Articles for category: Delivery

July 2, 2023

Greg Thomas

When to have a Meeting?

When the email responses have bounced around five times. When the chats are upward of ten responses and each reply is getting lengthier. When side conversations are starting to splinter off. You might have a different set of thresholds in your mind, but having the threshold is important so you can go “I think we need to get together and talk this out.” Your first response from someone might be – “Oh we don’t need a meeting, we’re almost there” – great, let’s have a call and get their faster, because unless everyone is saying they are almost there, and

June 29, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Value of Prompts

Prompts are little pushes to help you do something. Reminders and Alerts are great prompts – “don’t forget you have an appt”. But there are other prompts, ones that are more valuable that you can give your team. “Hey, do we need time this week to clean up our tickets?” “We should work on those unit tests for all the code we wrote this past week.” “The team’s delivery is slipping… was there a reason you need to get ahead of?” Prompts are the little kicks on work that is important but can sometimes slide – they help us not

June 27, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Gap Between Codes and Tickets

There is much discussion about what is written in a ticket and what is actually coded. In some cases, there is alignment, in others, it’s a quick close and onto the next ticket. In this case, the ticket doesn’t tell the story. The solution isn’t to shut down the world while you’re building and reworking all your tickets. The solution is to ensure there is alignment on what the final solution and if there is some “figuring out to do” while you’re coding, to update the ticket after the fact. When teams do this, not only do the developers know

June 21, 2023

Greg Thomas

Where Agile Burndowns Break

We all aim for the lines to intersect on a Burndown, and if we’re doing it right they intersect in the middle. The goal of course is to start with what you work on and finish it by the end of your sprint. The problem with Burndown charts is that if you add work, they don’t change, the math is the same as any history says – you add more work to do in a short time frame, and some of it isn’t getting done without herculean efforts. But regardless, we run the burndown and spend all of 30 seconds

June 20, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Farmer’s Advice

If you want to reap the benefits in four months, you can’t start the week before, the month before, two months, or three months before. They’ve done the math, they know the equation, and there are no shortcuts, it’s a simple matter of working backward and starting from the date you want to deliver on. That’s the first part. The second part is doing the little bits, the daily tasks, each day, that will make the four-month journey possible. Miss a day, push out the date. Forget to water for a week, start over on some, and may you’ll make

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