Agile Tour Sydney 2016 – call for facilitators

The Agile Tour Sydney is on again on November 14. For 2016 there’s a change of venue to the Aerial UTS Function Centre in Sydney.  So only 40 sleeps to go before the big day. The call has now gone out for nominations from those who would like to run a workshop on the day. So if you’ve […]

How popular are Agile Certifications with employers?

Certifications can be a controversial topic. Get a bunch of Agile practitioners together, and if the topic should turn to certifications, then a heated debate often follows. Some folks love certifications and see much value in them. Others don’t think that they’re worth the paper they are written on. Regardless of your personal opinion about […]

The Rubber Chicken and other ways to get Agile meetings started on time

In a typical Agile or Scrum environment if there’s one thing that reduces productivity and efficiency, its people being late for meetings. Valuable minutes, which soon add up to hours and days, are lost while the team waits for the stragglers to arrive. Waste = bad Waiting is one of the sevens wastes of Muda, as categorized by Taiichi Ohno […]

LAST Conference 2016 (Sydney) – only 16 places left

A quick heads up that the Sydney LAST Conference is on next Monday (July 25th) and there are only 16 tickets left! LAST stands for Lean, Agile, Systems Thinking, so sessions will fall broadly into one or more of those three categories. Tickets for the full day event are only $99 and you can find more […]

Agile and The Black Swan

The Black Swan concept is based on an ancient saying which presumed black swans did not exist. People mistakenly thought that the fact that no-one had even seen a black swan, meant that they didn’t exist. (The saying was rewritten after black swans were discovered in the wild!) Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term in his […]

Highlights from Scrum Australia 2016

Scrum Australia 2016 was a fantastic event. Hats off to the organizing committee for running the event in such a professional manner. Although there were a number of stand-outs, four highlights stood out in my mind. Steve Denning’s opening keynote Aattendees Buzz Bas Vodde’s closing keynote Steve Denning’s opening keynote Steve Denning, the well-known author […]

Inaugural Sydney Agile Coach meetup

A quick heads-up that an exciting new Agile meetup is starting next week in Sydney. The inaugural Sydney Agile Coach Meetup is taking place on Tuesday 3rd May. It’s already attracting some heavy-hitters which is not surprising as it’s being run by Peter Lee from Campaign Monitor and Marcio Sete from Elabor8 – two very knowledgeable guys. This should […]

What are the differences between Risks and Issues?

In traditional world of Project Management, many of us have used a RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Decisions) log, or some variation of it.  Even in Agile corporate environments we often encounter Risks and Issues logs at a project or program level. I had a colleague ask me the other day what was the difference a Risk […]

Scrum Maturity Model presentation in Sydney on Wednesday 27 January.

A quick heads-up that James Cowden is giving a presentation next Wednesday night in Sydney on the Scrum Maturity Model (SMM). This should be an interesting topic with Scrum being a leading Agile methodology, and Maturity Model bringing back memories of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) which was fairly popular in the 1990’s.

Eliminate wastage from your stand-ups

One of the critical concepts behind Lean is to eliminate wastage. You can apply this wastage elimination to all the processes within your project, including the daily stand-up meetings.