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...

How you kick-off a team is important! In fact it’s so important, that when you get it right your team can perform up to 30% better. That's what research by J. Richard Hackman tells us and it’s certainly consistent with my own observations. What exactly is a kick-off? A kick-off is a series of meetin...

This year's Agile Australia conference was an absolute blast! I loved having the opportunity to catch up with old friends, hang out with my Australian coaching colleagues and to meet new and interesting people. David Mole and Sandy Mamoli gave a talk on self-selection and creating great teams in Mel...

Everything you need to know about Self-Selection on a page. Download the quick overview guide. Download the Self Selection On A Page If you'd like to know more get our book "Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People Excel"....

Inspired by our squadification experiences at Trade Me and other large companies, Xero set out to try self-selection for themselves. People were asked to figure out who should be in which team and choose who they wanted to work with. Read our interview with Jordan Morris, a software engineer and Agi...

Guest post by: Jaume Durany, Agile Coach at Fairfaxmedia. This post originally appeared on fairfaxmedia.co.nz Boundaries are everywhere, always. And, as Jurgen Appelo explains in his book Management 3.0, a complex system can self-organise only when there’s a boundary around it. That is, every outbre...

"No one had ever done this on the scale we were contemplating. Could it possibly work?" Fast growth has a way of forcing organizational change on a business, but it also presents opportunities to try new ways of working. When Trade Me, New Zealand’s biggest e-commerce provider, hit a new level of gr...

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...

Self-selection helps Agile teams pick themselves. And it’s spreading: Since we shared our Self-Selection kit in May 2014 we have heard about successful Self-Selection events from companies from all over the world. Read our interview with MYOB’s Simon Bristow and Alex Barreto, and find out how they m...

Inspired by our squadification event, Australia Post set out to try self-selection for themselves. 60 people were asked to figure out who should be in which team and choose who they wanted to work with. Read our interview with Andy Kelk, Australia Post's Head of Technology for Digital Mailbox, who m...

Let them be in control of the way they work ... After having been though a day of letting people self-organise into squads David Mole, Trade Me's head of projects (and my Agile partner in crime) and I are often being asked how we kicked off the new squads and how we make sure they work in a discipli...

It's common among Agile teams to use some form of voting to make decisions, and that's especially true for retrospectives where the team as a whole decides what to fix next. Over the years I have facilitated many retrospectives and had the opportunity to vote for many things, over that time some pat...

... let teams self-select! At Trade Me we’re in the process of getting everyone into small, cross-functional teams (squads) that will persist over time and across projects. Up until last week we had six established squads and the rollout had been purposefully slow and controlled. Now we felt there...

Why your daily standup should be driven by a daily goal Let’s face it, the daily standup can be a boring affair. I’m not talking about abominations with 16 people or half-hour long status reporting meetings. I’m talking about the ones that are kind of okay and adhere to the rules but nonetheless are...

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...

I really like Jonathan Rasmussen’s project inception deck as a simple, quick and cut-to-the-chase way of kicking off projects. Overall, I pretty much stick to Jonathan’s content and flow, but sometimes, I use a press release exercise instead of a product box. The idea of refining a product vision th...