One of the keys to bringing teams together and unlocking the flow of work from idea to Value is collaboration. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? So why do so many organisations struggle to create an environment, a culture, and a way of working that supports everyone to exist in the same bubble? Perhaps collaboration is a little harder than we thought. Maybe there is a foundation layer required that enables collaboration. When researchers studied organisations with evidence of

We must get close enough to our customers in such a way that we really understand what they need. On a new initiative, we may not have the luxury to have years of customer data or metrics available to us. We might even need to build a business case to get the Analytics in place. It doesn't mean we can't start. A design sprint can assist us to take a scientific approach to discovering, prioritising, designing and testing a new product, service or feature. One of our greatest

Moving from second division to first division at the Queensland Schools Cup Volleyball competition is tough at 13 years of age. Having won second division in 2018 my sons’ team were pumped. Imagine coming into the 2019 competition having breezed your way through your first year of interschool competition. The boys were untouchable. Well, so they thought. What happened next? They were placed into a pool of winners. 2 larger schools with a reputation for excellence. The bigger

The Problems of Traditional Structures One of the major challenges I see around the ability for organizations to truly be adaptive to market needs — comes from the structure and incentives we regularly see throughout organizations that prevent our ideal behaviours. The characteristics of these structures are gates — controlled with disparate incentives & ownership — encouraging separation over collaboration. When their value streams are mapped, we tend to see patterns like be

Our increasingly complex and complicated business domains require new ways of working based on shared principles, trust and a culture of rapid learning. What this article does and does not do? This article describes how we can combine practises such as Design Thinking, Lean, Agile and DevOps across the product life cycle to achieve improved business outcomes. It does not postulate that this is an overall method that can be followed linearly. Rather, many of the practises over

What prevents you from starting? The key word here is “prevents”. I wanted to share a snippet of how we were able to help an organisation get started with tangible bite sized pieces of improvement based on an initial retrospective with a simple powerful question: “What prevents you from delivering valuable change to customers every 2 weeks?” Step 1 : Start with a Powerful Question This retrospective was with a team which had already been working as a cross functional team for

The reality for many enterprises trying to pivot quickly is they are dealing with significant legacy systems that cannot be replaced easily. They must continue to surface and manipulate rich customer data and their history of transactions in order to compete for and win new business. This is a story of how a company’s investment in Test Automation has allowed it to shift the dial on speed to outcome. There were even some unintended consequences that continue to reap great ben

Getting started is hard, making a change stick is even more challenging and crossing the ‘Valley of Death’ as we settle into a new mindset and way of working, frankly, can make you feel like it is easier to stop trying. Whiteboard people meet you wherever you’re at and work with you to get started. This might be in the form of a small experiment we design together that starts to build the “why”. Every organisation is different. For some the “why” is clear and you just need su

Introduction When creating a test automation suite, one aspect you need to cover off is the loading of data into the system under test. For each of your tests, the main aim is to set up the system in an initial state, providing the context in which to run that test. At a recent client, my team was tasked with creating just such a test suite for that organisation’s core set of applications. As we built out the test suite, we implemented facilities for automating the loading of