Like RACIs, project plans have a lot to answer for. Most project plans are hard to read, hard to update, and almost immediately out of date. I’m pretty sceptical of any project documentation that requires lots of time spent up-front to only approximate the reality of what you are doing, and project plans are often…

When we think about accountability, we default to thinking about managers. Managers keep people accountable by telling them what to do, and creating consequences if they don’t do those things. But people aren’t dogs waiting to be biffed on the nose with a rolled up newspaper for peeing on the carpet. When someone fails to…

Last week, we discussed why the RACI model sucks. Planning out responsibilities in detail at the start of the project can prevent you from learning and adapting as you go. A much better approach to divvying up responsibilities is to have a regular, structured conversation about them. That’s the “R” in RACI, but what about…

Working out who should be Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed on a project should make roles much clearer, right? Wrong. Every time someone asks me for a RACI, my heart sinks. I have spent so much time agonising over so many RACIs that only a few people have even skim read. There must be dozens…

I think silence is an underrated agile skill. That may sound odd, but fundamentally agile is a set of tools to help people collaborate and reflect. And you can’t do either of those things without silence. Silence helps you pause, slow down and spot what’s happening. If all your meetings are non-stop talking, no one…

We’ve talked about empowering the team as part of working in an agile way, and how to make collective decisions as part of that. But what if you need to dig into a problem as a group before you make a decision? Here are three of my favourite tools to do just that. Lean coffee…

Last week, we touched on the need for leaders to share power as a necessary criteria for working in an agile way. Flatter power dynamics have all sorts of benefits. Working in a less hierarchal way reduces the pressure on you as a manager. It uses the wisdom of the whole team, including those closest…

You might already be “doing agile” – you just don’t know it yet A common, but surprising reaction I hear when delivering agile training is that some of the content already feels familiar. Maybe one of their team draws on some agile practices even if they’ve never used the term. More likely, they emphasise with…

Last time, we touched on two important mindsets needed for making the shift to agile: a willingness to let the team decide, and a willingness to experiment. But how do you live those out in practice? Letting the team decide how to adopt agile If you’re the leader, you may have some ideas about what…

Agile doesn’t work for everyone. Often when I mention agile to others, they groan, because they’ve seen it done badly. I’ve seen two key failures that cause this: imposing processes on a team and not really trying agile at all. Failure 1: agile imposed on a team This is the failure I most often hear…