Prioritising projects and initiatives by ROI (return on investment) seems a sound way to determine the best business opportunities to pursue. But actually it isn’t — or at least it’s not the whole story. Positive ROI is certainly a pre-requisite for an initiative to be a viable option for economically…

Measuring performance (of e.g. products, services, operations and employee activity) is becoming increasingly popular in the arena of software and product development, and knowledge work more generally. At the end of the day, you measure particular things because they are important to you in some way. Your weight and average…

Agile is a philosophy which embraces (among other things) incremental delivery and improvement. Yet some folks treat it as a binary, “you’re either doing it or you’re not”, operating model. They claim a team cannot embrace Agile principles without the whole organisation doing so. This is a chicken and egg…

Followers of my work, including those who have attended my recent story slicing webinar or training, will likely know I advocate for (and practice) iterative, incremental and empirical approaches to the majority of software/product development endeavours (and, indeed, work initiatives of pretty much any kind). Often, when I introduce folks…

Here is a simple guide (fewer than 10 steps) to making incremental improvements using a scientific approach, whether it be in your personal life or in your workplace. Through the steps (below), we’ll follow two different examples — one related to an agile transformation, and one related to personal health. …

I came across this post by prominent Agile expert Mike Cohn. Mike is an extremely knowledgable practitioner and consultant with a massive wealth of experience, and as such he is someone we should most certainly listen to, and from whom we can learn a great deal. However, I would like…

I introduced ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development) to a team I was recently working with. It’s been used by agile teams for years (sometimes referred to as BDD — Behaviour Driven Development), but I do not see it used much in the wild nowadays. …

There is a very common trope in the agile community that agile and project management — and by extension project managers — do not mix, or are even in direct conflict with each other. Let’s unpack this. At its core, project management is about controlling delivery risk in projects such…

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