The Lean Startup – joining up the pieces

What a relief to find this book. It’s already beginning to tie up a few concepts I’ve heard over the years and make them form a better picture of what’s been going on in the Tech / Startup industry. The Lean Startup It was Jamie King who mentioned it at Games for Health Conference UK […]

We’re ignoring our stakeholders and they couldn’t be happier!

The following is a set of techniques that at WMG, Warwick University I have led and implemented on various digital projects to great success. Stakeholders are happy with it, and they’re not inadvertently altering the success chance of the projects. You’ll recognise this. Every project you run, has a plethora of stakeholders involved. In some large […]

Agile Release Management Training.

Just a note of my training this afternoon. We looked at Epics and Adventures and how they sit in the overall weekly Scrum planning, Backlog Grooming and Release planning. We looked at Roles and Responsibilities within a FULL company setup, past and further than just the Scrum team. I was told about a new role in […]

State of the union (since starting at Warwick Uni)

A small state of the union post so I don’t forget my journey so far… The largest change is introducing my Agile experience into many aspects of workflow and to many members of staff. Agile Training * I have delivered three separate sets of Agile training * Once for the Project Management Networking Group * […]

Should you allow clients into your bug tracking software?

I believe yes, you should. With the proper caveats and training, your client should be able to see what’s going on. The client has fewer surprises, is in on the problems and #FTW’s. They feel more connected to the product and weirdly will start to feel more “onside”. Sure it might seem scary at first, […]

Present development work without a live server

So on the Agile Development project I’m running we don’t have a feature to sort out a live or testing server yet. In fact that might still be a couple of weeks off. So how do you show your work off earlier for quality assurance before you have a server? We’ve found at the University […]

Mixing the Backlog and Sprint board together… gulp!

I’m trialling a new version of an Agile board for longer running projects. Ones that don’t have masses of tickets and set defined sprints, but are more on-going support work. Because, normally I keep a separate backlog board with any number of columns, (whatever the Product Owner feels is easier). And then we create a board […]

Killing off your emails, aiming at project transparency

Just wanted to share, recently I read this article… https://netguru.co/blog/cc-all-the-emails-tips-from-a It talks a lot about transparency which I totally agree with. A more transparent team is a more efficient and better team. Proper transparency means the team’s (including the client) expectations are managed and less confused. However I totally disagree with emails as the best tool for transparency. […]

Running Agile in a small team of 2 to 3

Recently I’ve been working on the site thisison.com which has frequently consisted of a remote team of 2, plus adding in occasional specialist freelancers. This has proved difficult to work completely Agile as it works best with 4 to 8 people. Here’s the changes we made and other salient points, * Trello boards to maintain […]

You’re a Damsel in distress and nowt’ more than an object

This series is by, Anita Sarkeesian, who talks us through a history of the “Damsel in Distress” mechanic used by many popular games from the digital age, referenceing games like Mario, Zelda, Prince of Persia… pretty much a lot of games. It takes a very well laid out approach to identifying what to look for, […]