How story points work
One of my clients is a small software development house that does custom development in the form of development projects for clients . I helped them to successfully introduce Agile (Scrum with XP) and...
View ArticleA Scrum Product Owner checklist
After my last post on the role of the Scrum Master I have been asked if I could write a similar role description for the Scrum Product Owner. Here’s my view of the role: The Product Owner The product...
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Business Modelling
The team from Bright Ideas Challenge have put together an excellent resource list for anyone starting off on the great startup journey. Last year I was not quite prepared enough to get through their...
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Agile Project Inception with a Press Release
I really like Jonathan Rasmussen’s project inception deck as a simple, quick and cut-to-the-chase way of kicking off projects. I have used it with several of my clients who have subsequently adopted it...
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9 Agile steps that injected magic into our project.
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...
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Risk registers and meetings are boring – try a project premortem instead …
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...
View ArticlePortfolio Kanban talk
Here are the slides for my presentation “Portfolio Kanban – Seeing the Bigger Picture”. I had a great time at AgileWelly last night – thanks everyone for coming along and for all the lovely feedback!...
View ArticleAgile undercover – when customers don’t collaborate
The other night I attended Rashina Hoda’s totally awesome presentation “Agile Undercover: When Customers don’t collaborate” at the Wellington Agile Professionals Network. Rashina presented the research...
View Article10 ways to fail with Agile
Last week I presented at WebDU in Sydney. The conference was excellently organised by Geoff and the Daemon guys and I met lots of interesting people. And I love Sydney! In short I had a blast. Apart...
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A template for the sprint review
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...
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Evolving the Story map
I can’t say enough about how useful story maps are and how essential they are on any Agile project. Jeff Pattonis the undisputed (certainly in my mind) master of the story map and it’s well worth...
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Personal Kanban as a Coaching Tool for Product Owners and Others
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...
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Making Agile work for the client
Working Agile in the client-vendor context is not always an experience filled with joy and achievement. It can be daunting, frustrating, expensive and unrewarding – as much as it can be productive,...
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5 Lessons from Business Accelerators – Part 1
2015 was quite a year for me, having been involved in two Business Accelerators and embarked on my own agile journey. When I first came across the term business accelerators, I was confused about...
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Is Talking to Users Enough?
Recently a friend of mine formed a startup with a goal of making the One-On-One Meeting an easier and more valuable process. Their aim was to help managers and their direct reports easier handle the...
View ArticleTime for a Change in Principles?
As Agilists, our principles and values underpin the way we work and decisions we make. A good principle should be timeless and non-prescriptive enough to be valid across many contexts, but specific...
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Breaking Bad: The cult of not giving bad news
This post was originally published in Methods & Tools magazine as Breaking Bad: The cult of not giving bad news. I have updated it since then and re-published here as I have collected more...
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Dual-track development
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...
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An Opportunity Canvas story
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...
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Making Product Development habitual
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...
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