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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

Little’s Law

What is Little’s Law? If you have a stable system (e.g. one-in-one-out), then the average number of customers you have within that system is equal to the average rate of customer arrivals multiplied by the average time a customer spends in the system. That was the law proposed by John… Read More »Little’s Law

New movie: “Bad stand-up”

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  • 1 min read

How effective are your daily stand-ups? Do you think you could spot bad traits if they happened? Could you spot them in others’ meetings? Some of you will remember that, at this year’s Scrum Alliance retreat, a bunch of us identified that many Scrum Masters don’t have a support network… Read More »New movie: “Bad stand-up”

STATIK

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  • 1 min read

I heard Mike Burrows talk about STATIK at the Kanban Leadership Retreat in June. STATIK is an acronym for Systems Thinking Approach To Introducing Kanban, a good title for the process of bringing the following steps into play: Understand sources of dissatisfaction Analyze demand and capability Model the knowledge discovery… Read More »STATIK

The Cobra Effect

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  • 3 min read

I have worked in lots of organisations where ‘management’ has tried to measure and monitor development teams with the aim of seeing how the teams are performing and then using that information to drive through improvements in performance. This desire to measure and control things can often have some unintended… Read More »The Cobra Effect

Fitness for Purpose

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  • 3 min read

Is your business fit for purpose? What does that actually mean? And how does it relate to what we do? It’s a topic that is regularly referred to in groups that deal with change. It’s a particular favourite of David J. Anderson’s, who I’ve heard mention it a number of… Read More »Fitness for Purpose

G.R.O.W as a Coach

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  • 2 min read

In my last post, Coaching v Mentoring, I talked about how, in my opinion, a Coach is someone who helps people “identify and achieve their goals” and that a coach should do this through questioning rather than “the coach influencing or giving their own opinion on the subject”. Surely, this… Read More »G.R.O.W as a Coach