Thoughts and conversation from our nomads.
Encourage positive behaviours
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...
Sprint Reviews are broken
In 2000, Southwest Airlines Flight 1455 was transporting 142 passengers and crew from Las Vegas to Burbank airport in California. The pilot was a man named Howard Peterson. During landing, the plane approached the runway at too steep an angle and was travelling too quickly to be able to come to a ha...
Demystifying the Agile Team Facilitator
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...
Why you get inconsistent experiences working with Agile Coaches
If you are in the tech world, you have probably had an interaction with an Agile Coach or any other agilist at some point of your career. Your experience is somewhere in a range from "Agile Coaches are annoying and useless" to "Agile Coaches are great partners and make things better". I have worked...
An updated Opportunity Canvas
I’ve updated the Opportunity Canvas by tightening up some of the language and descriptions and renaming the ‘Budget’ section to ‘Constraints’. Budget is a key constraint (how much is this opportunity worth realising or problem worth solving?) but I also find it’s worth explicitly considering others....
Scrum 2DVille
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...
Measures and Metrics Quadrant
Measures and metrics can be confusing; what do terms such as Leading, Lagging, Qualitative, and Quantitative even mean? when should you use them and why? It’s very hard to be ‘Data-informed’ in your decision making, if you are not informed yourself, on what these terms mean and how to apply them. I...
How to run a Coaching Reflection Session
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...
What is Business Agility?
Business Agility is about an organisation’s ability to change and adapt in a complex environment. But what does it mean for a business to be agile and why would they do it? Most definitions dive straight into the what, and how practices can be applied within the organisation, but ‘being Agile’ is no...
Spamcast: A Podcast with Sandy Mamoli
SPaMCAST features Tom Cagley's interview with Sandy Mamoli. We talked about teams and the book she co-authored, Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel. Sandy’s unique perspective as a world-class athlete and Agile Coach allows her to deliver options about forming teams you didn’t...
Asked to Self-Select? Here's How to Pick your Team
“How do I know which team to choose and what guidelines I should apply?” “How do we make sure people make good choices, not just for themselves but for all of us?” These are the two most common questions managers and team members ask before any self-selection event. This post will provide guideline...
The "new" new ways of working are not normal
We’re over the halfway mark of our initial lockdown period and there’s been a dramatic series of pivots going on as people and organisations re-evaluate what’s important, what their business needs to survive, and how to keep people busy and productive. The irony of there really being ‘new ways of w...
AgileBI Podcast
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....
Timely advice - remote working from the trenches
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...
Individual performance is not relevant
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...
Case Study: Self-Selection with Distributed Teams
How Travelstart used remote self-selection to create distributed teamsOnly five months after creating cross-functional teams Travelstart, a South African travel booking website, had a change in strategy and needed to rethink their team structure. From previous hackathons the company had experience w...