For the recent second PragmaBirthday, the whole team was asked for their favourite quote on "change". Now, that's fairly broad ask and it's hard to pick out one. Here I explain why I chose this one.

Taking on the role of Product Owner is no small feat, ensuring a balanced view of commercial needs, user needs and technical feasibility.

Ensuring the organisation is setup to allow the Product Owner to excel, giving them the responsibility and autonomy, yet support they need is crucial.

This week we held our bi-montly offsite, providing a great opportunity for us to regroup, reflect, reward and focus. The format for our offsite varies, such as hackdays, reflecting and planning, refresh OKRs and guest speakers.

Even if we are not managers, we may encounter many opportunities for coaching and supporting each other every day. We just rarely encounter them consciously.

Today Web Directions launched Transform 2017, Australia’s Digital Government Conference, to be held in Canberra late March.

I’m excited to be representing Pragmateam's transformation experiences in two parts.

Learning and sharing is a key ingredient within Pragmateam’s culture. While we have a very healthy internal shareback rhythm (more about this later) we also actively seek ways to give back to the community, sharing our techniques, experiments and learnings.

September marked the 2 year anniversary of Pragmateam. It felt timely to reflect.

While I wouldn’t say every day over the last 2 years has been smooth sailing (we would be bored, unhappy and missing a lot of great lessons for life if it were), as company directors there are a few key principles Juliano and I have subconsciously adopted which I believe have assisted us to stay on course.

Pragmateam Goals, Objective and Key Results - setting goals to keep us focused and challenged.

On October 27th, Digital Transformation Agency hosted Market Ready panel, in conjunction with the Spark Festival, a festival held throughout startup hubs across Sydney.

Hey You features in the Financial Review, a write up by Hey You co-founder Rebekah Campbell on the positive impacts of the improvements introduced through partnership with Pragmateam.

Every 8 weeks we spend quality time with the whole team, typically a half day offsite. Each offsite we seek to experiment in some way, shape or form. Here we share some of these experiments and what we learned from them.

I recently found myself working with Sarah on a mini-production line with the goal to laminate a new sets of flashcards which we use during workshops. The setup was pretty simple…

In the spirit of continuous improvement, we should always be actively seeking feedback, opportunities to do better next time.

At Pragmateam we believe in learning and improving so much so that we have captured a number of OKRs around learning culture, one specifically regarding meetings, workshops and sessions.

Sprint Planning is one of the well-known “ceremonies” within the Scrum framework. While at Pragmateam we absolutely see the value in planning, we typically approach Sprint Planning from a perspective of flow. The question we want to answer during sprint planning: How do we use the weekly/fortnightly conversation to continue the momentum of the previous sprint?

There are many interpretations of “Agile”, varying processes and methodologies, such as Scrum or Kanban. However, the implementation of Agile techniques and practices needs to be contextual to the environment and constraints. A purist implementation will be at the detriment of the organisation. As such, teams are encouraged to consider Agile a toolkit and apply relative to the problem they are looking to solve.

Instead of a reason not to run a retro, a slow sprint can be a tremendous opportunity: How often does your team take the time to reflect on topics outside of the regular sprint activities?

Few in the Agile world would disagree that Retrospectives make up an essential part of Agile. It is anchored in the Agile Principles as “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.”

Every workshop we do to kick off a project has some aspect of team building in it. The main reasons of course are to allow people to get to know each other, to feel comfortable working with each other, and to break the mould of the day-to-day. Sarah has previously written about the ROI of icebreakers.

The understatement of the year: Meetings are often not quite as effective as they should be.

As facilitators we have many tips and tricks in our toolkit. But of them all, “icebreakers” tend to get the most apprehensive reaction (myself included). Typical perceptions of icebreakers may be that they are a waste of time, too abstract, too fluffy. Also, given the creative nature of icebreakers, people can feel uncomfortable in putting themselves out there through whatever the chosen activity is.