As organisations try to improve their ways of working, better efficiency is often a cited goal. ‘Increasing flow’ is something else you may hear, with Flow Efficiency being a measure called out as something organisations need to focus on. The problem is that few, if any, share the many flaws…

FlowViz is a free data visualisation template for Power BI that allows you to better visualize flow metrics from the data your teams’ Kanban board generates in Azure DevOps, Azure DevOps Server, TFS or GitHub Issues. The chart contains industry recognised flow metrics (Throughput, Work In Progress, Cycle Time, Work…

A joint article by both myself and Ellie Taylor, a fellow Ways of Working Enablement Specialist here at Nationwide. The Golden Thread As we start a new year, focusing on outcomes has been a common topic of discussion in our work in the last few weeks.

Recently I was fortunate enough to speak at Lean Agile Exchange 2021 on a topic that evolved from one of the previous posts on this blog about blocked work and its impact. The conference setup at Lean Agile Exchange was super cool, with an interactive ‘map’ on the day taking…

Following on from my recent Story Pointless series, I realised there was one element I missed. Think of this like a bonus track from an album, I’ll take Ludacris’ Welcome to Atlanta if we’re talking specifics. Anyway, quite often we’ll find that stakeholders are less interested in Stories, instead focusing…

The final of this three-part series on moving away from Story Points and how to introduce empirical methods within your team(s). Part one refamiliarised ourselves with what story points are, a brief history lesson and facts about them, the pitfalls of using them and how we can use alternative methods…

The second in a three-part series on moving away from Story Points and how to introduce empirical methods within your team(s). …

The first in a three-part series on moving away from Story Points and how to introduce empirical methods within your team(s). Part one refamiliarises ourselves with what story points are, a brief history lesson and facts about them, the pitfalls of using them and how we can use alternative methods…

The Importance of Being Blocked Despite our best attempts at creating small, cross-functional and autonomous teams, being “blocked” is unfortunately still a common occurrence with many teams. There can be any number of reasons why work gets blocked — it could be internal to the team (e.g. waiting on Product Owner/Manager feedback, environments down, etc.)…