Focus
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Focus

One of the challenges I often hear from developers is about focus – there are good reasons to avoid multitasking (a big one being that people can’t multitask – it’s actually time-slicing and incredibly inefficient) but at the other extreme working on a single problem for a whole day is also ineffective, so what’s the…

Delivering Value
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Delivering Value

It’s fundamental to Agile! The first of the Manifesto’s principles is “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”; Modern Agile has four principles, which includes “Deliver Value Continuously”; Heart of Agile says “Deliver small probes initially to learn how the world really works. Expand deliveries as…

Priorities Change
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Priorities Change

One of the Product Owner’s key responsibilities is to ensure the backlog (well, the top of it, at least) reflects the stakeholders’ priorities. Of course, the certainty of those priorities decreases the further out you try to look: we ought to be pretty confident in the priorities for the next couple of weeks, but less…

4 Simple Steps
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4 Simple Steps

I was watching Henrik Kniberg’s keynote at AgileByExample 2016 and I liked his T-shirt (as well as his speech, of course) It sounds like 4 Simple Steps, but clearly it’s not simple or everyone would follow them. The challenge is to find out what’s preventing some or all of these – how is the system…