My startup idea has been on my mind for at least ten years. However it has only been recently that the congruence of technology and time made it possible for me to try it out. The idea has evolved over the last ten years and I have had many conversations with people about it during that time. No one...

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...

The driving force behind why people start startups is likely to vary wildly across different industries and types of business. For many it’s the promise of lucrative return - from sales of product or selling their eventual company. For some it’s the burning desire to fill a perceived gap in the mark...

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...

A few weeks ago I was sitting next to a log fire, sharing a glass of wine with a few like minded individuals chatting about all things Agile, one of the things we discussed was a time when one of the party was a Scrum Master and that they had a team admin who used to collect all the story data and d...

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...

For four of my six and a half Agile years I was solidly in the Scrum camp, Lean, in my opinion, was already part of Scrum and its influence made Scrum even better. I don't think that any Agile practice is for the work shy and there is a lot of personal courage needed to get any practice working well...

A “done” definition in an Agile project is a statement that the team use to measure whether they’ve met all of the requirements for completing a userstory / feature (and in some cases completing an iteration or release). Done is one of the major shifts from doing Agile to being Agile. So, what is “d...

Software projects experience a problem called technical debt. In short, technical debt is the result of making a quick and dirty work around (often for valid reasons such as deadlines) which creates rework later. I recently visited an organisation that had a wall of pain which I thought was an excel...

Many people’s first encounter with an implementation of an Agile framework is the visible workspace. I find first reactions to this very telling: for some it feels like a natural way of expressing their work and they can see what is happening in an instant, while for others it’s some cards on a wall...