Vagile – Serious about Agility

4th January 2021

A Hero to a story

A hero to a story is like a firefighter who pulls a person out of a burning building and saves the day. A few years ago, I coached an Agile Video Production team. It was a tight-knit team with specialised skill-sets and collaboration. The team churned through the work and delivered lots of high value contributing delivery to outcomes for the organisation....

Agile thoughts... observations/General

4th January 2021

Definition of Done (Exercise)

How to facilitate a DoD? DoD (Definition of Done) is a crucial part of quality in development in Agile teams. It defines conditions that the thing ‘card/story’ or ‘feature’ must satisfy before it’s ready to launch or is called done. DoD also describes the team’s responsibilities towards quality. Think of it as a checklist of conditions something needs to meet...

General/Learning journal

26th December 2020

Getting the right context –

What is Three Amigos? The Three Amigos is a Agile collaboration practice used to elaborate stories with the right capabilities and perspectives to prepare stories. It requires the collaboration of the usually the perspectives of; Business (represented by the Product owner or Business Analyst or SME) Development Quality Engineering (Tester) What Three Amigos is not The 3 Amigos is not...

General

15th November 2020

Self-organising teams

Is self-organisation an inspirational dream or the new reality? Self-organising teams are a staple of the agile way of working, but with so many hierarchical organisations built on industrial era ideals, how can we really make the transition from self-management to self-direction? In this podcast, we dig into the changing way we work as a team. Summary Self-organisation is...

General

25th April 2020

Collaborative remote working for teams and leaders

Collaborative remote working for teams and leaders from SoftEd on Vimeo.

Uncategorised

18th February 2020

Unlocking your team’s performance with working agreements

A working agreement or a social contract (team rules) is a team’s agreed way of working. A fundamental cornerstone for any high performing and high functioning teams in new ways of working. It is an explicit way to call out how the team will interact with one another, enhancing the quality of the group’s processes, emphasising good team behaviors that...

Uncategorised

16th November 2019

Tuckman-Edison Model

Form, Storm, Norm, Perform and Adjourn. So, most of us are familiar with Dr. Bruce Tuckman’s model with the stages a team goes through to get high performance. His work was based on reviewing over works on team theory and categorised them in stages. So the stages a team goes through – forming, storming, norming, and performing is a team’s...

Learning journal

28th September 2019

No more sprint reviews!

For some teams, the sprint review has become meaningless and it’s time to consider stop doing them. Am I breaking Scrum? Sure, I suppose I am. Hear me out. The Purpose of the Sprint Review The purpose of the sprint review is for the whole team to get feedback on what has been done and delivered. It is an opportunity...

Agile thoughts... observations

21st September 2019

Interactive appreciation

Background: Make sure your teams are receptive to this type of retrospective and are open to communication. This might not work so well for a team full of shy and introverted people. Know your audience. Create a half circle with chairs facing 1 chair. Place the 1 chair facing the other half. The hot seat – “Central Chair”. Make sure...

Agile retrospectives

15th September 2019

The Agile – Thai-cave rescue – autonomy, mastery, and purpose

Last night I was watching with Netflix on the couch with the kids. We came across a documentary about the Thai-cave rescue. A true story of an event that unfolded in Thailand during the monsoon season on June 23rd, 2018. 12 Thai boys and the coach were celebrating one of the boy’s birthdays by visiting the Tham Luang cave in...

Agile thoughts... observations