Delivery

The agility Challenge for Embedded Software

If you’ve ever worked for a business that has it’s core focus in the embedded software space, I suspect you are more likely to have had to tolerate software development practices from 20 years ago. If you’ve read many books on Agile software development, DevOps or other modern practices, you may also have noticed that they almost all talk about software that targets a server or website, possibly a PC. But unless you’re reading a very different library to me, you’ll not have seen much talk about embedded software.

Continue reading

7 Practical Steps To Increase Accountability In Agile Teams

Individual and team accountability is critical for any high functioning team, I believe that this is often a concern for senior management, especially when considering an agile transformation, and can be difficult to attain. At the points in my career that I have seen senior management push back on the adoption of agile methodologies, the main areas of contention has been around the feeling of losing “control” over the delivery roadmap.

Continue reading

Why the bottleneck is everything

This is probably the least intuitive idea that I’ve come across in my working career, but when explained and demonstrated, possibly one of the most important. Here it is: it is inefficient to have everyone working at 100% effort, 100% of the time. This seems wrong – we’re paying for these people, they should be putting all their time and effort towards our product features! Get back to working on them!

Continue reading

Motivation 2.0

How are you engaging your team? Are you running a regular appraisal cycle where everyone’s individual score is totted up and ultimately dictates financial reward (pay increase, bonus, share options) or, on the other side of the scale, performance improvement plans? How are you finding this? Do people who get the financial rewards become more engaged and effective throughout the year? Do those on the performance improvement plans “pull their socks up” and become superstars now that they know they’re not performing to expectations?

Continue reading

what is agility?

Strictly speaking, ‘agile’ is an adjective, a descriptive word… like “nimble” & so the more obvious title “What is agile?” probably would have made a small, hardcore, fraction of people up-chuck a little in their mouths. (I am not so offended on this one, but tell me something is “addicting” and I will develop an unruly lower eyelid twitch). I think the reason behind this is due to how commercialised and corporate the term has become over the years – ironically, as the original manifesto moved thinking in a completely different direction.

Continue reading