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…

Part 2: Using the wisdom of the whole team We’ve talked about how agile helps you reduce risk by working in shorter cycles, allowing you to learn as you go. But there’s another big reason agile works. It allows you to use the wisdom of the entire team. Your team are smarter than you think…

Part 1: a different approach to planning and risk I’ve already talked about how agile enables good prioritisation. This means you are doing the right things, and more importantly, you are doing fewer things at once. You can achieve so much more if you are focused on a few high impact pieces of work instead…

When I told my mother that I was writing a book about agile, her first reaction was, of course, supportive. But she wasn’t really sure what I was talking about. “Agile… that’s a computer programme, isn’t it?” Not quite, Mum! But she’s not the only one who has some funny ideas about what agile entails.…