Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

Do you know where your team's time goes? What are the competing priorities? Understanding this can be the first step to making sense of how a team is working together at a given time, and gives fairly heavy hints how to improve things for the better. A team's investment (time, money etc) can be broadly split into four 'pots': External Demand . User-facing features, new functionality. Internal Demand . Improvement. Kaizen. Failure Demand . This is the surprises. Often nasty, time consuming surprises. Business As Usual (BAU) . Keeping lights on. Those essential maintenance tasks that keep things ticking over. Any team that understands this, and knows how interdependent they are will generally thrive. Wait... interdependent?   Yes indeed. This is a zero sum game, and any team needs to make a conscious decision of how much of their finite budget (people, time, money) to invest in each at any given time. To make things even more interesting, a team only has direct control o...

Bill Gates chose to open his 2013 TED talk with the words  "Everyone needs a coach" . Someone to provide feedback, and help them see how others see them. True enough - I have helped many people over the years understand themselves, how they interact with others, and how they can resolve inner conflicts and improve. For me, being an effective personal coach is one part of providing quality leadership to companies, and was one reason I went on the Barefoot coaching course a while back. But let's zoom out, and look at the next level in the software industry, specifically the delivery teams. These folks should be the powerhouse of any company, turning customer needs and ideas into reality that can be assessed for usefulness, and ultimately value (whatever that is - value can take many forms. Maybe a subject to explore another day).  However, in companies I work with I am seeing a problem with many of these powerhouses. Something that I suspect is rapidly becoming a  BIG prob...

Anyone who knows me, or follows my posts on social media, will know that I have been studying for a Post Graduate Certificate in Personal and Business Coaching with Chester University. It is a fantastic journey, and has most definitely helped me understand myself in greater depth, as well as has helping my coachees! But the term " coaching " seems to be creating some confusion. Which is somewhat unsurprising as someone who has marketed themselves as an “ Agile Coach ” since 2005, it would be perfectly reasonable to assume the “coaching” training I am doing has something to do with agile processes and teams. Except nothing could be further from the truth… So if it’s not related to " agile coaching ", what on earth is this " personal/business coaching " thing? Let us start by describing what I do when “coaching” a software team in agility. “Agile” 1 has a well defined set of values, practices and principles that define it 2 , 3 . Stray from these, a...

Exciting news! Folks may have noticed that I have been quiet of late. Well, I have been expanding the range of skills that Thirsty Bear Software can offer. I am pleased to announce that we can now offer Personal and Business Coaching services . I am now a trained Barefoot Coach . It is worth pointing out that this coaching service is completely different  from what folks call " Agile Coaching " - this kind of coaching is aimed fairly and squarely at helping individuals, teams and businesses unlock their potential and maximise their own performance. Not a Scrum, unit test or continuous integration in sight (although I can  still help with that tech stuff if needed - that is a service we still provide). No doubt I will be publishing an article soon on the difference between the two, but for now I hope that definition is enough. If you would like to know more, then please do get in touch. However, this is just the first step on a longer journey, leading to both a Postg...