Business

Talking about product innovation at Agile Australia 2013

Speaking with Kate Linton at Agile Australia 2013 was a load of fun. We talked about product innovation in large enterprises. We walked through characteristics that are helpful for innovation, as well a bunch of methods and techniques used on recent ThoughtWorks projects around the globe. Check it out for yourself. The Intrapreneur’s Playground – …

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An approach to end-to-end product development

There are a number of different models/approaches/frameworks for product strategy and delivery. Many of them I don’t like terribly much, because of a tendency to break apart the sum components (business strategy, design, delivery) into disparate phases – often with gating process in between. This is mostly unhelpful, and not conducive to responding to change – either because of what is learnt along the way, or some other business factor.
So, recently somebody asked me what my ideal approach for end-to-end product development looks like.
It’s a straight-forward question, but not an entirely straight-forward answer.

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UX Australia: Turbocharge your workshops with Andy Budd

I was fortunate enough to attend UX Australia in Sydney this year, and  this workshop by Andy Budd – about running good workshops – was a highlight for me. As much as I enjoyed the content and hands-on practice, it was most interesting to observe a master at work. It’s fairly common knowledge that good facilitators are good communicators – and that means a lot more than just being a clever lad. Communications consultants/coaches often talk about the importance of things less tangible, like: gravitas, passion, modulation, body language and the ability to command a room. These things aren’t easily learnt, and it’s not a box you can tick during preparation. Watching Andy work his craft, by facilitating us for a few hours was in itself insightful and helpful.

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Phillip Calcado on pitfalls of velocity for Agile project management

If the Business Analyst or Project Manager gives Velocity more attention than it should be given, if he or she is more worried in counting points than listening to the team, if anything that would impact in Velocity is a taboo… then a project has a huge problem. In this scenario it gets clear that his or …

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Agile techniques in the wild

Scott Ambler gave this excellent presentation as part of Agile 2008 Conference last week, debunking a variety of assumptions, myths and a misconceptions surrounding Agile. Most discussion is based on field data gleaned from a large-sample survey distributed among the agile community intended to find out what is actually happening in the industry, not what …

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