Articles on management, technology and Agile

Email Communication

I was having lunch with Adrian recently and we were talking about how people work with email. One thing he said made me stop and think about the different ways people treat email and the potential problems that can occur if they aren't aware of the differences.

What he said was, "e-mail is a conversation, not a considered media".

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Leadership Course – “Leaders Breakfast”

In the final session of the ACS "Growing Team Leaders" course I started back in May was held last week, we attended a breakfast with some guest presenters giving insight into leadership. We heard from

  • Peter Grant, CIO of Queensland Health
  • Anne-Marie Birkill, CEO of ILAB
  • John Puttick, Chairman of GBST Holdings

As seen in so many other parts of this series, the common theme was the value of people and of course how to inspire them to greatness.

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Ephox Talking Car

No, the Ephox Talking Car isn't some new form of Kitt from Knight Rider … showing my age there. The Talking Car is a token we are using during our stand-ups to not only indicate who's turn it is to speak, but to remind the speaker of what the 3 main points to discuss are.

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Keeping Secrets

When we started having more people blogging, the first thing I did was create a blogging policy. I looked at a number of published policies from big and small companies to come up with the guidelines for Ephox. Basically it's all common sense, but a Blog Policy is a great way to ensure everyone is aware of the potential issues of blogging.

Adrian's recent post on EditLive! Dynamic being outed raised the question of how many points in our Blogging Policy were affected.

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XP Practice Champions

Ephox adopted eXtreme Programming (XP) at the beginning of 2006 when Doug joined the team. As part of our commitment to continuous improvement we have XP Adoption Reviews every few months. The aim of these is to review the XP practices with a view to rating our success with adoption of them. From this we choose 3 to focus on for the next few months.

In our first review, we identified Test Driven Development (TDD), Daily Stand-ups and Iteration Demos as the practices we would get the most value by focussing on.

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