One of the challenges of an Agile Coach, or anyone in a management or leadership role is establishing what I have seen referred to as the “zone of acceptance” for individual team members. The Zone of Acceptance is a term for the tasks an individual sees as something they are prepared to do as part of […]
Seems an odd question when for over a hundred years this has been the default option, we have never questioned it and often the benefits have seemed so obvious it is rare when they are articulated. But are the benefits clear and are the benefits restricted to a physical office or are there other ways […]
The phrase of 2020 has become – “Sorry I was on mute” this has become a little bit of a running joke and I feel sure that nearly all of us have experienced it in almost every meeting. But what would happen if we leaned in to the situation and simply asked people to NOT […]
One of the things I have noticed over the last few years is a drastic increase in the use of metrics. Particularly with the surge in the use of electronic boards for teams data is much more readily available and so is much more frequently used. Previously there was an effort required to collect and […]
I have been very fond of Scrum and a strong advocate for it since my first introduction to it about 12 years ago. But in recent years I have not been exposed to it so much, my current organization favors more of a Kanban approach to software delivery. However, this last few months I have […]
I have been asked by a friend to write an article explaining the concepts of Herbie from the book “The Goal” in a more accessible way. The book itself is amazing but in my opinion the language used in the 5-focusing steps has tried too hard to be scientific and precise that it makes it […]
I have recently been presenting a talk on WiP limits and as part of my research I spent some time looking into the history of Henry Ford as he was one of the most influential pioneers of what today we would call Lean or Kanban. He was the pioneer of almost all of our current […]
Have you ever noticed that late projects only ever seem to get later? Why is it that any gains get absorbed and delays get compounded? Let’s say I have a mini-project where I have a builder adding a kitchen to a house, he will construct the walls and then I’ll have a plumber come in […]
I grew up in the UK but I have lived in the USA for a little over 6 years in total, which equates to around a quarter of my working life, so whilst I still feel very British there is an element of the mid-Atlantic creeping in. That is to say I feel like I […]
I have recently been reflecting on the impact of our choices when hiring new staff. Over the last few years hiring has been a major activity for me, and so I am particularly interested in what the impact of these hiring decisions has on the team and the organisation. I have a number of experiences […]
The Theory of Constraints complements Agile software development extremely well, it is about applying a mindset of ongoing improvement to your organization. It contains the notion of applying efforts to improve to the areas that will have the most impact and offers some practical techniques for achieving this. When we talk about the Theory of […]
It seems like there is a very personal level to what Agile Software Development means, as far as I can tell there is no consistent common understanding of what agility means. Some see it as a framework, others as a mindset. For me it means two things. We have agility in our planning. We expect […]
Medical students are taught early to carefully consider the possible impact of their actions, this often translates to a bias towards inaction. A paradox when many of us consider them as being ‘fixers’. “Given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more […]
