organisations Specificity I've become that annoying person who asks, "you say it takes a long time - but how long exactly? Which part consumes the most time? How did you measure?"There's a reason. For
organisations Steak and Salami Ever had the feeling you're working constantly and getting nowhere? Specifically, the one where you've got a dozen things to do and none of them are getting done? Did you find that the
agile Servant Leader, Helicopter Parent Why is developing software so slow now?Provocative statement, so let's unpick. Maybe I'm getting more impatient as I get older, but the pace of modern software development feels glacial. Honestly, why do
teams Mentoring, not hiring: The Reality Semi-anonymous Internet idiots like me love telling you all these things you should be doing about team structure, organisational approach and Really Exciting Technology but we're often a bit light on what happens
agile Methodology? What Methodology? I think I'm getting kind of post-methodology in my thinking. I don't really care what it is or what it's called, but I do care that it facilitates three critical things
teams How to really identify a 10x developer The sudden trending of "hashtag 10x developer" worries me. It worries me because it's not really about 10x performance, at least most of the time I've seen it. Instead, it tends to bundle two often overlapping movements which are unrelated to performance.
agile Agility and the power of No One of the nice things for me about writing is I get to go back to my old articles every once in a while and see where my viewpoint has matured, where it's changed...
organisations The 10x Developer and You I'm in the mood for sarcastic graphs. I think (I hope) that the idea of the "10x" developer is not an astonishingly new and radical one. People in the upper quartile
teams Thoughts on Interviewing I think I'm destined to always be an iconoclast when it comes to interviews. Not quite so much as the days when "let's ask programmers some questions about programming" was a
teams Thoughts on team leadership and metrics I realise that in four or so years of this site I've never talked properly about team leadership, which is a bit of an omission given how much time I've devoted to organisational
organisations Two Transformation Questions What exactly is a transformation? Is it "go to the cloud" or "be Agile" or "containerise the things"? Despite the number of organisations which state those as
teams Performance Reviews I had an interesting conversation last night about that old bugbear, the annual performance review. No matter how many well-meaning attempts have been made with SMART targets or peer review systems, every annual
organisations Bias for action and agility What has linked all of the high-performing teams and organisations I've worked for or with? That title is a bit of a clue: it's a bias for action. What this means is they
devops DevOps: What I Learnt From A Nightmare Journey I've just finished what was a very rough journey into a fully-automated deployment infrastructure at a large scale. At times it felt more like I was in a bizarre far-future version of a
planning Planning isn't free I've got a confession to make: I secretly enjoy rewriting code when requirements change. I get to think again about what I was doing and my assumptions, tidy up the lingering technical debt,
organisations ln(t): The startup growth problem Here's an article that I found in my backlog, and realised I never got round to publishing. When I wrote it I was thinking predominately about startups, but on reflection there's a lot
organisations Firefighting Firefighting is one of the biggest and most common causes of lost productivity and morale in software development. It usually manifests as developers being pulled off their project to urgently fix something -
organisations Why enterprise companies are sinking in the flood There's a question enterprise companies ask about startups. "How are we being beaten by ten guys in a loft in Shoreditch? We've got so many more resources than they have!" And
agile Waste redux A conversation today reminded me of my musings about waste from a couple of months ago. The context being that Scrum is misunderstood more often than it's understood, the relatively broad statements of
agile Agile transformation: The Low A few months into any company's journey towards agile development I often see a point which I call the Low. This is where you've brought in a few experts, and done a few
organisations Bimodal IT isn't anything to aspire to Bimodal IT is a term created by analysis form Gartner, to describe an increasingly common pattern in enterprise development. It's where you have one part of the organisation working in a very traditional,
organisations Waste What's the difference between a merely good Scrum organisation and a great one? The answer is waste. Waste in a Scrum context is loosely defined as any activity which does not result in
organisations Be careful with "Modern Agile". I have a problem with a lot of the recent advice suggesting firms looking to adopt agile practices should eschew the stand-ups, estimations and fixed iterations of Scrum. Which is strange as a
organisations Updating the Joel Test for the modern world Hands up who remembers the Joel Test? It might take some remembering, because it's a shade over 15 years old now - pre-dating the Agile Manifesto. For those of you who don't, Joel's
agile Avoiding nightmare releases Something I've seen a lot of supposedly Agile teams fail with is releases at the end of a project. Everything up to that point ticks along nicely, but the final sprint is a
