I recently put a workshop together to take a new team through to help describe some important agile concepts including the benefits of working collaboratively and swarming on tasks; the value of communication; how to self-organise; how limiting work in progress achieves more value and what we mean b| Emily Webber
Reading Time: 2minutesHow do you know when you’re ready to scale your team(s)? Jamie Arnold and I have been exploring this topic and have created a handy download to help leaders and teams answer the question. I have worked in many organisations over the years, and the issue of scaling comes up very often. The need for […]| Emily Webber
My friend and work associate Ian Ames has generously offered to sponsor two places on my new course, Building Successful Communities of Practice for underrepresented and marginalised groups within the digital industry. I asked Ian to tell me more about why he wanted to do this, and this is what h| Emily Webber
A blog about people, culture, organisations and teams.| Emily Webber
I run a remote meet-up called Agile in the Ether. A while back I asked twitter followers if I should extend it out to a conference and they said yes, so I did and it was great. This is what happened and what I learnt.| Emily Webber
I have a habit of bringing people and communities together, this means I can't seem to help myself setting up or getting involved in running meetups (my current count is at six*). Faced with not enough time to devote to my existing meetup, I naturally decided to start a new one. This time a remote o| Emily Webber
I'm a big believer that language and the words you use say a lot about a culture, and that we can take steps to change culture through changing those words.| Emily Webber
I first wrote about skills mapping in my book Building successful communities of practice. This post digs a little deeper into identifying skills and capabilities with communities of practice.| Emily Webber
A little while back I wrote a post on skills and capability mapping with communities of practice, I have been developing this work further into an organisational-wide approach, under the name of Capability Profile Mapping.| Emily Webber
I recently had the opportunity to work with the awesome people at Citizens Advice, guiding them in creating a capability and progression framework for the newly formed design, data and technology (DDaT) function. Being a forward-thinking organisation, they were open to trying something a bit differe| Emily Webber
We have some of the best conversations when they are unstructured and happen by chance. That moment when you bump into someone when you are out and about, and they happen to mention something that really helps you. Or you sit down to lunch with a work colleague, and it sparks a great new idea.| Emily Webber
I have been a little quiet of late while settling in to my new job at Government Digital Services (GDS), but I did publish a post about the role of the agile wall over on the GDS blog. Read more it below, original published over here: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/12/19/the-agile-wall.| Emily Webber
After a successful first Agile on the Bench, we decided to do it all again, who would have thought standing in the cold listening to people talk about Agile related topics, without any tech would be what people wanted to do with a lunch time in December, but it was!| Emily Webber
This is a quick blog post with some tips for effective stand-ups that a friend asked me to write so he could share it with someone else. So here it is Mark.| Emily Webber
Exciting news! After lots of slide making, video recording and testing, I have just launched a new online course called Building Successful Communities of Practice. This course has combined my experience, research, blog posts, and talks over the years into a series of videos, quizzes and prac| Emily Webber
In 2016, I first introduced the Team Onion model (as the Agile Team Onion). Since then, it's had a few iterations and now has a new website home of its own at teamonion.works. The Team Onion is a model to keep teams small, break down silos and create shared responsibility across team boundari| Emily Webber
People often struggle to describe who does what. Getting it wrong can mean that things fall through the cracks, or it becomes so descriptive that it hinders work. Articulating roles and responsibilities, especially in the 4Ds format, can clarify decision-making, help set expectations within and o| Emily Webber
I have been working with leadership teams for a while and have used this workshop to help them align around and articulate their purpose. This exercise allows them to identify opportunities to improve, focus their efforts and better communicate what they do with the rest of the organisation. This po| Emily Webber
A Miro workshop, created with Jamie Arnold, that takes you from vision to measures, identifying your outcomes along the way. In 2018, while working with Jamie, something I always enjoy doing, we scribbled down these six questions on blue post-it notes, outcome-focused questions to get a team| Emily Webber
I'm a people-first, organisational consultant at my company, Tacit, focusing on joining people up, growing capability and creating environments that enable people to thrive. As a consultant, I've been fortunate to work with a bunch of different government, public and private sector organisations all| Emily Webber
Following last years' IRL get together, members of the Agile in the Ether Community spent another sunny Friday in Liverpool connecting and sharing ideas. Such a brilliant way to brighten up February. As with last year, this year's theme was strengthening connections across the community,| Emily Webber
While researching for a talk, I came across a term that was new to me but summed up something I had seen and gave me language to describe it. That team was the Transactive Memory System. This post talks about what it is, why it’s important and some tactics to help build it.| Emily Webber
A few months back, I worked with a client to design their away day. Working with Jamie, Paul and the programme team, we blended team updates with a new board game about planning to make a brilliant day.| Emily Webber
This workshop is a game that helps people play at creating multidisciplinary teams while thinking about capability needs, learning opportunities and constraints.| Emily Webber
In my last post, A framework for thinking about team memory, joining up and serendipity in hybrid organisations, I introduced a framework for thinking about Team Memory. I have now turned this into a Miro board template for a workshop, which is available on the Miroverse.| Emily Webber
I have been working with digital, data, and technology organisations for a long time, many of which are in UK government departments. One thing that I have seen people get tripped up on is how they describe teams. Ambiguity about what a team is can create tensions, rework, and confusion and ulti| Emily Webber
I have been running Agile in the Ether for over five years; this year, we had a face-to-face event for the first time. It was wonderful and proves you can make real connections over video. In this post, I’ll talk briefly about the intention, the approach and what happened.| Emily Webber
In my previous post Team exercise: Building empathy and understanding with the Capability Comb, I introduced an approach to help a team surface their capabilities and identify opportunities to collaborate. Since then, I have created a miroboard on the miroverse to use with the workshop. You can g| Emily Webber
I have been working with, writing about and speaking on communities of practice for many years now. That content is scattered in various places, like this blog, my company website and other platforms. So, I've brought it all together in one place. Check it out at communitiesofpractice.work| Emily Webber
Back in November last year I wrote up a talk I gave at Lean Agile Brighton called Why can't we all just get along? I've given the talk at a few more conferences and written it up as an article on InfoQ called Bridging Silos and Overcoming Collaboration Antipatterns in Multidisciplinary Organisati| Emily Webber
For a little while, I was encouraging myself out of the house by setting the target of taking regular short videos of the New Brighton lighthouse at the mouth of the Mersey. Here are those videos taken between December 2022 and August 2023. I often took these after a run or in really wind| Emily Webber
This week, I have been back at the Agile Cambridge conference with Agile on the Bench with my co-host, Cara Bermingham. Agile on the Bench is a friendly, low-fi, lunchtime, outdoor, agile meetup. A mix of 10min, mostly analogy-based talks about all things agile, people, teams, users and getting t| Emily Webber
How do we know what’s going on when we’re working in remote or hybrid organisations? How do we get the right information to the right people, find what we need and bump into ideas that can lead to something else? Distributed workplaces make it hard, but not impossible. This post explores some of the| Emily Webber
******Updated 26th Jan 2024****** In my recent post, Why Can’t we all get Along, I discussed the value of overlapping roles in multi/inter/transdisciplinary teams and referred to using the broken comb shape to describe skills and capabilities. In this post, I’ll expand on that theory and add an a| Emily Webber
A while back, I created this sticker and was reminded of it this week during a meetup, so I thought I'd share it here. During the meetup I host, Agile in the Ether, last week, someone asked the question, "How do you help make decisions stick? I struggle with things getting decided then forgot| Emily Webber
I've recently been playing with ways of explaining the extended team for large and largeish organisations. I get frustrated when I see Agile teams that are essentially siloed off from the wider business (for many reasons). This causes dependency and communication issues and means they just aren't ab| Emily Webber
Last week, I gave a keynote talk at Agile Manchester, based on a previous blog post. The talk was more detailed and had a new framing; this post summarises what I shared.| Emily Webber
In a recent talk that I gave at Agile testing days and Lean Agile Scotland called "Whole Team Responsibility", I mentioned the team manual as a way of growing empathy in teams. Here is a quick write up with a little more detail and how to use it.| Emily Webber
The term outcome is a brilliant way of describing the impact and value of doing something. I also like to use outcomes to help describe the capabilities of people and practices or disciplines. Let me explain why it’s so helpful.| Emily Webber
I initially gave this talk at Lead Agile Brighton in October 2022, then updated and refined the slide deck for Agile Manchester in May 2023, so I’ve updated this post too. I've noticed an increasingly worrying trend in the industry of focus on specialisms at the expense of collaboration, shared r| Emily Webber
Update Oct 2024. I have now added this retrospective to the Miroverse for anyone to use here. This week, I designed a short retrospective to close a phase of work. The team was handing the work over to an ongoing client team, so it was a perfect time for reflection and a chance to collate advice| Emily Webber
