Blog / Agile
I have been asked recently about what metrics we would use to measure an organisation’s key delivery metrics. Several PMOs are keen on metrics and measures - it gives them a reason to exist. When we deliver training or try to explain Agile...
Although private software developers have long been fans, Agile in the public sector is only just starting to gain momentum – and it’s proving well worth the effort. Here are five tips for running fun, productive workshops. National government ma...
Agile for government can be a very different kettle of fish than Agile in the private sector. It’s an alien context, it’s resistant to change and it’s used to playing by different rules. All the same, Agile offers fantastic opportunities for gover...
Far from being a bad fit for the public sector, SMEs hold the key to key to innovation and can bring jaw-dropping cost savings. Civil servants have often been wary about working with smaller companies, especially when it comes to high-profile are...
Agile methodology has its enthusiastic followers in the private sector, but many civil servants are wary about adopting it in the context of government software development and other public sector procurement – usually without good cause. Whilst ...
@sleepyfox asks: “I’m having trouble with my Agile team, how do I make them more self-organising?” Dear sleepyfox, You will struggle to “make” a self organising Team due to the very nature of the dynamic- how...
About a week ago, I was chatting to one of my friends about his new job. He seemed to be happy, he has a great Team, a friendly and supportive manager, a nice office - overall he was very positive, with the exception of one little niggle. When he ...
When you work for one of London’s leading Agile companies it is hard not to get inspired by the scrum processes. Inspired or brainwashed your choice, but I adopted some of the scrum processes when I was the Office Manager. To have daily sta...
I remember my first planning game well. I was very excited. Someone had just mentioned the need for a good bassline and I was about to jump up doing some serious air guitar to Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, “man this is going to blo...
We use Pivotal Tracker quite a lot these days and I was looking around on the web for a quick image of the Pivotal Tracker Workflow. I didn’t find much so I did a quick drawing which I thought I would share. I might put this into...
We recently launched our first Social Media game, www.pinmeifyoucan.com - for Contiki. It’s a Google maps integration with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. It was a challenging project on tight timescales which presented some unique problems ...
My wife and I had a friend over for dinner last night and during conversation she asked me what it is I do. I replied that I work for a software consultancy and I’m a QA and ScrumMaster. ‘Huh?’ was the reply I got. I kno...
In Part One of this blog I discussed how we set up the kanban board and the process we used to try out kanban for the first time on our own internal Timesheets application. Here is what we learned about the process. The first thing I learned, as ...
After reading the book ‘Kanban and Scrum - Making the most of both’ (Henrik Kniberg & Mattias Skarin, 2010), I was quite eager to give Kanban a try on a project. All I needed was a project that had fantastic clients that understand...
Another perfect release- this is what it’s all about, now time to kick back, cocktail in hand, bathing in the glorious glow of heaped praise as stakeholder after stakeholder thank Goldilocks and the Three Bears for managing to translate thei...
In an ideal world there won’t be any problems in production. In an ideal world there’s a great soundtrack playing while the dev team, PMO and the business high-five one another in slow-mo. If you’re talking about a complex ...