I created this guide with Sarah Blackie, to give an overview of Lean Agile Procurement (LAP), including the 5 core values and 5 core steps that underpin it....

I get frustrated when I hear people talk about strategy, and then think they are done when they have come up with a vision and objectives. To me that is a mere platitude. I agree with Richard Rumelt that a good strategy is an “effective mix of thought and action”. Strategy needs both, but it also n...

There are so many frameworks, tools and techniques for prioritising out there, that it’s tricky to know which one to pick (I see the irony here). As far as I’m concerned, whatever you are prioritising, whether it’s what feature to build for a product, what project to undertake, or what you should st...

Assumptions, we all make them; the things that we take to be true without having the evidence to back it up. It can be all too easy, when faced with uncertainty and deadlines, to feel pressured into making quick decisions without that evidence; taking shortcuts by doing things the way we’ve always d...

The problem: I often struggle with clarifying expectations; where do you start, where do you stop? Teams often end up with too much or too little detail and big gaps in what people actually do. The solution: story map your expectations I wanted something that would give my sessions a structured fr...

An Above and Below the Line Model An organization’s culture is expressed through the sum of its language and behaviors. Negative behaviors have a palpable impact on teams and, in turn, the culture in which that team exists; one person belittling a colleague’s idea will make the recipient think again...

I don’t like the way I have been seeing the term mindset used as an accusation, as a binary assessment that someone is stuck in a way of thinking that they need to be shifted out of. Mindset is not an absolute term. It’s a way of understanding and thinking about something, manifested through behavio...

I’ve updated the Opportunity Canvas by tightening up some of the language and descriptions and renaming the ‘Budget’ section to ‘Constraints’. Budget is a key constraint (how much is this opportunity worth realising or problem worth solving?) but I also find it’s worth explicitly considering others....

When we create a remote IC Agile course, a key objective is not to compromise on the interactive experience. This can be pretty tricky with some of the hands-on learning exercises we use, but thanks to the recent ‘make everything remote’ situation, we’ve adapted pretty fast! One of the exercises we...

Measures and metrics can be confusing; what do terms such as Leading, Lagging, Qualitative, and Quantitative even mean? when should you use them and why? It’s very hard to be ‘Data-informed’ in your decision making, if you are not informed yourself, on what these terms mean and how to apply them. I...

Business Agility is about an organisation’s ability to change and adapt in a complex environment. But what does it mean for a business to be agile and why would they do it? Most definitions dive straight into the what, and how practices can be applied within the organisation, but ‘being Agile’ is no...

Design Sprints are a great way for a team to solve a big problem and test a solution with real users in a structured way. Some of the activities, language and concepts can be new to people, so I created this ‘Design Sprint Dinner’ exercise, as a fun way to introduce people to some of the concepts of...

At Agile 2019 I ran a workshop on the importance of taking the time to prepare for a workshop by using the Facilitation Canvas and following the think-write-pair-share approach....

“There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in something, you do it only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.” Ken Blanchard It happens often - something new comes up and it sounds exciting and we totally w...

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....

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...

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 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 learnings since then. It stemmed from something I kept observing, which really bothered me; why is it so ha...

I was asked to facilitate a session with a team of systems analysts who wanted to set their objectives for the next 6 months. This was a group of people who spent a large portion of their time embedded within project delivery teams. I wanted to use an approach that could address a number of question...

I recently worked with a team of content writers, where we had introduced Kanban to help with the flow and consistency of delivery. The cycle time of work had reduced, but it was still high and as a team they seemed a little flat. They knew ‘what’ they were doing as individuals, but not the context...

... or Team Closure within a Project Closure Why? Projects come to an end, which means that a team that has been working closely together, may well be torn apart. This can lead to a sense of loss associated with disbanding some strong team relationships; especially if the team has reached the fourth...