My goal for the next couple of years is to become an awesome public speaker. And here’s why:This is handball, and this is what I used to do. First, on a competitive level from when I was 12 and then, when I grew older, as a professional player representing Austria at the 1992 Olympic Summer Games. W...

Let them be in control of the way they work ... After having been though a day of letting people self-organise into squads David Mole, Trade Me's head of projects (and my Agile partner in crime) and I are often being asked how we kicked off the new squads and how we make sure they work in a discipli...

... getting more stuff done At Trade Me we want to measure the overall health of Tech (that’s our team of 125 designers, developers, testers, BAs, and Squad Masters) to identify trends and to know if we are getting better (or worse!). We know that when we measure something it is a strong way of sayi...

This free Self-Selection pocket guide is a quick guide to Self-Selection. Use these handy checklists for preparing and running self-selection events of 20-200 people. It can be used as a stand-along guide or as a companion to the book “Creating Great Teams - How Self- Selection Lets People Excel” by...

Spotify's whitepaper on how to structure an organisation with Agile tribes, squads, chapters and guilds has been the most inspiring and interesting idea to come out of the Agile scene in the past three years. For anyone who has read the excellent paper we have created a one page infographic on how i...

Organisations get the best results when people can choose what they work on and who they work with. In that spirit we decided to let people self-organise into small, cross-functional teams called squads. Up until last week we had six established squads within two tribes the rollout had been purposef...

... let teams self-select! At Trade Me we’re in the process of getting everyone into small, cross-functional teams (squads) that will persist over time and across projects. Up until last week we had six established squads and the rollout had been purposefully slow and controlled. Now we felt there...

Why your daily standup should be driven by a daily goal Let’s face it, the daily standup can be a boring affair. I’m not talking about abominations with 16 people or half-hour long status reporting meetings. I’m talking about the ones that are kind of okay and adhere to the rules but nonetheless are...

5 things that happen when you let ‘em loose ... Last Friday we had Fedex day at Trade Me. The aim of a FedEx Day is to complete something deliverable within a 24 hour period, i.e. to go from idea to a shippable product within a day. It was fun, lots of great projects saw the light of day and I enjoy...

What is a premortem? A premortem is a project postmortem that’s run before a project. During a postmortem people analyse and discuss what went wrong, what went well and what could be improved. While postmortems are very useful the problem is that by the time we run them the project is usually over a...

Hi, my name is Simon and I am a Project Manager at Trade Me. Sandy kindly asked me to contribute to her blog, and I consider it a great honour. Below is my story about how we embraced Agile to inject magic into our project. As a Project Manager I am keenly aware that most projects fail and that’s a...

What are ground rules? Ground rules are a list of behaviours and rules a squad decide are useful for working together as a team in a productive and respectful way. A list of ground rules is an incredibly useful tool for guiding group behaviour. They are part of establishing an environment where peo...

Last week Jan, Mike, Anthony and I were at Agile Australia in Sydney and had an incredibly good time. The conference turned Twitter handles into people, exposed me to TimTam slams, and taught me that Beyond Budgeting is not a boring accounting thing but a riveting management philosophy. I presented...

Many novice teams find it difficult to strike the balance between too much and too little detail when writing user stories. User stories often start their lives as big statements of intent with lots of unknowns and that’s okay. For something that’s not going to be developed in the near future it mak...

When we introduced Scrum and Kanban to our teams the most loved addition to our way of working were visual workspaces. Our shared visual workspace We found it tremendously helpful to make our tasks visible though post-it notes, to visualise our workflow and to make sure that we didn't do too many...

Every other week I have a geek and gossip breakfast with fellow Agile coach Nathan from Boost New Media. Last time he told me that at Boost they had replaced the word “Scrum Master” with “Agile coach”. It makes complete sense: The most important part of the Scrum Master role is coaching. Also, many...