Digital by Default

Category: agile

  • Objecting to Objectives (and Key Results)

    Objecting to Objectives (and Key Results)

    On a couple of occasions last week I found myself supporting teams around drafting (or redrafting) their OKRs. This is a bit of a tightrope for me as I want to help the teams but – and I say this knowing it might get me thrown out of the product person club – I really…

  • How do you build a ‘community of practice’ without a ‘community’ that practices?

    How do you build a ‘community of practice’ without a ‘community’ that practices?

    I’m really asking. community /kəˈmjuːnɪti/ noun a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common. Not for the first time I find myself in a role where part of my responsibility is to support the development of some folk who are relatively early stage in their product and…

  • Walls that talk

    Terence wrote this post this week taking aim at the the pervasiveness of Post-Its in todays digital orthodoxy. He referred to the Post-Its on abandoned ‘agile’ walls as wallpaper. Sam responded with a lovely ode to the wonder of wallpaper. I’ve been known to take aim at the ‘blizzard of Post-Its’ (™ Charlie Stross) from…

  • The challenge of ‘user driven development’

      It has been 18 months now since we officially started the project to build a new ONS website – the most consistent thing throughout our initial discovery, the alpha and now the latter days of the beta has been a commitment to the principle of being ‘user focused’. Over the life of the project…

  • Don’t do Agile. Be agile. Or something.

      I’ve read a couple of great posts about ‘agile’ in the last week or so – it is like 2008 all over again! First Paul Downey strayed from the topic of lists & registers to contemplate ‘scope creep’ and then Nik Silver wrote about ‘getting partial value from partial delivery‘. Both posts eloquently cover…