agile

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....

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?...