Month: March 2015

How To Put The ‘Fun’ Into Work Environments

So you have, or you are implemented Agile in some form, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe…  These are both exciting and scary times.  You’ve convinced your boss that this is a better way to create software, to create and deliver business value earlier, quicker and to build an amazing team.  You have told your boss you can take him or her to management utopia!  Well now it’s time to deliver…

So, why is it then that some many companies that I see have made this massive paradigm shift in thinking, expect their team members to do the same… even though they are still in a work environment that was, to be quite frank, devised in the late 1800’s.

Agile + Fun = Management Utopia
(Massive results, happy staff and happy bosses!)

Continue reading How To Put The ‘Fun’ Into Work Environments

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

4 Easy Ways To Inspire Performance & Creativity On Your Project

Want to inspire a high performance team?  Want to inspire creativity on your project? You need to create an environment that is so ‘awesome’, creativity and productivity is never an issue.  Here’s some ideas to get started…

Here is a short list of simple ways to inspire your teams creativity and get them cranking out the productivity and creativity…

DO A SETH AND BUILD TRIBES

People want to belong to tribes.

I remember taking over a troubled project for a company in the UK.  The moral of the team was shot to pieces, the output non-existent, the budget exceeded.

I started on the Monday.

On the previous Friday the company had made the team sit through a ‘we value our employees’ presentation… then fired them all!  Go figure…

I walked in on the Monday… to only 1 team member.  My boss thought he was helping me, when what he had just done is thrown the baby out with the bath water.  After a rather uncomfortable conversation with him I was able to call the guys back in for a chat. Continue reading 4 Easy Ways To Inspire Performance & Creativity On Your Project

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

The Role of Project Manager On An Agile Project

I talk to a lot of project managers and they always have the same question for me…

“What is my role in an agile organization?”

They see the scrum roles of scrum master, product owner and scrum team member and they say, “Wait a second, there is no role for a project manager in there.  Do I even have a place in an agile organization?”

Well the answer to that is an emphatic yes.

I think that most project managers have a skill set that transfers over very well to scrum, but the key is understanding which skills do transfer over well and which ones are going to have to adjust.

Continue reading The Role of Project Manager On An Agile Project

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

The $1,000,000 Hackathon – Watch!

A colleague just send me a link to this youtube video and I just had to share it.

Why did you share this with me Steve?  What has this go to do with Agile?… a lot actually…

It is a good question tho.  Well you see I started my career as a developer… creating software is in my blood and I think this type of event is really cool… and very Agile.

These guys pump out two weeks or more worth of work in two days.  Sure they work like mad dogs, and have a great team around them, but this is very Agile… here’s why…

Continue reading The $1,000,000 Hackathon – Watch!

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

7 Ways Managers Can Support Self-Managed Teams

One of the cornerstones of Scrum is the self-managed team, and managers often struggle with this change in thinking.  Here are a few tips I have picked up on how to best deal with this issue.

A common question I get asked is:

“How can I support my teams in doing a better job of self-organizing and self-managing?”

Well, there are actually several things you can do to support your teams as they learn these new self managed behaviors and get better at them.

Straight up, don’t manage your Scrum team.  I will repeat that…

Continue reading 7 Ways Managers Can Support Self-Managed Teams

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Is your company infected with SCRUMBUT?

If you’ve been around SCRUM long enough you will be familiar with the term SCRUMBUT. SCRUM what? SCRUMBUT.

First off it makes me chuckle, it’s a great name.  Then my stomach churns.

“We use SCRUM… but…”

Memories of bad senior stakeholder initial meetings come flooding back… “We run Agile here, so we don’t create requirements”, “The guys just build whatever I tell them too” – OMG, SCRUMBUT.

So, what is SCRUMBUT, how can you identify it and what can you do to clean it up?

Continue reading Is your company infected with SCRUMBUT?

Bring the spirit of leadership back.
Be Brave - Trust, Truth, Transparency.

Find yourself in this situation?  Give us a call for a chat. We love assisting companies and business leaders through this challenging time.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.