5 Tips for Better Daily Stand-ups
Many teams I work with are already employing the agile basics, including working with user stories and kanban boards, but the most universal agile practice I see is the daily stand-up, or scrum meeting. What’s surprising is the amount of complaining I hear about how ineffective these meetings can…
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Safe to Fail and Formula 1
The term ‘Safe to Fail’ seems to be thrown about as if it is an easy thing to achieve. It isn’t always safe to fail. Adam Boas put it beautifully at Agile Australia 2018 where he referred to “Defined Safe Boundaries over Motherhood statements about safe to fail”. (Boas, 2018)So why do we need a safe…
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The Lost Alphabet: An Agile Release Planning Game For Teams
This basic game is designed to help players understand the concepts involved in release and iteration planning. It covers how to plan for new features, minimise defects, monitor velocity, re-plan and the impact of technical debt. You will need:The facilitator's guide
The team instructions (listed…
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User Stories: Your First Step Should Always Be Back
Have you ever played an outfield position in baseball or softball? As an outfielder, your primary responsibility is catching pop flies. When you hear the crack of the bat, there’s a moment of panic as you try to figure out where the ball is headed. For young players, their first instinct is alway…
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SoftEd Named in Top 10 Agile Consulting and Services Companies
SoftEd has been named in APAC CIO Outlook magazine's Top 10 Agile Consulting/ Services Companies for "their finesse in delivering cutting edge agile services in 2018". With over 25 years of experience, SoftEd has supported some of the world's largest and most innovative organisations to adopt new…
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Remembering Gerald (Jerry) Weinberg
Some years ago I sat down with Jerry Weinberg hoping to persuade him to travel from the USA to Australia and New Zealand, to speak at a SoftEd conference. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm to have someone of his calibre come “down under” was not met with similar enthusiasm on his part! Jerry was already…
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Agile Versus Knowledge Part One - Stories Are Great
Last week I gave a talk for business analysts in Sydney on “documentation for agile teams”My talk did not really contain anything too radical, but it did draw a reasonable crowd, with 80 business analysts making time to come after a full day of work. So why did 80 people turn up when, being busine…
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4 Tips for AI and Digital Transformation Analysis
I am excited to hear that many of my clients are venturing into projects that include digital transformation, intelligent automation, machine learning and other artificial intelligence capabilities. I am passionate about these topics and how these capabilities deliver value to our end users. If…
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Help! I don’t have time to do requirements right!
It seems each year it gets worse and worse—BAs have WAY too much to do! They can’t say no and can’t ask leaders to slow down the flow of requirements work. The backlog grows bigger and bigger, and teams get further behind every day. It’s impossible to catch up. I am going to write something that…
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Leadership and project management in a typical agile team
In my last article, I claimed that you can have an agile project manager who ran agile projects. But the projects I described did not involve “typical” agile teams. So now I want to show that a project manager can work well with a typical agile team. Let me start with a simple question:
Can a…
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Agile project management patterns
In my last article, I used a homemade leadership model to look at leadership in a self-managed (agile) team. I then used this as a basis to look briefly at how project managers might help or hinder an agile team. Here I take that concept a step further by looking at how people use project manager…
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True confessions: I was an agile project manager
I was once an agile project manager. In fact, I did it more than once. If that is not shocking enough then maybe I should also confess that I have coached, trained and enabled others to be agile project managers. In this article, I will share my experience of being an agile PM without a real product…
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