It is the time of year for winding down and reflecting on things before heading off to the beach for some BBQ-ing, drinking of things and general relaxing. So we wanted to thank you for your custom and support for 2012, wish you all the best for 2013 and share some of our reflections (we can share d...

A while ago I wrote about Personal Kanban at Snapper. Personal Kanban, or KanbanFor1 as we call it, has supported Snapper’s Agile adoption and has proven an excellent training ground for the team to develop good habits and behaviours. As in all Agile adoptions the delivery team aren’t the only ones...

If you’re doing it right an Agile and Lean adoption requires organisational change. Organisational change is often difficult because of the many layers and dependencies and the sheer number of people involved. At my current client organisational change involves upper and middle management, developm...

Since my coaching friend Mike Lowery described his experience at Agile 2006 as a life-changing event I really wanted to go to this conference. This year after having been part of Esther Derby and Geoff Watt's submission review team for the conference's coaching stage I decided that I needed to make...

I really like Jonathan Rasmussen’s project inception deck as a simple, quick and cut-to-the-chase way of kicking off projects. Overall, I pretty much stick to Jonathan’s content and flow, but sometimes, I use a press release exercise instead of a product box. The idea of refining a product vision th...

My client, a New Zealand government department, is in the process of introducing Agile-Lean. They are currently in a trial phase to see if it is for them and during the early stages they'd like to run Agile and non-Agile projects in parallel. Fair enough, but how to choose whether a project should...

“An adequate Scrum Master can handle two or three teams at the time; a great one can only handle one”. (Michael James - An Example Scrum Master’s checklist) I found that organisations, teams and new Scrum Masters (even freshly certified ones) often aren’t sure what the Scrum Master role entails a...

One of my current clients, a large government agency, have recognised that their current monothilitic waterfall approach doesn’t work all that well and are trying to decide whether to change their delivery approach to Agile or “just” Iterative (mini-waterfall style). Management have recognised that...

Following last week’s interview with a newly-minted Scrum Master this week I have had a conversation with developer Mateusz Udowski. We talked about how SilverStripe’s adoption of Agile and Scrum have affected him and why he thinks SilverStripe is now more intelligent as a whole than it was before....

Six months ago SilverStripe, an open-source Content Management System provider and Wellington web agency approached me to help them improve the way in which they deliver client and open source projects, increase employee happiness and, in general, just do the best possible job. To achieve this, we d...

Last week I presented to Flex and Cold Fusion Developers at cfObjective in Melbourne about Agile technical practices. As several other presentations dealt with practices such as TDD and unit testing I chose to focus on two areas I have become very passionate about during the last year: Acceptance Te...

In many companies, especially those who provide services to external clients, the main focus from a project management perspective seems to be on resource allocation and utilisation. People are viewed as individual “resources” and an important goal is to maximise people’s utilisation (Before you say...

“When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go.” — Nanny McPhee (via Lyssa Adkins) I am an Agile coach and the goal of my job is to put myself out of a job. My mission is to teach people Agile and to make sure they understand and c...

Checklists have a somewhat bad reputation in the Agile world, probably because they “smell” of too little self-organisation and too much process. I find this reputation is entirely undeserved as they can be extremely useful as a memory aid, or to visualize a workflow. Checklists play an important r...

Conducting an interesting and engaging end-of-sprint review is an often overlooked art: Not only do we want to show what we have built during the last sprint and collect feedback and good ideas for what to build next; we also want to give our audience a good experience. At my workplace we always in...

One of the things that immediately caught on when we started our journey towards being Agile at Snapper was the use of visual workspaces. The team loved the sense of achievement of moving a task from "In Progress" to "Done" and found the board helped them stay focused and co-ordinated. Everyone from...