Category: Agile

All the agile stuff goes here.

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From Agile to Zombie Apocalypse: The Walking Dead explains Agile Teams & Release Trains

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The final season of The Walking Dead is currently airing so I thought I’d use the show’s premise – surviving the zombie apocalypse – to explain how agile teams and agile release trains (ARTs) work, as well as the difference between the two.

The executive summary is that:

  • An agile team is like your family unit – your survival is integrally linked to how well you work together as a team and utilise your complementary skills to overcome your daily challenges.
  • An ART is like your village – a community of family units who, when working together effectively, can achieve much more (and survive much longer) than individual family units.
  • Moving from a family unit to a settlement requires giving up some autonomy but the benefits of being part of a team of teams in a settlement vastly outweighs the loss of absolute autonomy.

Continue reading “From Agile to Zombie Apocalypse: The Walking Dead explains Agile Teams & Release Trains”

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The immediate impact of Scrum Masters (and how reducing committed work leads to more delivery)

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  1. How important is a Scrum Master to a team?
  2. Can an experienced Scrum Master with no domain knowledge have an immediate impact on a team?
  3. How important are realistic sprint commitments?

Here’s a quick article answering all the above questions. Spoiler alert: The short answers are (1) Very, (2) Yes and (3) Very. Continue reading “The immediate impact of Scrum Masters (and how reducing committed work leads to more delivery)”

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Enhanced PI Planning Calculator

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If you’re doing PI (or Big Room) Planning across multiple geographies, it can be a challenge to schedule the event around public holidays and other events. I’ve enhanced the standard “ART and Team Events Calendar” spreadsheet that Scaled Agile provides within their “PI Planning Toolkit” to allow for much better visibility and customisation of dates. Continue reading “Enhanced PI Planning Calculator”

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How I Gamified my Kids’ Physical & Mental Health (so that I could spend more quality time with them)

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Covid has been tough for parents but even tougher for kids. Everyday interactions that we took for granted have disappeared. Even the most imaginative and creative parents eventually acquiesced to the ‘mother’s little helper‘ of the digital age – the electronic device.

The mental strain of Covid on children is well documented. Extra murals and regular play dates with friends have been replaced by Netflix binges and online gaming with friends. For children, the house became a prison and parents the wardens. The inmates grew increasingly reluctant to leave the confines of their bedrooms and, as wardens, my wife and I found it increasingly difficult to get our kids outside for a daily dose of Vitamin D. Exercise in any form was shunned and their fitness gear got less use than the indicators on a BMW. Continue reading “How I Gamified my Kids’ Physical & Mental Health (so that I could spend more quality time with them)”

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Life Lessons from the Road: Be Mindful of the Middle

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It’s time we revisited that hackneyed piece of common wisdom which states, “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.” When you are doing anything substantial, like running a marathon or a complex project – starting is easy, finishing is also surprising easy but dealing with the middle is what separates the medal winners from the also-rans. Continue reading “Life Lessons from the Road: Be Mindful of the Middle”

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Life Lessons from the Road: Use Goals to Drive your Journey

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When it comes to major undertakings, we’re often told “It’s a journey, not a goal.” However, I’d argue that goals are vital to ensure that you make progress on your journey – and I’ve got the data to back this up!

Working in the corporate world, I’ve been on the receiving end of major change management transformations – and in several cases I’ve been partially responsible for inflicting them on sizable chunks of the workforce.

Studies suggest that up to 80% of organisational change initiatives fail. I contend that one of the major reasons for this dismal performance is that we place all the emphasis on the journey at the expense of the goals. Goals give impetus to the journey and without goals your journey is likely to result in aimless wandering in the wilderness.

Who better to highlight the impact of goals on performance than 20,000 Comrades runners! Continue reading “Life Lessons from the Road: Use Goals to Drive your Journey”

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Life Lessons from the Road: It’s a Jog, not a Sprint

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Business agility has recently become a big buzzword in the corporate world. If you work for a large corporate there’s a good chance that you are currently part of a ‘business agility transformation‘. These are characterised by consultants throwing Japanese words around like ninja stars in a pot-noodle eastern* and lots of talk about sprinting and scrumming.

* as opposed to a spaghetti western.

The good news is that sprinting is really easy – even if the last time you did any running was in PE class at school when you were forced to. Everyone can manage a sprint: It’s a short burst of energy, after which you’re doubled over gasping for breath and can’t run any more. Continue reading “Life Lessons from the Road: It’s a Jog, not a Sprint”

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The Power of Decentralised Decision-Making (and how this helps create high performing teams)

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This article uses a department’s entertainment budget as a simple way to explain how the principle of decentralised decision-making should be applied at the team level. What’s more, you can expect teams to communicate and function better when it’s applied correctly.

Traditional “Project Cost Accounting” Scenario

Each department is allocated an ‘Entertainment Budget’, usually this is calculated as a Rand amount per staff member, e.g. R1,000 per staff member for a 200 person team which equals R200,000 to spend on entertainment for the year. Continue reading “The Power of Decentralised Decision-Making (and how this helps create high performing teams)”

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Every Feature Needs a Hypothesis

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In this article, I’ll use a simple, easily accessible example feature to show how a feature hypothesis should evolve and how monitoring results can impact our plan and backlog priorities.

I am going to stick with the “Password Reset” example from the previous article in this “Outcomes versus Outputs” series since resetting one’s own password can be applied to almost any website and application. Continue reading “Every Feature Needs a Hypothesis”

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