Weeknotes: 2022, Week 19

12 May, 2022

"Delicious giant pretzels hanging on racks on the buffet table." — Pretzel heaven.

I'm a little disappointed in my ability to keep up with the Weeknotes at the minute. It's a combination of them taking longer to write due to the amount of things I am learning in the new role, the amount of analysis required as a result, and having little time to write them too due to all of my spare time being taken up by Kitchen fitting and tiling.

Anyway, this is a good week to write them.

What did I enjoy this week?

I was in New York at BP Launchpad's Techfest event. It was fantastic not only to be in New York, but to meet so many of our counterparts from the other Launchpad Portfolio companies, and establish some new relationships.

I got a couple of great runs in as well by the Hudson.

"A photo from the highline looking along a Manhattan Street." — Photo from my morning run along the Highline.

Post Agile > Post Hardcore > Post Modernism

There were some good talks and workshops at Techfest, but I particularly enjoyed Dave Huntley's talk about Agile that concisely gathered a lot of my thoughts about Agile, and armed me with some new ways of explaining the important things about it to people. He condensed it down to three questions:

Are we building the right thing?
Are we building the thing right?
Are we building it fast enough?

Too often I've seen teams go straight to the nitty-gritty of frameworks, without understanding higher-level how they are achieving the aims of Agile. These three questions really help strip it back and explain the why.

Anyway, this led me to discover the term "Post Agile" - it seems to have been around for a couple of years now, but I'm slow on the uptake! It's hard to tell, but on the face of it, Post-Agilism seems to be the acceptance that Agile had some good points, but has failed to lead us all to a promised project utopia. This is a natural backlash to anything that attracts zealous devotion of any scale.

What do I want to achieve next week?

I want to look further into implementing agility into Hardware projects: how can we get to a stage where we can rapidly complete iterations of a hardware project and test them. Does it require a massive investment in manufacturing process and methods? Software is easy!

I also need to get my newly develop Business Model Canvasses collated into a digestable story.