When it comes to managing change then what ever practices you decide to adopt, its preferable to take an “all in” approach, in that you get as many people involved as you can. This does not mean that you have to adopt everything all at once, but helps you understand the big picture of change within your organisation.

Read More

When trying to share some knowledge or raise issues, I try to lead the audience (audience being an individual, team or community) on a thought trail rather than pointing out issues directly or just imparting the answer. By laying out a path of thinking, the audience is more likely to engage with the concepts or information you are imparting and become involved in path to the answer. Once on the path, the audience is more likely to accept the outcome.

Okay, so how do you start a thought trail, it sounds like a long, drawn out, boring process!

Read More

Limiting your work in progress (WIP) has several benefits when it comes to making individuals and teams more effective. Here are my the most useful approaches I have found.

Read More

On my way to understanding lean concepts through the use of Kanban, I have found books by the following authors invaluable:

Read More

For people in software development, a great deal of time is spent working and learning in order to increase the quality of your output and make you a more rounded person. Unfortunately, all this time is spend with your body fairly inactive, leading to another kind of more rounded person that you didn’t plan for, i.e. your body does not get the exercise it wants.

This is a problem for many knowledge worker roles, so here are some things you can do to make you a rounded person in mind and not in body.

Read More

Agile fairytale is a neat way to express agile concepts in a way that is easily understood, using a context more likely to be meaningful or recognisable to a wide audience.

At the heart of Agile Fairytales are three fundamental concepts:

Read More

The term agile evolved to encapsulated the principles behind software development practices such as extreme programming, scrum and other iterative and incremental approaches.

Lean has been around a lot longer, (possibly a great deal longer - Chinese Emperors) but has infrequently seemed to gather momentum in software development until recent years.

On the surface that there is a great deal of commonality between the two approaches. For example with Agile, teams focus on doing enough work to get the job done whilst leaving options open, to help managing the inevitable change with less pain and risk (eg. failing early). This agile practice could be viewed as minimising waste, a lean concept, but do most agile teams have the opportunity to understand that they are minimising waste and the implications of doing so?

Read More

Scrum is a process framework for creating your own agile way of working, to help you address the goals of your particular organisation. Some of the key benefits to using scrum (over some other non-agile or non-iterative process) are as follows:

Read More

Regardless of the processes and tools you put in place to become more agile, you should take the time to appreciate the principles of agile to help you understand what you are aiming for. Reading and understanding the implications of the agile manifesto is therefore a valuable start, although it is just a start of a very important change.

Here is a quick summary of the agile manifesto to get you started:

Read More

Developers should be open about the importance and value of code and not be too precious about their latest creation. An understanding of how good your code should be in terms of what you need to achieve makes you a better developer.

Have a read of the article: 7 Reasons To Hate Your Code

Thank you.
jr0cket

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket