**UPDATE** The Agile Team Onion is now the Team Onion, same model, slightly new name. I’ve recently been playing with ways of explaining the extended Agile team for large and largeish organisations. I get frustration when I see Agile teams that are essentially siloed off from the wider business (for many reasons). This causes dependency …
Considerations for more diverse conferences
I have been thinking about barriers to diversity at conferences a lot recently. This is sparked by a few things, including my own recent conference submissions, an experiment that I carried out recently that let people encourage their friends to speak and conversations on the topic. Here is the round up of some of that …
Building Successful Communities of Practice
As you may know from previous posts, I’ve been busy writing a book called “Building Successful Communities of Practice: Discover How Connecting People Makes Better Organisations”. The book is now ready and you can now buy it both on kindle and as a paperback (print on demand) book.
Diversity in public speaking: help your friends find their voice
I am currently involved in running meetups in London (Agile on the Bench) and Leeds (Agile in Leeds) and c0-ran a conference last year. A couple of the challenges that I have are around finding new and interesting speakers as well as maintaining diversity in the speakers and the audience. A challenge that many organisers …
Explaining the role of a Delivery Manager
**Post updated Feb 2018** I have found myself explaining the role of delivery manager a lot over the last few weeks, so I thought I would share that description here to help others understand it. The term delivery manager is used to describe an essential set of skills on an agile team and is used in …
Writing a book in an agile way
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.
Community of practice maturity model download
I have been very busy recently writing a book (currently) called Building successful communities of practice: Discover how learning together makes better organisations. It’s been in progress since September and I’m planning on publishing it early next year.
Advanced Sticky Note Handling
I’ve run a fair few workshops over the years and they tend to include many sticky notes and have learnt a few tricks along the way, here are my top tips for professional sticky note handling.
Agile On The Bench, Successes And Learnings
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 …
Agile on the Bench goes Camping, the minimum viable conference
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.
The Deconstructed workshop, getting input from busy people
Getting busy people in a room together to workshop is hard and a challenge I came across last week. I’m currently working at the wonderful ustwo as an Agile coach (who are currently hiring for Agile coach/PMs in case you were wondering). One thing that I was asked to help out with is a refresh of the guidelines around how …
Agile on the Bench #3
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 …
2015 a year for learning (and MOOCs)
2015 is going to be all about learning and learning to learn. There has been a shift in the way that organisations are run, as the speed of technology and innovation increase, being able to learn and adapt is more and more important in order to keep up. This is why so many organisations are moving to …
Agile on the Bench #2: The second outing of the outdoor Agile meetup
After a successful first Agile on the Bench, we decided to do it all again, who’d have thought standing in the cold listening to people talk about agile related topics, without the use of tech would be what people wanted to do with a lunch time in December, but it is!
An interview on Agile Government Leadership
I was recently asked to give an interview to the website Agile Government Leadership, a community-powered network of Agile government professionals based in the US, you can see it online over here
A tool for visualising business risk and scheduling
I’ve just spent a week in Vienna at David J Anderson’s coaching masterclass, a 5 day look into organisational change and modern management with Kanban. One of the subjects we spent some time looking at was managing risk and using different values to understand how to schedule work. This exercise creates criteria that decision makers can agree to, which …
Doing Agile on a bench: A minimum viable event
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 …
What learning how to ride motorbikes taught me about being agile
I just gave a talk at the awesome Agile 25×20 about riding motorbikes and being implicitly agile, here is what it was about and the slides. This year I finally got my motorbike licence (yay!), it was an interesting experience in learning new skills and it got me thinking about how we learn and form habits and how does this apply to agile.
Building a (delivery) community a talk at Agile Cambridge
This 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 …
Webber Walker Wedding Week Notes (weeks 10 and 11)
There is just over 2 weeks to go until the wedding, so this is probably the last in the wedding week notes series. Once the excitement is over, I’ll post a whole overview for anyone looking to do something similar.
Talking about communities and learning at Agile 25×20
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 …
Best agile training? Just do it!
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/ -o0o- Best agile training? Just do it! 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 …
Webber Walker Wedding Week Notes (weeks 8 and 9)
Following on in the wedding week notes series and continuing the theme of week notes every other week, here is what has happened:
Webber Walker Wedding Week Notes (weeks 6 and 7)
Following on in the wedding week notes series and continuing the theme of week notes every other week, here is what has happened:
Webber Walker Wedding Week Notes (weeks 4 and 5)
I skipped the week notes last week as we are so organised we didn’t have much to say, we are not far off having everything in place, so we are ready to sit back and relax until September.