Reading up for CALM-Alpha

I’m really looking forward to the CALM-Alpha event next month. In preparation for it, I’m going through our tentative reading list. The faculty members suggest that attendees read the following books as preparation for the event:

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Ursula leGuin, The Dispossessed
Dava Sobel, Longitude

In addition, it would be [...]

Thoughts on priority poker

Many years ago, I took part in one of the first Certified Scrum Product Owner courses ever held by Ken Schwaber and Mike Cohn. One of my favourite exercises from that course, and one I’ve often used since, was priority poker. Priority poker is a method for assigning relative priority, or weight, to items, and [...]

1st International Workshop on Complexity and Real-World Applications, Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of the 1st International Workshop on Complexity and Real-World Applications , an invitation-only event held in Southampton. Set in a scenic venue, the conference was organised in a loveably sloppy way by Andrew Tait and Kurt Richardson. The two of them are doing an admirable job, but the scenic venue [...]

On understanding Agility…

An email popped into my inbox yesterday that made me very happy. My paper on applying the Cynefin model to Agile software development was accepted to the 1st international workshop on complexity and real-world applications.
I was pleased because this acceptance is recognition of the research and work I’ve been doing for almost 15 years on [...]

“Coaching self-organising teams” at the Orlando Scrum Gathering

I’m really looking forward to doing yet another run of my “coaching self-organising teams” session at next week’s Scrum Gathering in Orlando. A number of people have asked if the session is worth attending. I think it’s pretty good – I’ll be attending it – but I’m not really objective. If you’re also wondering, you [...]