I love the agile manifesto, one of the things that most drew me to it was “Responding to change over following a plan”. I’ve worked on enough projects to see the benefit in changing direction when it’s clear that your plan isn’t going to help you hit your goal, and the sheer grinding death-march experience for teams when that doesn’t happen. However the manifesto doesn’t say much about different types of change and how best to respond to them....
A few months back Neil Vass asked in the Agile in the Ether slack channel for advice for people looking to move into Delivery Management roles. I posted a bunch of replies, others did too. Before slack deletes all the replies I thought I would turn them into a blog post. What is a delivery manager? When I first started working as a delivery manager in 2015, job searches for the role mainly returned delivery driver and pizza delivery type roles, over the last 9 years the role has become much more established in both the public and private sector....
User Manual of Ian Ames I’ve used Cassie Robinson’s User Manual of me template a number of times when starting projects with new teams, its a great way to quickly introduce a team to how everyone likes to work and to discuss how best to work together. It also works well in remote organisations as a way to quickly learn about colleagues you may not see on a day to day basis....
This post was originally published on the surevine blog. 3 months ago, I took the next step in my career and joined Surevine as a Team Lead. There were many things that first attracted me to the company, but one major benefit was that it’s totally remote, and so learning how to work collaboratively whilst remote was a challenge that really interested me. Sureviner’s are spread all over the country, and my team alone covers a geographical area that stretches from Durham to Plymouth....
Emily Webber recently asked if I could run an 8-minute workshop to energise people at the beginning of her regular Agile in the Ether remote meetup. (It is a very friendly meetup and well worth checking out). This is the detail of the game I facilitated: Objective Tell a story that develops iteratively and everyone in the group contributes to. Instruction Each person adds a sentence to a story, but has to repeat the preceding sentences first, then nominates the next person to go....