Thoughts and conversation from our nomads.
The decline of the A word
“Agile is Dead” seems to be the phrase of the day. Not really what you want to be hearing when Agile consulting is your bread and butter and you are fairly passionate about everything it encompasses - and know that fundamentally this sentiment is not founded on any logical reality. So I set out to e...
#JAFAC2023 was wonderful!
One of the highlights of the Nomad8 calendar is always #JAFAC. Where we create and curate the conference we want to attend, and then relish the opportunity to share it with the Agile community. So it was especially exciting to be able to run the conference again after a 3 year break. It felt differe...
Leading Responsible Adults
Back in the pre-COVID days, when we never imagined the future we now live in, I started to look into workplace culture and how it flowed through an organisation. While much has been written about this from many wiser heads than mine, my perspective was a bit unusual. It was when I sat in the toilet...
The "new" new ways of working are not normal
We’re over the halfway mark of our initial lockdown period and there’s been a dramatic series of pivots going on as people and organisations re-evaluate what’s important, what their business needs to survive, and how to keep people busy and productive. The irony of there really being ‘new ways of w...
Check yourself listening
I’ve been meeting new people lately, work-related. And one of my pet peeves has resurfaced with a vengeance… people who don’t listen. Not just not listening, but basically just waiting for their opportunity to jump into the conversation and talk about their angle on whatever I just raised, as if the...
The lowdown on JAFAC 2019
What is JAFAC? Born out of a desire to attend a conference full of speakers we really would like to hear from, the Nomad8 team decided to create the event we craved. JAFAC is a relatively small but carefully crafted conference that brings together ten speakers, 120 people, and creates plenty of (Ope...
Top takeouts from Business Agility Vienna
Sandy Mamoli and I recently attended the Business Agility Vienna Conference, where Sandy presented about Self Selection. (20 min video)...
The Agile Bandwagon
Although it’s been around for a really long time, Agile is still the newcomer on the scene for some organisations. But like the snowball rolling down the hill – it’s been growing larger and gathering momentum for some time – (and picking up all kinds of shit along the way) attracting more attention...
Just Another F&#king Agile Conference - #JAFAC2018
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...
Just Another F’ing Agile Conference
It’s a funny thing, the Agile world. Globally accepted as the right and logical way to do things most of the time, it is still pretty much in the ramping up phase in Aotearoa. Nomad8 started out in 2007 as a group of people who loved Agile and who wanted to share that love with people and organisati...
Happy New Year from Nomad8
Thank you for being part of our extended whanau, friends and partners this past year! We’ve had a hugely busy and exciting year and we thought we’d jump on the newsletter bandwagon and tell you about a few of the things we’ve been doing. Nomads Emigrate, Immigrate and MigrateIn February we moved our...
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, useful, involving and successful. Working with Agile with internal teams can be challenging enough, bu...
Taking Personal Kanban to the World
Round 2! All is not lost. Moving right along from the children’s book publishing no-go concept, on which I spent a fair amount of time planning and preparing, startup idea #2 is already out the door and up and running in less than a month. Stemming from an initiative that emerged at Snapper while Sa...
Knowing when to call it quits
My startup idea has been on my mind for at least ten years. However it has only been recently that the congruence of technology and time made it possible for me to try it out. The idea has evolved over the last ten years and I have had many conversations with people about it during that time. No one...
Passion as a Priority
The driving force behind why people start startups is likely to vary wildly across different industries and types of business. For many it’s the promise of lucrative return - from sales of product or selling their eventual company. For some it’s the burning desire to fill a perceived gap in the mark...