Thoughts on Responding to Change

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....

<span title='2025-09-05 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>September 5, 2025</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;4 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;Ian Ames

5 Reasons Open Plan Offices Suck for Agile Teams

I recently gave a presentation at the inaugural Tech Exeter conference called Practical agile: Lessons learned the hard way on our journey delivering digital products. In that presentation I claimed open plan offices are terrible team spaces, but didn’t really elaborate on why. Since then Neil Parker asked on twitter to explain why I thought open plan offices are bad team environments. So here is my totally unscientific personal listicle to explain why!...

<span title='2016-10-13 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>October 13, 2016</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;4 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;Ian Ames