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Notes from Lean Agile Scotland 2023
I’m just back from 3 days at Lean Agile Scotland conference based at Edinburgh University. It was a brilliant location, walking distance to lots of beautiful buildings in the city and to the countryside too. While there I ran a workshop on estimation, which carefully incorporated some locally-relevant facts (did you know Edinburgh is home…
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Deliver Sessions: Facilitation skills
I’ve helped organise Deliver Sessions meetup for a few years, and now I try to write a few notes after each one so I remember all the good topics they cover (like lightning talks and thinking about outcomes). The latest one, in June 2023, was back at the BBC’s offices, where we talked about facilitation…
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Notes from Agile Manchester 2023
I spent 3 days at the Agile Manchester conference, and had a great time – lots of interesting talks and workshops, plus lots of time to speak to people from all kinds of roles and companies. There’s plenty of ideas I’d like to think back over and put into practice. This post’s a prompt for…
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Minimum Viable Estimation, part 5
This is a writeup from a series of talks and workshops I’ve given on this topic. So far: This post, part 5, describes a workshop to help practice coming up with those ranges – a way to make them just wide enough so you’re confident they include the right answer. This skill is useful for…
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Minimum Viable Estimation, part 4
This is a writeup from a series of talks and workshops I’ve given on this topic. It’s been really helpful to think through what techniques I’ve used, what situations each work best in, and what less-than-obvious challenges make this such a hard topic to give simple answers on. So far: This post, part 4 of…
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Minimum Viable Estimation, part 3
This is a writeup from a series of talks and workshops I’ve given on this topic. Part 1 introduced the topic, and took a look at how not estimating at all can work. Part 2 explored using data to avoid having to ask people how long they think things will take. Knowing how you can…
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Minimum Viable Estimation, part 2
This is a writeup from a series of talks and workshops I’ve given on this topic. It’s been really helpful to think through what techniques I’ve used, what situations each work best in, and what less-than-obvious challenges make this such a hard topic to give simple answers on. Part 1 introduced the topic, with a…
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Minimum Viable Estimation, part 1
This is a writeup from a series of talks and workshops I’ve given on this topic. It’s been really helpful to think through what techniques I’ve used, what situations each work best in, and what less-than-obvious challenges make this such a hard topic to give simple answers on. This post is part 1 of ……
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Using lines of hope and despair for prioritisation
I’ve used this technique for several years since learning about it from Dr Sal Freudenberg – thank you Sal! The illustration above is from a “Taming Unicorns with Technology” workshop I ran with Katie Roberts, where we described how using this rather than MoSCoW or other techniques helped hugely with discussions and decision making. Using…