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Our experts talk about what it means to solve complex client problems with 21st century frameworks and practices.

Becoming agile with Zen Ex Machina

Zen Ex Machina has been helping people and organisations to be agile. Digital transformation isn’t a one-size-fits-all. It requires an understanding of context, customers and

Zen Ex Machina recognised as one of the top 30 Innovative Companies to watch in 2017

Really excited that Insights Success named Zen Ex Machina as one of their top 30 innovative companies to watch in 2017. Zen Ex Machina: Simplifying

Backlog Refinement Patterns: Yin and Yang

What’s an easy way to run a Backlog Refinement session so that assumptions, risks, ideas and draft designs are identified? Yin and Yang is one of our favourite patterns.

Collaboration vs Cooperation

They sound similar, and are often conflated, but what are key differences and reasons why you might want to work collaboratively instead of just cooperatively?

What does a Product Owner do?

The Product Owner is a role in many Agile Frameworks. They are responsible for optimising the delivery of products and maximising the value of the work of the Team. But what does a Product Owner do?

What does a Scrum Master do?

The Scrum Master is a role in Scrum – an Agile Framework for optimising the delivery of products. In most organisations, when someone is given

1st Conference 2017, Melbourne. Scrum: Declutter. Optimise. Deliver.

How do you unclutter the dogma surrounding Scrum’s 20 year history? Can you find its powerful Lean, user-centred powerhouse for collaborative improvement? Some people throw away

Dealing with Dysfunction: Agile NZ 2016

Asimov’s Laws of Robotics help man and machine get along. So, where are the laws that stop teams from hurting themselves either by action or

Silicon Review names ZXM as one of the 50 Smartest Companies for 2016

We are excited to announce that we have been named by the Silicon Review as one of the 50 smartest companies for 2016. Its been

Agile Product Ownership and the Role of the Business Analyst

As part of the IIBA stream at the recent Australian Computer Society Conference #ACSCanCon16, I explored agile product ownership and the role of a business

Beyond Lean UX: Making Enterprise Agility and Scrum more User-Centred

We get the best feedback from working software over documentation, says Alistair Cockburn when commenting recently on the Agile Manifesto. View on Prezi: http://prezi.com/x3dgayc1zbpa/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share And while

Dealing with Dysfunction: using couples counselling patterns to manage team conflict

Is your team dysfunctional? Is their behaviour likely headed down a path that will destroy their productivity and collaboration? If they are, what are the

The 8 Elements of Agile Coaching

There are quite a few ideas circulating about what makes a good agile coach. Should they be a senior developer with excellent coding prowess? Do they need technical skills? Should they be something more? ZXM’s model is founded in contingency-based leadership and reinforces the need to take a product agnostic view, a non-software perspective, on how to support agile teams.

Confessions of a Scrum Mum – how the short term heroics don’t scale

As an Agile Coach and Chief Scrum Master responsible for 8 teams in a service delivery program, when things went wrong, I found it really

Moving to Agile: What’s the difference between a project manager and a product owner?

When making the decision to adopt an agile method like Scrum, invariably the question about existing roles arises. In particular, I find that the question

What's the difference between Waterfall and Scrum?

“But isn’t that just doing mini-waterfalls?”, asked a recent attendee at one of our Agile Essentials courses. Scrum requires the team do all the same

ZXM named in the top 25 Most Promising Agile Solution Providers APAC 2016

We were really excited and humbled to be named in CIO Outlook’s top 25 Agile Solution providers in APAC 2016. CIO outlook has gained recognition within

Specialist Team Members within a Scrum Team – Testers

In my previous post on Business Analysts as Specialist Team members within a Scrum team noted, individual team members may have specialised skills and areas

Specialist Team Members within a Scrum Team – Business Analyst

Whilst individuals within a Scrum development team may have specialist skills and areas of focus, accountability to deliver the Sprint work belongs to the Development

The Master Scrum Master – Scaling your Scrum Master capability in Government

Whilst Scrum Teams are self-organising and empowered, at scale, the Master Scrum Master (i.e. Chief Scrum Master) provides coordination and alignment to support teams’ delivery. In Government,

The Four Principles of Forming Effective Governance of a Release Train

I’ve been working with a number of government agencies as they look to Agile methodologies to help them implement their digital transformation strategies. Governance is key

Release Train Engineer – The Master Scrum Master

When scaling agile at an enterprise level, coordination and alignment across multiple teams is challenging. Whilst Agile teams are self-organising and empowered, someone needs to

Who should be your Product Owner?

Who should be your (Scrum) Product Owner? I’ve had a number of these conversations recently with small, boutique software development agencies and even design companies

Growing Pains – Scaling Agile to achieve greater capability in service delivery

The team I was working with had a “great problem” – more work than we could deliver. However this success brought mixed blessings as the

Agile adoption & helping to change organisational culture

This presentation given at LAST 2014 (Melbourne, Australia) and Agile 2014 (Orlando, USA) outlines ZXM’s behavioural approach to changing culture to become more agile based on

How to Teach your Team Scrum in Three Months

We tend to think about agile as a software development approach, but it has applications to the business as it can aid the improvement of

What is Lean Coffee?

Lean Coffee is an structured but agenda less meeting that allows participants to gather, build and talk. It’s a great way to run Retrospectives by crowd-sourcing what the team really want to talk about.

The Lean, Agile PMO

Presentation at the Australian Computer Society 2013, Canberra Australia. In a modern world of agile processes and self-managing teams, what role does the traditional Project

Scrum Coaching in Canberra — Top 5 tips for using Scrum in Government

What does it take to produce results when using Scrum in a highly regulated, hierarchical, and often risk-averse culture like a government organisation? Here’s ZXMs top 5 tips.

The Lion, the Mouse and the Thorn of Usability Testing

Presentation at Agile 2013, Nashville USA. [gigya src=”http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”450″ height=”400″ bgcolor=”#ffffff” flashvars=”prezi_id=4lepbbbgfxxw&lock_to_path=0&color=ffffff&autoplay=no&autohide_ctrls=0″]

PRINCE2 processes vs Agile development frameworks

PRINCE2 has been the gold standard for project management certification for over a decade. It’s commonly a prerequisite for project managers and is recognised as being essential for keeping projects “in control”, but does this make project management incompatible with Scrum? How do you put the two together?

Focusing on User Tasks to Deliver a Better Customer Experience

On one of my recent projects, we were asked to deliver a new Information Architecture for a government website that reflected the depth and breath

Beyond the new new product development game

Keynote presentation at Product Camp Sydney, 2013 [gigya src=”http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”450″ height=”400″ bgcolor=”#ffffff” flashvars=”prezi_id=yxy_jtee1jfg&lock_to_path=0&color=ffffff&autoplay=no&autohide_ctrls=0″]

Applying a Psychology Based Model to Improve Business Processes

Often, when we find out that we don’t know something that may be important to know, it motivates us to find out more in order

Patterns for breaking down usability and UX re-work

So you’ve just finished usability testing in your Sprint and have a pile of changes for your agile team to implement. How do you break down the UX changes that are needed to make a product useful, usable and accessible, into smaller, bite-sized User Stories?

New at the Blog

Our experts talk about what it means to solve complex client problems with 21st century frameworks and practices.

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