A blog about agile, lean, people and things
Reading Time: < 1 minute After my talk and post in May, I have now turned the Team Onion (formally the Agile Team Onion) into a free ebook. The Team Onion model is a way of helping collaboration between Agile teams and the rest of your organisation, to lead to successful delivery. It’s a short book (around 3000 words) and …
Reading Time: < 1 minute I’ve been running a friendly, low-tech, lunchtime Agile meet up in a park since Nov 2014, if you want to know more about it, have a look over here. One of the things that we’ve done since the start is to give our lovely attendees badges. And not the same badge, it’s a different design every …
Reading Time: < 1 minute I realise that I haven’t blogged about one of my latest projects, the diversity charter (although I’ve tweeted about it quite a bit). This came about after this blog post about considerations for event organisers and frustrations at seeing the same people at conferences. I created it to make people think about how the impact that they …
Reading Time: 5 minutes **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 …
Reading Time: 5 minutes 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 …
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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.
Reading Time: 2 minutes 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 …
Reading Time: 4 minutes **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 …
Reading Time: 3 minutes 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.
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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.
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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.
Reading Time: 6 minutes 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 …
Reading Time: 2 minutes 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.
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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 …
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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 …
Reading Time: 2 minutes 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 …
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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!
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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 …
Reading Time: 2 minutes 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 …
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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.
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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 …
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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.
Reading Time: < 1 minute 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 …
Reading Time: 2 minutes 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 …