Very technical roles require very technical skills. Information security experts, software developers, architects and others all need specialist skills as a baseline. But in general those people (like so many others) don’t work alone, and it’s important that their work meshes with others. If we treat our staff like cogs in a machine then that … Continue reading
Some people are often advised to not solutionise—that is, don’t jump to conclusions about how to solve a problem. Instead they are urged to make sure they understand the problem properly; defining the solution comes later, possibly from or with other people. In one organisation where I worked various representatives from around the business would … Continue reading
Last week I caught up with the enlightening Morten Elvang, who introduced me to a powerful metaphor: the black market in common sense. Morten describes this as a “shadow organisation”, an organisation within an organisation, populated by people who are working round the system in order to get their work done. Perhaps you’ve seen organisations … Continue reading
Visualising data is good, but then looking behind the visualisation is even better. This became apparent to me recently reading a fun piece of research by Justin Matejka and George Fitzmaurice: An effective (and often used) tool used to demonstrate that visualizing your data is in fact important is Anscome’s Quartet. Developed by F.J. Anscombe … Continue reading
One of the most entertaining sessions at last months’s Agile in the City: Birmingham was from Martin Burns, discussing teams in relation to performing music. And of all the points he made, the simplest and most compelling to me was the distinction between teams and crews. The dynamics of a team, he said, changed significantly … Continue reading
Measurement might sound like it’s some kind of objective process, but that’s not always the case. Last week I asked the audience at Agile in the City: Birmingham to “Quantify Your Goals”. As part of that I showed how on one of the programmes at ONS we assessed progress against a goal simply by asking … Continue reading
I’ve been doing a lot of impact mapping recently, but when my friend Matt Hosking got involved he noticed a problem: it makes very poor use of wall space. And as a result of that he suggested laying it out differently—in rings. I’ve now had a chance to try it, and I can report that … Continue reading
Last week I came across a post by my friend Kelly Waters, in which he bemoaned the many competing Agile methodologies, and said that he thought “the best advice is to go back to basics and apply those basic principles without layering over them a whole tonne of processes“. I agreed, but didn’t add my … Continue reading
Recently I was part of a discussion on team improvement, and someone asked “How do you know if a team is the best it can be?” My first instinct was to ask why it matters, although I couldn’t think of way of doing so quickly and be sure I wasn’t sounding rude. However, that’s definitely … Continue reading
I was speaking to my friend Matt Hosking, recently, about the problems with making the time to collaborate when an organisation is in the process of adopting agile. We often speak to people who feel that collaboration, as emphasised by agile approaches, is an additional time sink. They feel they need to do all their … Continue reading
