Every organisation I’ve ever worked with has suffered from ‘healthy tensions’ between roles turned nasty in one form or another. I’ve seen them lead to interpersonal conflict, team dysfunction, silos and productivity grinding to a halt. In general - bad outcomes all round.... continue reading

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... continue reading

The problem: It’s so boring! Someone joins the team: Maybe they come from another area of the business or maybe you just hired them. They might have worked agile in a previous job or they might have no idea what that means. Anyway you, the agile coach, now have to bring them up to speed so they are... continue reading

I often think I'm the luckiest person to be able to do what I do. I get to work with the smartest folk and solve gnarly problems with different teams. I get to help people do their best work together. What’s not to like? But when your job is to try and help people change the way they work, sometime... continue reading

Why is it that we are still obsessed with the performance of the individual in our modern team-based organisations? Shouldn’t we measure and compare teams instead? Not for the sake of competing, but to learn from each other.... continue reading

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... continue reading

With the wave of Agile ways of working quite a few new roles have been introduced to organisations: with basic Agile we’ve added Product Owner, Agile Coach, Scrum Master. Then the famous Spotify model added some extra roles to the mix like Chapter Lead and Tribe Lead. It’s easy to get lost in the ro... continue reading

I have been an agile practitioner for a while now and every year I learn new things and add practices and ideas to my tool belt. I have hundreds of these. The agile alliance has this Subway map of practices and I know there are MANY more out there.... continue reading

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... continue reading

How do you deal with your “is this completely bananas or ...” moments at work? How do you get feedback on your approach and interventions? How do you bounce around ideas among peers? Being in a leadership (coaches, scrum masters, product leaders, people leaders) role can be a lonely place. Often, y... continue reading

The AgileBI Podcast is presented by Shane Gibson and Blair Tempero. In this episode Tony O'Halloran talks to the guys about a range of topics including how he got into the world of agile, scaling, frameworks and his current area of interest: Plan Continuation Bias and how that affects teams.... continue reading

Many organisations and teams around the world are currently figuring out what a distributed world looks like for them, and if having and supporting great agile teams remotely is even possible. The good news is “YES, it absolutely is, but it takes deliberate thought and effort”. Timely is a NZ-based... continue reading

The performance of an individual is much less important than you think it is. The way we measure, assess, evaluate and reward individual performance is no longer relevant in the modern workplace. We need to look at different behaviours and skills and instead consider the performance of the team. W... continue reading

Feedback is a funny thing. We crave it, get disgruntled if we don’t get it, and often get upset when we do get it. As someone who requests feedback on a relatively frequent basis, I have been on a journey from being a terrible receiver of feedback, to a much less terrible one. It’s something I am al... continue reading