MY BLOG

Still confused about agile? Not managed to make sense of mindsets and manifestos, sprints and stand-ups? You're not the only one.

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In this article I address that by describing agile in pragmatic terms. This is a common sense guide which will explain what the hell agility is all about, and why adopting an agile approach is a strategic choice that will give your organisation a competitive advantage.

Recently I’ve read books about Amazon, Google and Netflix. I consider them to be successful agile organisations and I want to learn from them. But search these books for a mention of agile — or scrum — and you get precisely zero results. So what do they talk about?

In this article I discuss how these companies develop an agile culture through an emphasis on leadership and talent rather than frameworks and methodologies.

Growth marketing, or "growth hacking", is the secret sauce that's driven the success of the likes of eBay, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Uber and AirBnB.  It's also an approach widely practiced in Europe, and is just starting to bubble up in the UK, which has been slower to adopt.

 

If you want to supercharge the growth of your organisation, you want to know about this.  This is my guide to the most useful resources to start your learning journey.

 

The challenge that faces all successful start-ups is the need to scale effectively.  In a small company agility comes naturally, but how can you maintain this speed as you grow?

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As businesses grow they become more complex, a growing network of dependencies emerges, and with that comes the need for more process.  

 

This article explores how a team structure optimised for alignment can reduce that complexity, remove dependencies and decrease the process overhead in order to enable speed.

The challenge that faces all successful start-ups is the need to scale effectively.  In a small company agility comes naturally, but how can you maintain this speed as you grow?

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Focus is the superpower which all businesses possess, but few ever deploy.  ​

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In the second part of my series on how to move fast at scale I explore the power of focus to enable speed and realise learning and value sooner.

The challenge that faces all successful start-ups is the need to scale effectively.  In a small company agility comes naturally, but how can you maintain this speed as you grow?

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While alignment and focus are relatively easy to achieve, autonomy is much more nuanced and more tricky.​

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In the third part of my series on how to move fast at scale I tackle autonomy - what it takes both to lead and work autonomously.

This is an in-depth case study of introducing business agility at Moonpig.  An hour's reading in total, it's split in to 12 "bite-sized" chunks.

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It covers every element of the journey - why the change was made, how it was made, outcomes and lessons learned.

We've been organised into functions for so long that it has come to feel "right".  But the rationale behind cross-functional is more common sense than crazy.

Using football as an analogy, this article explains the benefits of cross-functional working, and why it's a better way to achieve your business goals.

Self-organisation is a core concept of agile working.  It assumes that if we stop telling people to do, they will figure it out for themselves.  But is this really the case?

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This article examines the reality of self-organisation - why it often fails and how to make it work.

Published in 2001, the Agile Manifesto triggered a seismic change in the way software is developed.  For that we must be grateful.  However, whilst outlining a sound set of principles, the manifesto has also caused untold confusion.  We've spent the last 20 odd years arguing about what agile is.

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In this blog post I discuss simpler, more effective ways to communicate and sell the benefits of agile.

When it comes to adopting agile, methodologies have tended to dominate - Scrum in particular.  The benefit of methodologies is that they provide clear guidance by seeking to translate principles into practice.  However, they do have limitations.

In this article I suggest a different approach to methodologies - using guardrails as an alternative way to provide guidance whilst still maintaining a high level of autonomy and flexibility for teams.

Originally written for the Moonpig Engineering blog, this post describes Moonpig's journey to adopt continuous delivery.

 

This change had a significant impact on our capacity to learn and deliver value to customers by enabling a fail-fast, test-and-learn approach.

Originally written for the Moonpig Engineering blog, this describes my experiences of working with the engineering teams to successfully adopt trunk-based development. 

 

This enabled genuine continuous integration, creating fast feedback loops to provide early validation of working software.