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 […]
A question I have been hearing a lot lately is how do you know whether an employee is putting in their hours, or not slacking off. This question seems to be particularly concerning for people in the context of working from home where the perception is that it is more prevalent. The irony here of […]
I have worked in software delivery for over 25 years now and in that time I don’t recall ever hearing of a project being cancelled due to lack of efficiency. By contrast I have seen numerous project cancelled because of misguided decisions in the name of efficiency. The most common is where team decide to […]
Scrum has only three roles: the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the Dev Team. Scrum names three roles because the framework needs all three roles, they are all as important as each other and all are vital to the successful implementation of Scrum. But of the three key roles the Scrum Master is the […]
‘Community’ along with ‘engagement’ are two terms frequently thrown around by leaders as being important, critical, even crucial, and yet rarely do you get any sense of what the terms mean to them, or indeed to us. We know they are important, but I do not get the impression that there is a sense of […]
These are slides from the Agile Product Ownership Meetup, where we discussed the Discovery Phase of a product.
I recently saw an article where someone said that all leadership, sales and politics can be simplified to just two types of influencing motivations. Inspiration or Manipulation. Essentially you can be stimulated to act or you can be persuaded to act. (Push or Pull) The manipulation aspect is fairly easy to understand. In leadership this […]
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 […]
What sometimes gets lost or at least confused is the notion that ‘Agile’ is at its core it is a form of project management, a style of planning. One of the main benefits of Agile is that it is restrictive and limiting. It forces focus and prioritisation and it limits work in progress, it mandates […]
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 […]
There is an old saying – An Agile Transformation is easy, you only have to change two things: Everything you say, and everything you do. But actually, as obvious as that joke was, it is also wrong. You only need to change one thing, you need to change the way you think. Project or Product […]
Or more conventionally – The map is not the terrain. This is an old quote attributed to Alfred Korzybski which is highly appropriate to my current client, as we make Charts of the oceans. They will be the first to agree that a chart is not the topography. Charts can and frequently go out of […]
I found an interesting link discussing common Project Management problems and suggested solutions, and I found myself questioning the advice given… http://www.cio.com/article/2391872/project-management/12-common-project-management-mistakes–and-how-to-avoid-them.html So many projects, so much mismanagement. That’s the refrain of many IT executives. Indeed, even with project management software, IT projects often wind up taking longer (much longer) than planned and costing more […]
Recently I have spent a lot of time talking about story writing, but this week the focus has been on Acceptance Criteria and there have been a variety of comments that have caused me to reflect and have caused me some concern. Some examples: Unless stated otherwise a story is assumed to be happy path […]
