Wouldn’t it be great if everybody you worked with totally agreed with each other over the approach that should be taken to everything? No passionate debates. No people pulling in different directions. Nobody disappointed that their idea wasn’t taken forward. I’ve worked in many teams over the years and it’s…

I’ve recently run a few workshops using different modes of transport to help explore some aspects of agile and thought I’d share the experiences here and what we learnt. Redgate aims to work in an agile way and you might expect that many of the concepts are second nature to…

We’ve been using OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in the Redgate product division for over 18 months and there’s no doubt we’ve got better at creating them during that time, but there’s always room for improvement, so we’ve recently experimented with a more engaging way of showing progress against the…

Background At Redgate we believe strongly that the best way to deliver valuable software to our customers is via agile and lean development practices. …

On a rare working from home day I was looking out at my garden and thinking about the parallels between gardening and leading teams. One thing that gives me great pleasure in my gardening is growing fruit and vegetables that I can then eat but this involves quite an investment…

Background The Tuckman model of group development is one that many teams are familiar with, it’s the one that has the four stages of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. I’ve recently been working with a new team who’ve found themselves stuck in the storming phase. We had many discussions around the…

Here at Redgate we strongly believe that Agile and Lean are the right principles to use when building software products and we’re continually striving to do this well. Part of this involves ensuring we’re regularly inspecting, adapting and sharing learning between teams. At the Level Up conference in Duxford, I…

Delegation can often be associated with a top down hierarchical approach to management, where the boss delegates to their subordinates; you don’t often hear it mentioned in relation to agile teams. But great agile teams are not made up of a lot of highly skilled specialists, they typically have individuals…

Developing and launching products is a team activity, it involves the efforts of development, marketing, sales and support functions. The tasks performed by these functions can’t happen at random times, they all need to be co-ordinated. Traditionally it has been the responsibility of a project / programme manager to perform…