James Wyllie

What is Scrum?

This week’s blog post is based on a chapter from our book, Scrum 101: the most frequently asked questions about Agile with Scrum, which is available to buy for £9.90. Scrum is a framework that can be used to help apply the core values and principles of the Agile Manifesto (Beck et al.,… Read More »What is Scrum?

Autonomy in practice

During a recent consulting engagement, I was working with the leadership team on the next phase of their organisational evolution. We were talking about the kind of culture they wanted to build, and the topic of autonomy was raised. The concept of autonomy has been popularised by Dan Pink in… Read More »Autonomy in practice

Continuous Improvement with Team Sky – Taking inspiration from professional cycling

A friend of mine recently pointed me in the direction of an article by Joao Medeiros in Wired magazine, titled: Behind the scenes with Chris Froome and Team Sky ahead of the Tour De France 2016. As I began to read the article, I was immediately interested, not only because I’m… Read More »Continuous Improvement with Team Sky – Taking inspiration from professional cycling

Turbine – In Brief

Turbine is a recently published “methodology” that outlines a vision for the continuous delivery of business value driven software iterations. The creators of Turbine; Marco Tedone and John Ferguson Smart, have put together a manifesto and a supporting structure for how a Turbine style delivery environment can be achieved, consisting of environment conditions… Read More »Turbine – In Brief

Transparency – The Missing Pillar

There are three pillars underpinning any empirical process: transparency, inspection and adaptation. Teams are generally familiar with inspection and adaptation, after all, frameworks like Scrum are quite prescriptive about the need for retrospectives. Teams often overlook transparency. There are a number of ways in which a team can be transparent. Firstly, they can… Read More »Transparency – The Missing Pillar

An Obsession with Labels

Having spent the last 5 years working in retail, and specifically high end fashion, I’ve seen a lot of obsessing over labels. You might expect that of the retail fashion industry, but it seems this obsession with labels has made its way into the software development community too. Using a framework like Scrum is… Read More »An Obsession with Labels

Thinking in systems

I’ve recently been involved in delivering a number of new services designed to replace a long serving monolithic web application. Sound familiar? The move to a service oriented architecture can be described, for many reasons, as a good thing. However, care needs to be taken to ensure that the dependencies… Read More »Thinking in systems