Thoughts and conversation from our nomads.
GROW your planning
There are many approaches to carrying out planning. Here's what I use for situations that require any kind of planning at all - from working across organisational transformation to figuring out what to do at the weekend. I like it because it’s simple, easy to remember and it sets me up naturally to...
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...
The importance of size and proximity
Process is expensive. Bigger teams, working from a distance, part time team members, and many specialists are all factors that lead to a more elaborate process. This might be obvious, but the more companies we get to know, the more we experience that this is something being ignored. This article is...
Benchmarking performance across organisations
A problem we were facing recently was that our teams perceived their own progress as not being fast enough and were developing a sense that they were not performing well. Sometimes it is useful to know how productive we are as an organisation and how our teams compare to teams in other companies. A...
How we measure output and productivity
... getting more stuff done At Trade Me we want to measure the overall health of Tech (that’s our team of 125 designers, developers, testers, BAs, and Squad Masters) to identify trends and to know if we are getting better (or worse!). We know that when we measure something it is a strong way of sayi...
Every day should be Fedex day!
5 things that happen when you let ‘em loose ... Last Friday we had Fedex day at Trade Me. The aim of a FedEx Day is to complete something deliverable within a 24 hour period, i.e. to go from idea to a shippable product within a day. It was fun, lots of great projects saw the light of day and I enjoy...
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...
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...