Team Ways of Working on AlanIsWright.com

Trumpet time: a great way to kick off a remote-first all-team meeting

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 16:36:28 +0000

In 2021, I wrote a blog post on running effective show & tells. If I were writing that blog post again today, the first thing I would add would be kick off the event with trumpet time.

Trumpet time. How we kick off our weekly team show & tells at Climate Policy Radar

Pre-discovery. How to prepare for product discovery

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 20:56:51 +0000

Product discovery is all about uncovering user problems and validating solutions to those problems quickly. When teams start discovery without preparation this can lead to wasted time, wasted effort and bad solutions. This post explores my thoughts on how best to help teams prepare for product discovery (aka pre-discovery).

How we are using Linear and Notion to manage our product backlog and project work

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 14:09:14 +0000

This post describes the simple approach we have settled on to keep track of our work at Climate Policy Radar: actions on Linear and documentation on Notion.

How we use Linear

Why we like Linear

Linear prides itself on being a simple alternative to larger more complex task management systems like Jira. Their method is to offer a simple tool that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of the bigger players. Users need to accept the constraints that come with that. But if your ways of working align with the “Linear way”, then you get the benefits of a super-fast tool that is easy to use. No features are missing in Linear that anyone on our team feels are must-haves, so it’s an easy trade-off for us.

Cycle time, queues, work in progress and batch size – four things product teams need to reduce if they want to deliver more value faster

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 06:05:00 +0000

Good product teams are focused on rapidly delivering maximum value to their users. This post describes four factors that when kept to a minimum, enable teams to deliver more, more often and at a higher quality: cycle time, queues, work in progress and batch size. In this post, I explain what these four things are, why reducing them helps teams become high-performing and some of the techniques we can use to keep them to a minimum.

How to run a daily stand-up

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 08:48:57 +0000

If you have ever worked with a software or agile team before, you have probably done a daily stand-up. In this blog post, I share my thoughts on why daily stand-ups are useful and some tips on how to run them well.

About stand-ups

What is a stand-up?

Stand-ups are regular meetings for the team to synchronise. They are usually

held daily
last 15 minutes or less (the idea behind standing up is that the lack of a chair encourages people to be brief.)
combined with less regular meetings such as planning, retrospectives and show & tells

You might have called this the ‘daily scrum’ if you’re working with the scrum methodology.

Team manual and team charter – my two favourite workshops to run with new teams or teams with new members

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 18:47:00 +0000

When a new team is formed or an existing team goes through change, it is important to take some time for team members to learn more about who each other are and how best to work together. In this post, I summarise my two favourite workshops to help teams get off to a good start: team manual and team charter.

Team Manual

I first learnt about the team manual exercise from Emily Webber, who I worked with at the Land Registry.

Splitting one product team into two

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 18:00:56 +0000

This blog post explains why and how we (Climate Policy Radar) decided to split from one big product team into two smaller teams.

The problem with working as one big team

As the team grew in size, we found it increasingly difficult to do everything together as a whole team. Meetings took a long time to get through. Most people found it difficult and unnecessary to stay on top of everything being done across the organisation. “Not having enough focus time to get things done” had started to come up in retrospectives.

How we have setup Notion to help our startup stay organised

Sun, 21 May 2023 12:49:18 +0000

I am working at a startup of 13 people with big plans for the future. Notion is one of the main tools everybody in the team uses. This post describes how we have set up Notion to make information easy to find across multiple growing teams.

What is Notion

Notion is a note-taking and productivity tool. We use Notion for

organising our ideas and documentation
keeping track of work

We don’t use Notion for:

How to run a retrospective

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 14:41:51 +0000

This post provides an introduction to team retrospectives and a guide on how to run them.

Intro to retrospectives

What is a retrospective?

A regular meeting for the team to reflect on past performance and identify ways to improve.

Why bother?

Good teams continuously improve their product. Great teams also continuously improve how they work together as a team.

Retrospectives help teams:

Identify actionable ways to improve
Make continuous improvement a habit
Take collective ownership of their processes and ways of working
Recognise each other’s achievements
Celebrate good performance

Good retrospectives are:

How to run a premortem

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:09:00 +0000

Premortems help us identify and reduce risks before they happen. They are a great exercise to run before launching a product or feature.

What is a premortem

Product teams often use postmortems to understand what caused a problem and how to reduce the risk of it becoming a problem again. Premortems are the opposite. You do them at the beginning instead of the end, and you plan how to stop the worst from happening rather than try to understand why it happened.

Writing good OKRs

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 17:21:35 +0000

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a goal setting system that was popularised by Google. To summarise, the objective defines what you want to achieve and the key result defines how you will measure progress towards achieving the objective.

In this blog post, I share my thoughts on how to write good OKRs. I focus on the content of the OKRs themselves rather than what they are or the wider process of creating them. Check the links at the bottom if you want more info about OKRs in general.

Makers time and collaboration time: two metrics that help teams improve the timing of meetings to increase team health and productivity

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 12:15:25 +0000

Makers time and collaboration time are two metrics that I have started using to help teams to measure the amount of quality time they have available to do their best work, and to make improvements over time. In this blog post I explain what they are and when/how to use them.

Better meetings for remote teams

Wed, 12 May 2021 16:32:07 +0000

“Too many meetings” is something I’ve said or heard over and over again in every organisation I’ve worked. Since lockdown began, this problem seems to have gotten worse for two main reasons:

There are more meetings: ‘Watercooler’ conversations and informal chats around the team space have been replaced with scheduled video meetings.
Meetings are more stressful: Video meetings seem to drain energy more than face to face meetings

My team have been experimenting with ways to make our meetings work better for us over the past few months. Below is what we’ve found has worked for us:

Measuring and improving ways of working on digital teams

Sun, 28 Apr 2019 17:29:13 +0000

Healthy teams, happy people and mature agile ways of working are good leading indicators of organisational success. Getting these things right is key to unlocking long term sustainable delivery of value. In this blog post, I summarise some of the approaches I have used to measure and improve ways of working.

How Government digital teams can use Cost of Delay to prioritize work

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 19:50:46 +0000

Over the past year I’ve been learning a lot about cost of delay. In this blog post I explain what I’ve learned so far, and how it can be used by teams to prioritise work. My focus is on teams that are following the UK Government Digital Service Standard, but it can be of use to any team.

People over resources

Sun, 13 May 2018 20:16:54 +0000

In most digital teams the vast majority of budgets are spent on people. People are our biggest assets. Almost all of our value is produced by them. Small changes in our ability to reduce the number of resignations and motivate them to work have an exponential impact on productivity.

Firebreaks on GOV.UK

Thu, 03 May 2018 10:03:46 +0000

Firebreaks on GOV.UK are similar to Google’s 20% time or Spotify’s hack week. For 1 week every 3 months, teams disband and everyone is given a chance to have some self-directed time to improve GOV.UK. We’ve had 3 firebreaks now: June, September and December 2017. This blog post explores why we do them, how they work and the benefits they bring.

GOV.UK: a journey in scaling agile

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 21:31:00 +0000

GOV.UK is relied on by millions of people every day to access vital services and information. Material published on GOV.UK can move financial markets. GOV.UK is a vital part of our national infrastructure.

But GOV.UK differs from most other pieces of national infrastructure in one respect: we built it and we run it using agile. GOV.UK has been live for more than 5 years and we’re constantly iterating and improving it based on feedback. GOV.UK has always been – and will continue to be – agile at scale.

How we do team selection on GOV.UK

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 17:17:18 +0000

This post explores how we plan who works on which team on GOV.UK, and how that process has evolved throughout 2017-2018.

Using Kata to help teams deliver value faster

Sat, 24 Feb 2018 19:50:16 +0000

Kaizen, Kanban, Kaikaku. We can’t get enough of these Japanese words in agile! Here’s a lesser known one: Kata. Kata is a term used by Mike Rother to describe a set of routines that Toyota use to ingrain a culture of continuous improvement in their organisation. Each routine is practiced and repeated so that it becomes second nature.

Starting up a new team

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:05:36 +0000

GOV.UK was recently restructured to help us achieve our 2017/18 roadmap. As a delivery manager, I oversaw the formation of 2 new teams under the new roadmap: Content History and Worldwide Publishing. The aim was to build happy, motivated and productive teams with a strong culture of agile user-centred delivery. This blog explains the steps we went through to start them up.

How we use Trello on the GOV.UK Publishing Platform team

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 22:57:00 +0000

Teams at GDS are free to pick the processes and tools that work for them. On the GOV.UK Publishing Platform, our Kanban process is supported by Trello. This is a follow-up to my blog post on How we use Kanban on the GOV.UK Publishing Platform team, and explains how we use Trello to support our Kanban process.

How we use Kanban on the GOV.UK Publishing Platform

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 22:48:15 +0000

At GDS, we believe that self-organising teams create the best results. So we give each of our teams the autonomy to pick the delivery approach that works best for them. On the GOV.UK Publishing Platform, we use Kanban to help us manage the work we do.