Empathy is a good thing and understanding what your colleagues actually do can be a very useful boost to collaboration. When we work in cross-functional teams or with people from other parts of the organisation it is helpful to get an understanding of what they do, how they can contribute and what w...

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...

A while ago I wrote about Personal Kanban at Snapper. Personal Kanban, or KanbanFor1 as we call it, has supported Snapper’s Agile adoption and has proven an excellent training ground for the team to develop good habits and behaviours. As in all Agile adoptions the delivery team aren’t the only ones...

Conducting an interesting and engaging end-of-sprint review is an often overlooked art: Not only do we want to show what we have built during the last sprint and collect feedback and good ideas for what to build next; we also want to give our audience a good experience. At my workplace we always in...

After my last post on the role of the Scrum Master I have been asked if I could write a similar role description for the Scrum Product Owner. Here’s my view of the role: The Product Owner The product owner is a visionary who can envision the final product and communicate the vision. The product o...

The other night I attended Rashina Hoda’s totally awesome presentation “Agile Undercover: When Customers don’t collaborate” at the Wellington Agile Professionals Network. Rashina presented the research she had conducted on the basis of interviewing 30 people across 16 organisations in New Zealand an...