I created the Facilitation Canvas as a tool to help facilitators prepare to run a session. We use it as part of our ICAgile team facilitator course. The canvas is made up of 8 boxes, each with an associated set of prompt questions that I have found work well as a guide when filling it out....

Has your team ever felt like things are going stale? Do you worry that you’re beginning to rest on your laurels? None of the greatest teams I’ve experienced ever think that “good enough” is good enough. Here’s a handy way to collectively challenge each other to improve in a constructive way. This ca...

Sandy caught up with Kristin Andersson, Agile coach at LIC to learn how Self-selection has enabled their people to become high performing teams. LIC is an agri-tech co-operative that empowers farmers through the delivery of superior genetics and technology. They needed to redesign their existing tea...

Working Agreements, Team Norms, Team Charters… Call them what you want, they’re great in theory but in practise they can be awkward to come up with and difficult to implement. Committing to “don’t be a dick” and “respect each other” is well and good, but it’s pretty much implied. We shouldn't need a...

There are many approaches to carrying out planning. Here's what I use for situations that require any kind of planning at all - from working across organisational transformation to figuring out what to do at the weekend. I like it because it’s simple, easy to remember and it sets me up naturally to...

It’s the little conference that could, and has. A few years ago the people of Nomad8 decided to create the agile conference that we’d want to go to, as there really wasn’t another option that met our needs. We wanted a conference with diverse speakers, who would spark our imaginations, talk about in...

Product Development is a mash up of three mindsets; ‘Design Thinking’, ‘Agile’ and ‘Lean’, at the heart of which is empiricism. Continuous product improvement is a cycle of Build-Measure-Learn, where experiments define how rapidly we can get feedback on whether we are making progress. The problem I...

I got 'canvas envy' after seeing Jeff Patton's excellent Opportunity Canvas in late 2016, and have been using it in the field ever since. I've made a few changes to it, as people seem to like more structure, especially when it's run in a group. This version tells a 'story' to gain a shared understan...

How we created a networked organisation 5 Key take-aways Holacracy provides radical transparency and timely decision making at the right level. Decision making by consent is awesome! The freedom, autonomy and responsibility to achieve a clear purpose enables self-organisation. Holacracy will amplif...

Empathy is a good thing and understanding what your colleagues actually do can be a very useful boost to collaboration. When we work in cross-functional teams or with people from other parts of the organisation it is helpful to get an understanding of what they do, how they can contribute and what w...

In Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash Mary and Tom Poppendieck categorised waste encountered in software development into: Partially Done Work Is work going from beginning to end in a single rapid flow? For example; are you building up large amounts of untested or undeploye...

I often teach Agile to people who have nothing to do with software development, such as leadership teams or organisations that operate entirely outside of the digital world. In this context I only teach the Modern Agile values (read more about the modern agile movement at modernagile.org)....

There is a lot of talk right now about how agile product delivery teams should take ownership of customer discovery work, alongside their development activities. This is otherwise known as ‘dual-track development’ and is described in Jeff Patton’s excellent article In this blog I want to talk throug...

Understanding ‘why’ you do agile is important, and the agile manifesto is one of the first things we cover on any Agile Professional Foundation course. I have, however, found the wordiness of some of the principles a little daunting and let’s face it the website does look a bit like my Nan’s wallpap...

This is the second year we have organised JAFAC (Just Another F#$%ng Agile Conference) and as I’m slowly coming down from the buzz and enthusiasm I’m reflecting upon the experience of organising and attending the conference. Here are a few things that stood out for me: 1. The #JAFAC vibe Several att...

Role Expectation Mapping is a process described by the awesome Jimmy Janlén designed to aid collaboration and help a team work through mismatches in understanding of each other’s roles. I came across Jimmy's article recently when working with a small team who were struggling with what they could and...