Prevalent Themes at Agile 2019

What a blast Agile 2019 was this year. We met some amazing new people and re-connected with fantastic customers. Agile 2019 really brings together the tenured Agilists, along with those just starting to dip their toes into Agile practices and principles. This coming together of knowledge is what makes the event such a great place...

Can a Minimalistic Work Strategy Work for You?

Minimalism has been rejuvenated in the past couple of years, mainly inspired by Marie Kondo’s take on decluttering one’s home, with Kondo herself and many other commentators exploring how every aspect of one’s life could be improved by adopting a minimalist approach. This is not a new theory of course, with minimalism in art first...

The Flow Framework™ – Defects as Warranty Costs

In my previous posts, I’ve talked about two flow Items from the Flow Framework™ and how they are analogous to other types of financial transactions. Tech debt is similar to financial debt and risk items are similar to security costs. Today, I’m going to discuss how defects are similar to warranty costs.  Why do we...

How Climate Change is Making British People Poorer

While the effects of climate change are scientifically undeniable, many people in the UK and around the world still view it as something of an alien concept. The words themselves conjure up disaster movie images of huge sea storms, baking deserts or animal extinction, but far too often people don’t think of how climate change...

Reflections from Agile 2019: The Perfect Agile Imperfectionist

Another Agile show is in the books. Agile 2019 wrapped last week, and it was nothing short of awesome! The conference was full of great speakers, conversations, and partners as well as great competitors and old friends. Each day brought a new set of Agile practitioners and enthusiasts to our booth, each with their own...

Just-in-time design in software delivery: how to avoid 4 sources of waste in design

Please note: In this post, I will refer to all design practices, User Experience Design, Interface Design, Visual Design, and Design Research as design. Much has been written about Lean UX and the role of design in Agile development. Design’s primary role is reducing the risk that the team is building the wrong thing or...

Four Ways to Improve Workflows in Marketing Ops

A marketing workflow is a set of repeatable steps and processes that are connected to a single marketing task. These standardized workflows are then easy to use as benchmarks of productivity, as well as being easier to roll out to all teams once they have been finalized, meaning that one team’s innovation or improvement will...

6 Steps to Become a Lean Organization

THE WHY AND HOW BEHIND LEAN In previous posts, we’ve talked about the benefits of becoming a Lean organization. We’ve looked at Lean’s guiding principles, and how it’s been used to help organizations continuously improve the way they work and how they develop products. In this article, we’re going to take it a step further and explore...

Shift Happens – 3 Key Takeaways from Agile 2019

The Agile 2019 conference confirmed that the community energy around Agile, as a better way of working, has not wavered. The positive vibe was palpable throughout the conference, as I overheard and took part in conversations around scaling Agile adoption. Those in attendance were excited, engaged, and enthusiastic to learn about improving and growing the...

Optimizing UX: How to set up your own Usability Testing Program in-house  

Testing Tasktop Integration Hub’s user experience is a rather complex undertaking. As my colleague Rebecca explained in her blog last week, “Tasktop suffers from an interesting, almost paradoxical problem: the users who benefit most from our product often have no idea that it exists”. To address this problem, we devised a Usability Testing Program —...