Blog

Arguably, the most important aspect of any development endeavor is the Stakeholders - the people for whom we are creating the solution. Yet, how often do you see teams focus more on the product than its users, sometimes with dreadful consequences. Luckily, making sure your Stakeholders are being managed well needn't be hard. The Essence kernel includes a specific alpha for Stakeholders, with the states they can be in and checklists to help you.

Essence is one of the most exciting innovations in software engineering today - but what exactly is it? Unsurprisingly for something so powerful, with so many different use cases, Essence is often hard to explain. There are lots of articles describing the details, but in this article, we distil Essence down to a single page.

Our industry loves a fad - and in particular, we love to discover the Next Big Thing in development approaches. Each time we are promised a new (or improved) framework or playbook that will solve all our problems, and that we should immediately roll out to all our teams. And each time, we end up disappointed, without the results promised or anticipated, needing to look for a new Next Big Thing to repeat the cycle. It doesn't have to be that way, and the alternative needn't be as scary as it may seem. And it isn't another big framework!

Scrum and its hybrids are the dominant approaches used by Agile teams today. However, despite Scrum being a seemingly simple framework, many teams struggle to apply Scrum well and fail to achieve the faster delivery of higher value products that are promised. Playing the Practice Spotlight game is a simple way to improve any team's understanding and application of Scrum.

The following blog provides a set of free, downloadable agile coaching cards that can be used by Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters and teams working in many different contexts. These cards have been developed while working outside of software and product development with government Defence teams and I’ve used these cards to teach agility and help develop an agile mind set.

In this series of posts we wil explore the Events that either perform, schedule or track the activities that affect the Lifecycle of an Epic. This second post looks at how the events that run the Portfolio could be structured.

In this series of posts we wil explore the Events that either perform, schedule or track the activities that affect the Lifecycle of an Epic. This first post looks at the activites that the Portfolio needs to perform in order for it to make progress.

Epics have a lifecycle, they don’t magically appear fully formed. There is work to be done to progressively elaborate a business case and if the Epic is approved then there is further work to progress the Epic through implementation. This post explores the Lifecycle of an Epic and the states it progresses through in that Lifecycle.

Read one of our student’s testimonial regarding our upcoming course, Better Scrum through Essence.

In a recent blog by Fujitsu’s Rob Devlen, Fujitsu and IJI go Agile with Essence, Devlen describes how Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) worked with Fujitsu to create a workshop to build an understanding of Agile for their top 100 executives and senior managers in the EMEIA region. The blog article describes how we created that interactive workshop with them, facilitated the session and the results obtained. In this article we’ll show you a flavour of some of the content.