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....
I’ve never been much of a one for career planning, from reading the ‘5 minutes with’ series from Jon Rhodes that seems to be a common trait of delivery people, lots of us kind of fall into it and enjoy it, that’s certainly been my situation. The Amesy method of career development: For the last few years I have been contracting, this has been a great experience seeing how different organisations work, learning about lots of new problem domains, and hopefully making things just a bit better; I’ve kind of just taken the contracts that were available at the time and haven’t been overly deliberate when selecting work, I find myself getting frustrated by common patterns and want to address them....
Triage is used in medicine when acute care cannot be provided for lack of resources. The process rations care towards those who are most in need of immediate care, and who benefit most from it. More generally it refers to prioritisation of medical care as a whole. I have some personal experience of using triage from my time as a mountain rescue volunteer. We would often train for scenarios where the number of casualties was more than our capacity to treat them all....
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....