Original insights and unique perspectives from our founder, Glenn Smith.
How you can overcome both the technical and market risks associated with product delivery. It’s all about feedback loops, identifying them and making them as short as possible.
I’ve been mainly having my head down in to two books over the last couple of weeks. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing ImprovementEliyahu Goldratt This is a parable that explains the concepts of production flow through the story of Alex who runs a manufacturing plant. I found it a very interesting read and didn’t…
There is so much fabulous content out there today that it could be a full time job just reading a small part of it. This is a start of what I hope to be a semi-regular series of snippets from articles, blogs and books I’m reading that I haven’t selected to spend more time on….
Using outcomes can guide the delivery and improvement of your products. From finding the customer’s needs to products operating with them in mind.
While facilitating a stakeholder workshop recently, I ran two rounds of grouping and ordering. One, I used dot voting, and one didn’t. On reflection, I was surprised by the results. The question asked during these processes follows a pattern of, what are your top three things you do/don’t like about a tool. The stakeholders wrote…
Failure is sometimes seen as a bad word. When you discuss this with people, you discover it carries baggage, often from an identifiable incident where someone of influence criticised their failure. They are right in some ways that failure can be bad, but only when you don’t learn from it. An essential facet of Agile…
For those familiar with Scrum and other Agile ways of working, you will know that during Sprint Retrospectives, as part of our Inspection and then Adapting the team will often set up Experiments to try in the next sprint to help make their world a better place. They can vary greatly, examples could be, trying…
When I am coaching (not in an agile sense), it is sometimes useful to introduce Anchors with the client. An Anchor is a coaching term taken from Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) methods, which allows the client to trigger a desired state on demand. The textbook example is someone who wants to be more confident when…
I have just read the wonderful book, Who Moved My Cheese. It’s not a large book, in fact, it only took me a mere 50 minutes from cover to cover. I do feel however it’s power is greater than it’s size.The book takes the form largely of a story about two mice and two little…
While spending some downtime watching TED talks, I stumbled across one about how to dry your hands in toilets such that you only need one paper towel. What jumped out at me about this straightforward technique of flicking your hands and the water off 12 times before drying was how an entire industry had been…
One of the more essential techniques for coaching and self-coaching is obtaining an achievable goal as a well-formed outcome. Once you have this goal and an action plan in place, it helps to remind yourself regularly, as this helps you focus on why you are doing what you are doing. Some like to use sticky…
Since Agile was conceived, the Agile community has adopted the idea of using games to help teach and develop teams. While attending an induction evening for parents at my Son’s first school this week, the teachers discussed how the learning was mainly through play, and that reminded me of the power that games can have…
