We like Agile surveys, we especially like Agendashift surveys. We use them a lot, to open up a conversation in teams. We find this especially useful when we’re being introduced to a new organisation, particularly an organisation that is looking to begin or fix its agile adoption. Our Agendashift expert- Steve Mackenzie, gives you an overview of how to use the Agendashift Survey platform and talks about how we use them to generate a conversation that uncovers some of the obstacles to progress.

Defects potentially have a huge cost to businesses. We give some examples of those costs from our own experiences and we talk about one recent famous comedy defect that had huge implications for MacDonalds.

We talk about how to improve quality and reduce defects by building quality in throughout the whole software development lifecycle; with examples that include both of us fessing up to some of the mistakes we’ve made in past roles and how you can avoid making the same mistakes we did.

In this session Antonio shares some of his decades of experience in using data improve the performance of his teams. Convincing people inside and out side the team to spend their time and budgets differently to get better outcomes.

We know some of it can be faked, we know we cannot measure everything that matters. We know some people won’t like it! But in the end more is achieved if you can prove what works.

Here we look at how the concept from lean: the waste of waiting applies to software development. How bad is waiting? Really, what are the costs? What actually causes it and if you think your team is suffering from excessive waiting what should you do about it?

We all know it can take a while for teams to play well together. It’s as true at work as it is in sports. But why? What makes a long lived deliver faster and to a higher quality?   How do we build a team that lasts a long time. There is more to it than “just bring work to the team”.  There are a bunch of things leaders can do to preserve the culture, performance and the trust achieved from having a mature team. It can be harder than you think in organisations that fund projects rather than teams.   Finally we cover the idea of a team both building the thing and maintaining the thing. The ultimate motivator for quality.   Presented by veteran agile coaches and trainers: Phil Cutcliffe, Dan Gibson and Steven Mackenzie of Add Agility.

How many people would you ideally have in a team for maximum agility, and what happens when you break those rules? We explore both what happens when a team gets to big and when a team is too small as that can be a problem too. Especially for Phil who is still sad about his little metrics team that turned out to be too small.   You will see with the intro we started with good intentions of covering long lived teams in the same session but we will save that for next week.

We continue the theme of how to build agile teams this week focusing on collation. Is co-location still a thing in the post covid world? Why did we put teams in the same room in the first place and are those reasons still relevant with all the tools at our disposal?  We don’t think it’s black and white, even for many of the digital-first teams we work with colocation should be considered in some form. And there are many things you can do to make a distributed team feel more colocated.   Presented by veteran agile coaches and trainers: Phil Cutcliffe, Dan Gibson and Steven Mackenzie of Add Agility.

Building agile teams: why bother and organising around value?  We work in an industry full of jargon and a tendency to overcomplicate things. But things don’t need to be this way.   Introducing Agile on Air a podcast / YouTube series. The goal is to make the complicated simple, in an entertaining way with real examples from people with lots of experience.   It’s our first ever episode and we are starting where many of us start, with a series on building agile teams.   So why should anyone bother with building an agile team?  We explore on why we just might want to build a team differently if we want to add some agility to the work we do.   We also discuss on what it’s meant to organise around value, what does it mean to be a cross functional team? Or even a feature team?   Presented by veteran agile coaches and trainers: Phil Cutcliffe, Dan Gibson and Steven Mackenzie of Add Agility.