Products and Processes RSS

Back in December, Cyber Security firm Redscan published a report, based on FOI responses, showing that the NHS was apparently under investing in cyber security resources and training. The NHS takes a lot of flak in the press, sometimes deservingly and sometimes not. I was struck by the fact that every time this news was reported the story quoted the Redscan report but not the NHS. I do not know if the NHS were asked to comment on the report, the articles did not say, but I would certainly understand if the NHS were not willing to engage in a...

When we started out creating stationery for scrum professionals, we knew sticky notes were a must but we didn't just want to be yet another brand with more or less the same offering. There are a whole host of brands making the same kind of sticky note - a strip of adhesive on the top and a choice of neon and pastel colours. Prices were competitive, but were customers getting what they wanted?  One of the common problems we noticed in the office was sticky notes curling up and falling off the whiteboards. Bloggers and twitter users were talking about the same...

Scrum teams value visualisations and adapt their environment to ensure the visualisations they need are constantly visible. The largest and most important visualisation is the board, a visualisation of workflow state, and shared repository of team process and work items. There are also mission statements, policies and  various charts showing the rate of progress toward milestones.Scrum teams are mandated to have very specific kinds of meeting every day. Their gold-standard way of working is to gather around a whiteboard for the daily stand-up and have a complex visualisation set up on that whiteboard. The gold standard is that this set...

It was a left-field customer enquiry that lead us to discover Hotbox and begin to build new tools for supporting the adoption of Scrum. Two people spoke to us at a meetup, both from the same organisation, both with the same need. Scrum masters, tasked with supporting the operation of key enabling processes in innovative settings were joining their team and finding their first task was to beg steal or borrow a caddy for lugging stationery around. Then they had fill it with everything they needed. They were not foolish to do so. Scrum teams have lots of meetings, and...

The news seems to be full of companies suffering serious breaches of security. As a consumer of their various services I am left baffled, bewildered and disappointed. At the same time, as a participant in the process of delivering online services I understand their thoroughly complicated internal architecture and can understand, if not forgive, a lot of what is going on (with the possible exception of the Facebook "View As" breach). How we outgrow this One of the things this this industry has become good at is retrospecting and improving. This is thanks to the empirical agile mindset in general....