This post originally appeared on the Stiltsoft blog in April 2016 as a guest post by Nicholas. Effective communication is vital to keep employees engaged and motivated. Research shows there is an “explicit positive relationship between communication satisfaction and employees’ organizational commitment”. Authentic, frequent and collaborative conversations with employees leads to increased trust, decreased turnover and… Continue reading Increase Employee Engagement with the 3 C’s of Internal Communication
Understand What Your Customers Want with Agile User Story Maps
Quick post to point out two other blogs I recommend you read. User story mapping is an essential practice for every agile team. Have a read of Understand What Your Customers Want with Agile User Story Maps to get some background and then follow up with Anatomy of an Agile User Story Map for the details.
Minimise Context Switching
Often if a team picks up too much work it is because they don’t fully understand, or can’t see, the cost associated with their action. Fortunately there is an exercise you can run with a team in 10 minutes to help them see first hand the cost of context switching. 3’s & 5’s 3’s and 5’s is really simple… Continue reading Minimise Context Switching
Serious Games to Teach Agility
There are a few games and exercises that you can use to help teams understand the why and the mechanics of being agile. Take a look at: Rival Effort – a three-to-five person game that explores process optimization and efficiency strategies, asking players to allocate their effort between projects. Through the game participants become managers in a company… Continue reading Serious Games to Teach Agility
Measuring Engineering Performance
Just got a great query from an Engineering Director. Love it. I’d love to pick your brain about engineering team performance measurement. How do you do it? Do you have any experience with what works/what doesn’t work? I’ve got lots of thoughts on measuring the performance of engineering teams. No doubt you do too, so… Continue reading Measuring Engineering Performance
Scale Engineering Effectively with Cross-Functional Teams
As companies grow they place ever greater demands on their IT (and/or Engineering) organisations. There are constant requests for assistance, be they from the CMO who is looking to get a better understanding of customers to the customer support team looking to keep costs stable while expanding to 24×7 support. If you’re a VP or Director of Engineering… Continue reading Scale Engineering Effectively with Cross-Functional Teams
Velocity Counts in 2014 – A Preview of our Backlog and Commitment to You!
VC’ers – Happy 2014 from Nick and I. First off, we’d like to thank all of you for all of your encouragement, support and fellowship in 2013. We are thankful for your steering and guidance and we are moved by your actions. In 2013, we felt part of your Agile practice and part of your… Continue reading Velocity Counts in 2014 – A Preview of our Backlog and Commitment to You!
Building an Ideal Agile Team Workspace
Trendy technology companies love the open plan office. From Atlassian to Facebook, Twitter to Zynga, they’ve all recently built beautiful open plan offices. More traditional tech companies such as LinkedIn and eBay favour the clustered cubicle approach. One trendy tech company that stands out amongst the open plan and cubicle loving crowd is Campaign Monitor, check out their office: While the… Continue reading Building an Ideal Agile Team Workspace
A Daily Scrum can be Strategic!
I’ve spent a good portion of the past 11 years as a product coach, working to introduce scalable agile techniques to hundreds of product engineering teams. My work has brought me around the globe in pursuit of helping enterprise teams accelerate product development, doing so in a manor which helps increase individual performance and promote… Continue reading A Daily Scrum can be Strategic!
Courage! Close off old and stale backlog items.
The following question is one that comes up every few months. A product owner is overwhelmed by all the items in their backlog, and quite often the backlog is growing faster than the team can work through it. Every time a product owner wants to visit the backlog it is a mess, which causes waste.… Continue reading Courage! Close off old and stale backlog items.