Category: Uncategorized

This post describes a workshop format I’ve used a few times: help a team think through risks and possible disasters that might affect a piece of work, before the work starts and while there’s still time to do something to avoid all those bad outcomes. What’s a futurespective? Teams often do “retrospectives”: Looking back, reflecting,…

This is a writeup from a series of talks and workshops I’ve given on this topic. So far: This post, part 6, is the last in the series. There’s a lot more techniques you could look into for estimation, but for this “what’s the least you can get away with” series, we’ve seen enough. Today,…

I’ve mentioned recently how much I enjoy Advent of Code challenges (no spoilers here, don’t worry). One topic I’ve found fascinating is how to write algorithms that find their way around graphs. There’s a lot of history on how people came up with things, and a wide range of problems they can help with (not…

Advent of Code is an advent calendar of coding puzzles – one puzzle appears every day from 1st to 25th December. Each puzzle is in two parts; solving the first part (by writing some code to work out the right answer, and pasting it into the site) gets you a star, and unlocks the second…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 ……

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…