Unboxed Roundup: our links for w/c 10th November 2014

We've rebooted our Dev Newsletter to encompass links from the entire company. You can expect plenty of tech as before but it'll be mixed in with our thoughts on design, agile, lean, and whatever else we find interesting each week.

Failure Demand - Murray

http://blog.mattedgar.com/2014/11/09/sink-or-swim-a-short-story-about-failure-demand/

A reminder that design is important to everything you do, no matter how trivial. Start with the user needs and work from there.

Scrum for a management team - Gavin

http://www.lagerweij.com/2011/05/20/scrum-for-management/

A company applies scrum and agile to their distributed management team.

The team was particularly struck with the fact that with the new levels of transparency and communication, even given their the different areas of expertise, it has become easy and normal for them to pick up parts of each other’s work regularly

Waste in the NHS - Martyn

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/05/nhs-wastes-over-2-bn-on-unnecessary-treatment

SH:24 brought us into close contact with the NHS and the experience gave me a new perspective on the amount of waste within the different organisations. From software procurement to employee contracts, nothing quite works as well it should. There are some massive opportunities to make things better but a general sense that it's all too late.

The new user story backlog is a map - Gavin

http://agileproductdesign.com/blog/the_new_backlog.html

A flat backlog removes all context. Story Mapping is a backlog keeps the skeleton of the project in full view.

"After all that work, after establishing all that shared understanding I feel like we pull all the leaves off the tree and load them into a leaf bag - then cut down the tree."

The Phoenix Project - Dom

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_Project:_A_Novel_About_IT,_DevOps,_and_Helping_Your_Business_Win

I found this book fascinating and transformative in the same way as To Sell Is Human, Re:Work and The One Minute Manager Meets The Monkey.

Communicate like Github - Ben W

http://ben.balter.com/2014/11/06/rules-of-communicating-at-github/

How and why to use chat and IM like github does.