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...

Round 2! All is not lost. Moving right along from the children’s book publishing no-go concept, on which I spent a fair amount of time planning and preparing, startup idea #2 is already out the door and up and running in less than a month. Stemming from an initiative that emerged at Snapper while Sa...

This is my second post in my Scrum coaching patterns series. In my last post I asked for some help with a pattern format that I could follow and at least one person must have read my blog as I now have a shiny new format to follow thanks to Gareth Evans for this. This is based on Linda Rising and Li...

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 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...

Earlier this year I was invited to join the Scrum plop, to help write some patterns for the Scrum community, unfortunately the stars were not right and I was not able to attend. It did however help me answer a question that a great friend and fellow Agilist Sandy Mamoli put to me, which was "how do...

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...