The role of Product Owner was first defined as part of the Scrum agile product development method. The current definition says – “a Scrum Product Owner is responsible for maximising the value of the product resulting from the work of… Read More
A Humane Approach to Organisational Change
Organisational change is seldom popular. However all organisations exist in a changing world and must constantly change and adapt to what’s around them and the market conditions that prevail. How an organisation adopts change preoccupies many management teams and whether their… Read More
Ideas on How to Split User Stories
Breaking large user stories (or work items in layman’s terms) down into several smaller ones hugely improves delivery predictability. There are several reasons for this including the fact that smaller items with fewer moving parts are simply easier to estimate… Read More
Agile Telemetry, Doing Data Driven Product Development like a Formula 1 Team
Building a software product requires thousands of design decisions to be made and making those decisions quickly will significantly reduce the time to market. Getting things shipped quickly can significantly reduce commercial risks through gaining early feedback. But making these… Read More
Agile Business Analysis Using the Three Amigos
Good outcomes when building software features is strongly connected to having the right insight and information at the right time to help form a consensus on what to actually build. The problem with traditional requirements documents is that they typically… Read More
Development Agility May Not Mean a Formal Agile Transformation
Change within organisations is not normally easy to achieve and it’s even hard to make changes stick. The book sellers are full of change management publications advising on ways to achieve organisational transformation. But working in new ways doesn’t have… Read More
Product Backlog Tools – How to Prioritise Using the Cost of Delay
Have you wondered how to arrange a to-do list in the correct order? Probably not. There’s nothing to learn, right? Clearly, prioritising what to do next shouldn’t be hard. But don’t underestimate how costly a casual attitude to this can… Read More
Why User Story Points Help Agile Effort Estimation
Story Points seem to enjoy a perpetually difficult place in the lives of many agile teams. They are the source of much confusion and teams often choose not to adopt them. The traditional practice of quantifying work in days or… Read More
What is a Pull System and Why Should I Care?
The concept of a pull system is a simple but important one for software teams. Many teams I see struggling have problems rooted in the push nature of their environment. A pull system reacts to customer demand and worker throughput.… Read More
What is an Agile Software Team Anyway?
There are a few questions I get asked in convoluted form. This is one of them. In this safe haven I’ll try to explain what an agile software team is in the most straightforward way I can. Aiming this at customers,… Read More