Using Scrum & Kanban in the real world
“I have an idea.” The 4 words that strike fear into my wife How do you know if your killer new idea is really any good? Although my recent book, The Innovation Revelation, looked at finding solutions to customers’ problems at a macro level (i.e. from understanding the intersection between an organisation’s needs and customer… Read More »
Charlie is at his wits end. He and his team suffer from their organisation’s bad practices on a daily basis and he has had enough. He writes his resignation letter, listing a dozen problems. Some of you will recognise this as the start to my new book, a story about a fictional organisation called Nuttinghams.… Read More »
In the 1950s, Carl Rogers made a defining change in the way therapists viewed their patients: rather than the expert therapist needing to fix the patient (as in psychoanalysis), Rogers proposed that the client was the expert in their own life and therefore the client was best-placed and capable to find a solution to their… Read More »
I’m a big believer in simple tools (afterall, they are there to help us get the work done rather than be the focus of our work). I’m also a sucker for a bit of stationery. So when I got sent a free sample of Myndflo — apparently “A sustainable alternative to flip charts and sticky… Read More »
When I started writing The Innovation Revelation in the summer of 2017, I had a very specific goal: I wanted to take what I’d learned from working with dozens of top organisations, and share the best practices for creating valuable products and services. But it couldn’t be another text book; it had to be easy-to-read… Read More »
At this month’s meetup we tried something new: allowing people to learn by putting them in a simulation of a Scrum event. That is, we created a daily stand-up and retrospective using ‘actors’, then asked participants to jump in if they thought they could do a better job at facilitating. Preparation Ahead of the session,… Read More »
Abraham Lincoln’s “you can’t please all the people all of the time” is certainly true, but sometimes we make the situation worse unnecessarily. Here’s my list of 10 ways to demotivate people in a working environment that are all avoidable: 1. Refer to people as “Resources” Printers, paper, pens, computers are resources; people aren’t. Referring… Read More »
John Kotter is a professor of leadership at Harvard, as well as a best-selling author. One of his most famous books, Leading Change, outlines eight errors that cause corporate “change efforts” to fail. How many do you recognise? #1: Complacency In short, the organisation doesn’t create a great enough sense of urgency for the change.… Read More »
“Scrum Mastery is about servant leadership.” “The best leaders are servant leaders.” We hear statements like this a lot in our agile world. But what does it actually mean? It all started in 1970 with Robert K. Greenleaf’s essay “The Servant as Leader”. What does Servant Leadership mean? Greenleaf says that a great leader is,… Read More »
So you’re an “agile coach” day-to-day, but you want to get some sort of certification. Which one should you get? Here’s a summary of some of the most popular options. Agile Coach (ICP-ACC) ICAgile has a number of tracks, two of them relating to coaching: Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC) and Coaching Agile Transitions (ICP-CAT). ICAgile says… Read More »