Thoughts and conversation from our nomads.

Tony O'Halloran David Mole Tony O'Halloran David Mole

How to Avoid Waste - a Lean Retrospective

In Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash Mary and Tom Poppendieck categorised waste encountered in software development into: Partially Done Work Is work going from beginning to end in a single rapid flow? For example; are you building up large amounts of untested or undeploye...

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Sandy Mamoli David Mole Sandy Mamoli David Mole

Personal Kanban as an Organisational Lens

One of the most useful tools when introducing Agile into an organisation is personal Kanban. It gives me unique insights into an organisation's culture and values, and helps me determine my next steps. As an Agile coach, the process of getting people into personal Kanban facilitates insights into ho...

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Sandy Mamoli David Mole Sandy Mamoli David Mole

Personal Kanban at work

When we introduced Scrum and Kanban to our teams the most loved addition to our way of working were visual workspaces. Our shared visual workspace We found it tremendously helpful to make our tasks visible though post-it notes, to visualise our workflow and to make sure that we didn't do too many...

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Sandy Mamoli David Mole Sandy Mamoli David Mole

Utilisation, Teams and "Resources"

In many companies, especially those who provide services to external clients, the main focus from a project management perspective seems to be on resource allocation and utilisation. People are viewed as individual “resources” and an important goal is to maximise people’s utilisation (Before you say...

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Sandy Mamoli David Mole Sandy Mamoli David Mole

When the coach needs to go

“When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go.” — Nanny McPhee (via Lyssa Adkins) I am an Agile coach and the goal of my job is to put myself out of a job. My mission is to teach people Agile and to make sure they understand and c...

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Sandy Mamoli David Mole Sandy Mamoli David Mole

Visual Workspaces: Kanban for one

One of the things that immediately caught on when we started our journey towards being Agile at Snapper was the use of visual workspaces. The team loved the sense of achievement of moving a task from "In Progress" to "Done" and found the board helped them stay focused and co-ordinated. Everyone from...

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Sandy Mamoli Vlad Lukianov Sandy Mamoli Vlad Lukianov

A 5-why root cause analysis retrospective

The idea For quite a while I have been waiting for an opportunity to try a 5-why root cause analysis in a sprint retrospective. The 5-why analysis has its origins within Toyota and lean manufacturing and is used to find the root cause of a problem through identifying a symptom and then repeating th...

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