How software organisations actually deliver: team-of-teams structure, flow economics, cost of delay, and the constraints that decide throughput. Reading the system, not blaming the team.
On Doing Versus Being Agile
[May 2026] I now reach [...]
How Scrum Teams Can Seek Out and Destroy Organizational Impediments and Unplanned Work
Track the unplanned work and the impediments as their own signal, and the system starts telling you where it breaks. The early instinct that later became control charts on two streams.
Mary Poppendieck’s “The Tyranny of ‘The Plan'”
A long, close reading of Poppendieck's talk on how plans quietly become the thing we serve instead of the thing we're building. Cost of delay, queues, and the economics underneath the manifesto.
The Customer is the Marshmallow
The marshmallow challenge is the whole argument for shipping early and often, in eighteen minutes of spaghetti and tape. Prototype, test, and stop mistaking the plan for the product.
A Retrospective on Managing a Client Services Team
My earliest operating-model thinking, before I had the vocabulary: headcount, process, and tools as constraint-led capacity work, and the support team as a feedback loop, not a conduit.
I hate priorities
Rigid priority-number columns mislead, and I said so in 2008. What I'd do differently now: weight by cost of delay and treat ordering as a live conversation, not a sorted list.