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Down with the kids

Inspiration sometimes comes from unlikely places. Last weekend, I took my children to the Story Museum in Oxford for a reading of The BFG (by the amazing stage actor Anthony Pedley). Anyone with children will know what happens after any such event: there is an obligatory trip to the gift… Read More »Down with the kids

Feedback loops

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  • 3 min read

feedback loopn. a circuit that feeds back some of the output to the input of a system When I agreed to run a discussion group on feedback loops, I thought that it would be easy: everyone thinks of the same few feedback loops, right? Wrong. Firstly, if you try to… Read More »Feedback loops

Independent feedback

I’m always on the lookout for ways of getting better engagement, from planning sessions to retrospectives, project kick-offs to project wrap-ups, workshops to meetups. How can you get independent thoughts that aren’t influenced by that loud/experienced/dominating participant? One tool that I experienced recently (which was being used to get feedback… Read More »Independent feedback

Systems Thinking

My old approach to systems thinking. When I met a new team, or the team’s primary focus changed, I used to run an exercise with the team that went like this: draw a flowchart of your processes. For example, a work request is made, it gets developed, then it is released.… Read More »Systems Thinking

Three Amigos

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  • 2 min read

How do you ensure that requirements are communicated from subject matter expert (e.g. Product Owner) to those implementing the work (e.g. the development team)? We tend to avoid detailed requirement specifications nowadays, but tediously long meetings are equally unattractive. Some say that “Three Amigos” is the solution. There are various… Read More »Three Amigos

Agile pub quiz

For its first session of 2016, the London Agile Discussion Group ran a pub quiz around agile and lean. The teams did pretty well and it was a close fought battle. The quiz caused a lot of interest so, due to popular demand, we’ve published a slightly cut-down version. No looking… Read More »Agile pub quiz

How short should your sprints be?

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  • 3 min read

How long should your sprint be? Although the latest version of The Scrum Guide (version July 2013) says it should be time-boxed at “one month or less”, the most common length in practice seems to be two weeks. The underlying rules for sprint lengths are: choose the length that is best for your… Read More »How short should your sprints be?

IMPROVing Agile Teams

If you think about it, there’s a lot of similarities between improv and the teams we work with: every day we face uncertainty about what we are going to have to deal with, we rely on the people around us to help us achieve success (and they rely on us),… Read More »IMPROVing Agile Teams

Agile on the Bench

Today, Emily Webber and I launched Agile on the Bench. Our idea was simple: people gather around a bench and listen to short talks on agile. In the spirit of Speaker’s Corner, we wanted to create a cheap, fun, and no-tech platform for people to share ideas, raise questions and… Read More »Agile on the Bench