Blog

  • Singing for Pope Francis

    Singing for Pope Francis

    On Saturday 26th August, I joined the Mornington Singers as the anchor choir on stage for the World Meeting of Families Festival of Families concert in Croke Park.

    Continue reading

  • Blockers to getting a story ready

    Blockers to getting a story ready

    I like that we have a Definition of Ready for our stories. As a Product Owner it gives me confidence that I’ve done my job properly in analysing and communicating the requirements, and also that the team is ready to hit the ground running when the sprint starts. Lately, however, it’s been more of a

    Continue reading

  • Never report on story points

    Never report on story points

    The whole subject of measuring performance of agile teams is a divisive one. In an ideal world we should be looking to measure the value delivered by a team, rather than collecting performance statistics. After all, our primary goal in agile is to deliver some value to the product or customer. But measuring value isn’t

    Continue reading

  • Sprint Commitment

    Sprint Commitment

    How often does your sprint goal or stories change in the middle of the sprint? A late-breaking requirement or bug comes in, or a manager pops up with an urgent task, and before you know it your sprint is totally overloaded. Does that sound familiar? Teams often think they’re being agile by responding to changing

    Continue reading

  • What’s your Definition of Ready?

    What’s your Definition of Ready?

    Have you even been to sprint planning and realised that the so-called stories are a bunch of crap? One-line JIRA tickets that the team haven’t seen before? Then you need to enforce a Definition of Ready. We can be good about tracking the progress of stories once they’ve been added to a sprint. We track

    Continue reading

  • How are we developing junior Product Owners?

    How are we developing junior Product Owners?

    In the olden days of waterfall development, you had teams of Business Analysts that all sat together. When a junior BA joined an organisation, they had a number of colleagues sat around them that they could call upon for advice and help, and lots of time for requirements documents to be reviewed and revised before

    Continue reading