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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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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Tester – Specialist Title or Generalising Specialist?
Are you someone who has spent years as a manual tester, following a familiar testing process, using a tried and tested set of techniques - the result of years of specialisation; perhaps you were a test analyst or a ‘QA’ or you took on a similar role in a previous life and you were clear on the part…
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Imperfect agile, or fit for purpose?
I have been looking at patterns for “agile release approaches” and in this article, I will be looking at some more patterns that I have observed. But I got a bit distracted by the philosophy of value and so I will be meandering for a little while before I get back on topic.
If a team creates value…
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Hiring for the agile mindset
If you spend time researching and educating yourself on agile as a way of working, you will come to the point where you have an “ah-ha” moment around the key foundation for agile success. We have been conditioned over the years, to believe success resides in action and activity. The more action and…
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Continuous (“ish”) release patterns in agile teams
When I first worked with an agile team, we released our work into production whenever we wanted to. We were able to do our own testing, our own release control and our own communication with users. We also supported our own work. We released some things during the day and others outside normal…
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