Agile Cambridge 2019: piecing it together

Last week was Agile Cambridge, the annual, three-day, conference on Agile at Churchill College in Cambridge. Despite the fact that my new job role doesn’t directly involve Agile any longer, I was speaking and I wanted to go for all three days anyway, because a lot of the sessions looked interesting. For the last couple…

Hard Reset: A workshop at Agile Cambridge 2019

Back in November at work, we ran ‘Reset Week’. Basically, we had a problem: we had three products needing work and three teams that weren’t quite the right shape and had the wrong skill-sets in the wrong places. But by making the teams gel, the result would be that the resulting teams wouldn’t have worked…

Moving on…

It’s time for a bit of work-related, personal news… My career has been one where I’ve followed a slightly unusual path, jumping at opportunities that have presented themselves. From a languages degree to Technical Authoring, then to Agile as a Scrum Master, I’ve been keen to explore different areas in a way that’s hopefully also…

Measuring Technical Debt

Recently I saw a Twitter thread bemoaning the rise of ‘psychological safety’ as a phrase. Not because it isn’t important – it is – but because giving it a name has made it acceptable and risks giving a scapegoat to hide behind. There’s the possibility that just saying ‘My organisation / team doesn’t promote psychological…

My first six months in a new role

As those of you who know may will recall, I was made redundant from my job as a Scrum Master at Redgate back at the end of May 2016. Luckily, I wasn’t out of work for too long and since July I’ve been working at a major multinational ecommerce player in the travel and tourism…

What is technical debt?

This article is my own synthesis of ideas presented at Lean Agile Scotland in September 2014 by Dan North, Jabe Bloom and Torbjörn Gyllebring, with some of my own embellishments. Any misunderstanding of their points is mine! I’ve linked to their original talks at the foot of this post. Conway’s Law says that the design…

A year of whiteboard evolution

My colleague, Simon (aka The Agile Pirate), has written a post on his blog about how our team’s Scrum Board has evolved over the past year. Until I Simon’s summary, I wasn’t quite concious of how much we have achieved since January. It’s probably worth supplementing Simon’s post with something about the aim of the…

Reflections from Agile Cambridge 2013: Day 3

[This post continues from Reflections from Agile Cambridge: Day 2] Real Options in the real world (Chris Matts) This was a fascinating keynote investigating how we can consider the options we face in project management as being Options in the financial sense: they expire, they have a value and we should avoid committing to them…