How to treat employees like prisoners
During this time of pandemic, one small corner of the economy is doing morbidly well: employee surveillance software. “Identify your team's superstars, time-thieving slackers and in-betweeners”“Take continuous screenshots of employee workstations at intervals you set”“When remote workers know they…
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How to get your requirements right sooner
As a business analyst, you have the very important job of uncovering what your stakeholders really need, not just what they say they need so that you can deliver solutions that they love. However, getting to the bottom of what your stakeholders really want can be challenging. You have to deal with…
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Taking time to think in 2020
It is almost comical that in our busy lives we struggle to find time for deep thought. The pace of business is moving so fast people come to expect movement and activity as signs of success. Thinking is in most cases a sedentary activity done with a pensive look. Even the word pensive which mean…
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How to work effectively in a remote team
Where and how we work has changed dramatically over the past few weeks. The rise of Covid-19 has prompted many companies to ask some or all of their teams to prioritise their wellbeing and the wellbeing of their teammates by working remotely. While technology advancements have meant that most of u…
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Working remotely is not the same as working from home
Occasionally we may have had the opportunity to work from home, however, that's usually not for a prolonged amount of time. In the near future, a lot of us may find ourselves working remotely for a long time. If we are going to be working remotely we need to change our working practices to maximise…
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Home checklist when preparing for your Live On-line class
Training will continue as organizations have to prepare for new rules, regulations, policies and procedures that happen as a result of the unpredicted impacts of Covid-19. The quicker organizations can pivot to provide solutions and services for what’s to come, the greater value they can…
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Using a story wall to add learning
A story wall helps us to focus our attention on the present, by allowing us to take a snapshot of the state of our work at any given moment. Doing so allows us to see bottlenecks and priorities and generally take better control of our work in progress. But in my last article, I mentioned that we can…
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SoftEd celebrates 30 years
In February 2020, SoftEd celebrated thirty years of being in business. Established in 1990 as a result of a management buy-out of the education arm of Datacom Systems, Software Education (SoftEd) was formed by Martyn Jones, Merrill Holdsworth and John Watson. “30 years ago, we saw the advent of the…
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Basic Feedback
I was running a course for agile team facilitators and coaches and we discussed “giving feedback. ” It turned out that everybody was giving feedback but some of the crew were not confident that they were doing it well. I mentioned this to the crew in another course and people again mentioned that…
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Agility in three: Setting up for success
There is a lot of confusion around agility and the implementation of agility at the moment. My theory is that since there is money in helping organisations learn “how to do agile” there is money to be made in making a specific agility framework, trademarking it, creating training courses and then…
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How to change your thinking to maximise your value
As the new year and the new decade dawns most of us are thinking about how we can maximise our effectiveness this year. It’s a popular time to think about new things, new ways, new beginnings. Often to just end up applying the same thinking from last year, the processes from last year and the…
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What happened to double-loop learning in agile?
Back in my day times were hard. I don’t want to shock you, but my corporate life began last century before even Twitter and Slack existed. You can imagine how slow-moving and inefficient we were, but we knew we could do better and so we focused on improving. We came up with many new ideas, both…
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