an exercise to help build empathy in teams
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**Post updated Feb 2025**
In a recent talk that I gave at Agile testing days and Lean Agile Scotland called “Whole Team Responsibility”, I mentioned the team manual as a way of growing empathy in teams. Here is a quick write-up with a little more detail on how to use it.
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Tips for using Trello effectively
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I’ve been using Trello for a few years, both for personal projects and with teams. I love how simple it is to use, which makes it easy to use in the way that works for you. The downside of this is that some teams struggle with knowing where to start, this post is about showing you how the team I’m with at Defra currently uses it.
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The Realtime Retrospective
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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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The Team Onion: A short (free) ebook
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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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A Tool for tracking Kanban projects (that you can cut out and keep)
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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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