This year I was finally able to attend MapCamp 2019 with ~600 other people at Sadlers Wells Theatre, London. MapCamp is a conference introducing and describing the technique of Wardley Mapping, a tool for mapping strategy. I first came across Wardley Maps a couple of years ago through the medium book. I found it compelling, Simon Wardley has a lovely humble style of writing. He described how he went from ‘bumbling CEO’ to ‘having a vague idea of what I was doing’....
Kick-off’s are a great way of bringing a new team together at the start of a new project or phase of a project. The aim is to allow the team to get to know one another and to allow all the team members to understand the goals and objectives. I recently helped facilitate a kick-off for the alpha phase of the ‘Protect’ service (working title). Although Protect had been through a discovery phase, circumstances meant that the Alpha team was quite different to the Discovery team....
I love hill climbing and mountaineering, ever since I was dragged up Pen-Y-Fan and got mild hypothermia in the scouts at about the age of 13. One of the best things yomping up hills has taught me is the nature of risk. So I was a bit surprised when I saw this tweet from Vasco Duarte: Friends, let's collect a list of domains where Risk ELIMINATION is priority #1: Climbing; Air travel industry; what else?...
I’m the scrum master for a small team developing a new service for a government agency. The team has been working in an agile way for 20 months. I have been with them for 15 of those months. Our team is made up of user researchers, a designer, a BA, developers and testers. Dealing with users isn’t new to me, before joining my current team I worked in IT operations and service management, dealing with angry and frustrated users was a day to day part of the role....