With discussions on the ‘death of agile’ circulating and many calling for a ‘return to basics,’ it’s essential to recognise the pivotal role leadership plays in either accelerating or impeding agile success. Agile, at its core, is about fostering an environment ripe for innovation, with high talent density and rapid delivery of customer value. However, without leadership fully committed to understanding and applying agile principles, transformations risk becoming empty gestures. 

Did you know November 23 is Fibonacci Day? In honour of this mathematical marvel, I’ve written a guide relative estimation techniques, including the Fibonacci sequence, to help Scrum teams tackle ambiguity and align better on effort estimations.

From T-shirt sizing to Planning Poker, I break down the pros and cons of different methods and offer practical steps to make your estimations more effective.

There are some key reasons why high EI is important for leaders. These may seem obvious however, I’ve seen too many times individuals promoted quickly up the ladder who have excellent professional acumen, but poor emotional agility and little self-awareness.

A highly capable leader who feels they are doing their job to the highest level of excellence can still fail themselves, their company and their team if they lack the essential skills of high emotional intelligence.

The main impediment to agile adoption is often the behaviour and mindset of executives and leaders in an organisation. There is a need to understand, embrace, and support agile principles to enable its successful adoption and reap its benefits. Here I’ve covered some of the impediments to a successful adoption of agile, which leaders should tackle when implementing agile ways of working.

As detailed in the excellent HBR article by Darrell Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Hirotaka Takeuchi ‘Embracing Agile’, innovation is what agile is all about.

In this article I summarise the six practices Rigby et al discerned through their study and analysis, that are crucial in capitalising on agile’s potential.

Agile is gaining increasing adoption throughout organisations. Agile methods have moved beyond just software development. However, there’s ongoing confusing as to what is meant by Agile Adoption vs. Agile Transformation and Digital Transformation vs. Agile Adoption or Transformation. In this post I’ll try highlight the differences and interrelationships between them, in simple terms.

Conflict in the workplace is inevitable, but it isn't always a bad thing! Being in SLT and heading up Agile Delivery teams, Rebecca has experienced conflict as a great way to work through important problems and issues. Equally, she’s seen it divide teams and negatively impact collaboration and morale. Discover the difference between constructive and destructive conflict.

Rebecca explores the importance of an effective kick-off, with a focus on the human-centric, relationship-based factors which are essential to setting teams up for success.