All Posts

If Marcus Aurelius had to navigate the Northern Line at rush hour, he would have written a very different book of Meditations—probably one w

If you've always assumed philosophy was just for bearded academics or Instagram influencers posing with Marcus Aurelius quotes they don't un

Feeling overwhelmed at work? This ancient Stoic principle offers a surprisingly effective approach to reducing anxiety and improving focus.

Discover the power of IT leadership in fostering success. Learn how IT leadership archetypes can transform engagement and drive change.

Struggling with IT prioritisation? Discover effective strategies to tackle IT prioritisation challenges and make better resource allocation

Discover the 8 essential aspects of product alignment for successful product teams. Learn how product alignment can drive innovation and val

Discover why a daily standup is crucial or when it might be redundant. Learn how daily standup meetings impact business agility today.

<p>A definition of done is one of the cheapest and most effective ways in which you can start tackling IT issues. It can improve quality, transparency, accountability, alignment, and even predictability. All at the cost of a conversation and some documentation. There&#8217;s plenty of material on what a definition of done looks like and why &hellip; <a href="https://seantrobinson.co.uk/writing-a-definition-of-done/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader

Discover the essentials of agile testing and how it enhances customer experience. Dive into agile testing principles and improve your practi

<p>It&#8217;s likely a coincidence, but I&#8217;ve recently noticed a slew of issues arising in my work around test data management. As I dug into this, I found a disappointing lack of prescient information on how to manage this in an Agile environment. It&#8217;s going to be a quick one this week, but here&#8217;s my take &hellip; <a href="https://seantrobinson.co.uk/agile-test-data-management/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Agile

<p>You can&#8217;t move for people talking about the project to product journey lately. Getting organisations to start mapping out what their products are so they can build cross-functional teams around them. Projects are transitory and lose us all of the learning, we want long-lived squads! While these sentiments are all rock-solid, unfortunately, they&#8217;re missing the &hellip; <a href="https://seantrobinson.co.uk/a-product-team-is-not-the-answer/" class="more-link">Cont

<p>One of the largest challenges preventing organisations from competing effectively in the market is their structure. When you are optimised for technology or role, then you are not optimised for customer value. But how do you actually get there? What does good look like for your organisation if you went back to the drawing board? &hellip; <a href="https://seantrobinson.co.uk/business-outcome-alignment/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8

<p>Where We Stand The role of the project manager in Agile is often a complicated one. While there is little concrete direction by many of the frameworks, it is often understood that a traditional project manager may often find themselves moving into a Scrum Master or Product Owner role. The intent behind this guidance is &hellip; <a href="https://seantrobinson.co.uk/lean-pmo/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Lean PMO&#8221;</span></

<p>A dependency chain is where you have a number of functions that all need to do some part of a piece of work in order to fully deliver it. These functions complete their part and then pass it along to another. In my last article I showed why your IT requests were likely taking so &hellip; <a href="https://seantrobinson.co.uk/dependency-chain-modelling/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Dependency Chain modelling&#8221;</span></a></p

<p>You&#8217;ve got a quick job to do so fire it off to an IT team. It should only take around half a day of effort so you expect to hear back by the end of the week. Three weeks later and you&#8217;re still waiting. So why is this happening? What is the deal with IT &hellip; <a href="https://seantrobinson.co.uk/why-do-we-have-it-delays/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Why do we have IT delays?&#8221;</span></a></p>

<p>This is going to be another opinionated piece on the ideal line management reporting structure for an Agile team. I&#8217;m not going to get into organisational hierarchy or connections between teams, instead just focusing on the Agile team itself. This does, however, relate to the concept of dependencies.</p>

<p>Over this series, I&#8217;ve spoken in detail about the organisational impact of IT dependencies in your system. I&#8217;d like to take a diversion and discuss how it can impact the individual. I posit that even without the work benefits you could derive from eliminating dependencies, the quality of life changes you could bring about would &hellip; <a href="https://seantrobinson.co.uk/the-psychological-impact-of-it-dependencies/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span cla

<p>After some of my recent articles on building a dependency map, a few people got in touch asking for tips on actually creating them. Here&#8217;s a quick way to get started. You might have noticed the following example in my previous posts. I created the graphic above with an amazing bit of kit called Neo4j. &hellip; <a href="https://seantrobinson.co.uk/quick-dependency-map-automation/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="screen-reader-text"> &#8220;Quick and dir

<p>I&#8217;ve written a few heavy articles recently, so thought I&#8217;d take a step back with something a little lighter. I absolutely love retrospectives and am going to take this time to highlight some common retrospective pitfalls that I frequently see people falling into.</p>

<p>Why should we care about facilitation for introverts? What does it actually matter? Let&#8217;s run through it. “[…]someone who prefers calm, minimally stimulating environments.” noun I sat there in the audience, gazing up at the exuberant figure breathing life and energy into the room. New to facilitation, I felt anxious just watching him play the &hellip; <a href="https://seantrobinson.co.uk/facilitation-for-introverts/" class="more-link">Continue reading<span class="scr