Weaponised Agile?
“A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still” – Adapted from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1612-1680) and popularised again in Dale Carnegie’s book ‘How to win friends and influence people’ 1936. People over Process Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools, is a value which can be summed up as People over…
Read MoreUsing Agile principles to Develop Company Culture Part 3: Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation
In this third post about applying agile principles at FutureLearn, Tessa Cooper, Director of People and Culture, talks about how you should identify, understand and collaborate with your ‘customers’. Before you read this you might want to read the first couple of posts: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. The second…
Read MoreUsing Agile Principles to Develop Company Culture Part 2: Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools
In this second post about applying agile principles at FutureLearn (see the first) Tessa Cooper, Director of People and Culture at FutureLearn, talks about why hiding behind email and tools makes companies less efficient and how putting time into interactions with individuals can make a company more effective. “Individuals and interactions, over processes and tools”…
Read MoreUsing Agile Principles to Develop Company Culture Part 1: Introduction
In this introduction to a series of posts, Tessa Cooper, the Director of People and Culture at FutureLearn (an online training platform teaching courses in everything from coding, to languages, to Shakespeare, to genetics) discusses why she believes agile working principles can be used to develop company culture. Many of the individual principles and practices…
Read MoreWhat is the Agile Mindset?
What is the Agile Mindset? The agile mindset seems to be a mythical abstract quality that is hard to define and often glossed over in agile discussions. It is the outermost ring in the popular metaphor agile onion. The model tells us the mindset is the most powerful of the layers that make up agile….
Read MoreWhy you should beware of professionals that set lean against agile
This post discusses the opinion that professionals, experts, and thought leaders consistently setting lean against agile are likely to be in discord with lean and agile mindset and foundations. This post also describes how lean/agile polyglots, that seamlessly use and mix ideas from a repertoire of lean and agile methods and practices, better serve organisations,…
Read MoreWhat is Agile?
What is Agile? Over the last few years, the word Agile (or agile with a small a) has taken on different meanings and been used in multiple contexts. This is a short post to give my perspective on what Agile is. I’m not going to bore you with the 2001 meeting, agile manifesto, or an intro…
Read MoreWhy agile works & how to go beyond it with Alistair Cockburn
Adventures with Agile are honoured to announce a new training course for agilists this September in London. Now’s your opportunity to learn why agile works and how to go beyond it on the 3 day Advanced Agile Master Class with the co-author of the agile manifesto – Alistair Cockburn. “Expert” agile practitioners have mastered the practices – but…
Read MoreAgile will change the world
As the foreword in Scott Ambler’s book says ‘The process wars are over and Agile won’. Agile is now being adopted in the largest organisations and the smallest all over the world. It’s no longer a question of ‘if’, it’s just a question of ‘when’. If you don’t become more agile, then you have more…
Read MoreWhat is value? (part 2)
Read part 1 here. Agile Manifesto As always, we will start with the Agile Manifesto. The manifesto specifically gives us a set of values in which we use as the building blocks for our development. We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to…
Read MoreThe Self-Organising team is at the heart of Agile
From XP (1) and Scrum (2) we have the concept of self-organising teams. A self-organising team doesn’t need to be commanded or controlled to get its work done. This page is a discussion on self-organising teams and the opposite of the command and control top down approach. Self-organising means that the individuals within the team…
Read MoreAgile from first principles
The Agile Manifesto gives us four statements which form the underlying ideas behind all the Agile methodologies. It also gives us 12 principles behind the Manifesto which go to further help us understand what it means to be Agile and guide us in our decision making processes. Agile has become a noun and a verb….
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