Uncategorized Category
Out with the old …
Posted on March 18, 2021 Leave a Comment
A little thing happened today …. I say it is a little thing but to me and my colleagues at Boots it is actually quite a big thing. Today we launched the new www.boots.com homepage and our new CMS Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). In the grand scheme of things this might not seem like much — websites go live everyday with varying degrees […]
Agile Tools: The Burn-Up Chart
Posted on March 15, 2021 Leave a Comment
Organisations are embracing agile delivery models at an unbelievable rate; a huge range of methodologies are being adopted in order to allow large corporations to make sense of doing things in a new and unfamiliar way. All to often we see agile being interpreted as an “IT Thing”; as a result other parts of the […]
Why I Actively Share My Pronouns
Posted on February 10, 2021 Leave a Comment
Someone asked me today why I put my pronouns in my e-mail signature and what it means. As a cisgender man (a person whose gender is in alignment with the sex they were assigned at birth) there is little to no risk in sharing my pronouns. When you’ve never questioned what pronouns people use for […]
Recognising the Chimp In You
Posted on January 1, 2021 Leave a Comment
Over Christmas I’ve been reading a fascinating book called The Chimp Paradox by Professor Steve Peters. The book introduces the concept that we all have two brains: You (The Human) — this brain is responsible for intelligent, rationale and logical thought. The Chimp — this brain is completely independent of you and not under your control. This brain thinks emotionally and […]
Which bugs are morally acceptable?
Posted on November 1, 2020 Leave a Comment
On a daily basis our organisation makes choices about what features can be released and what features are not yet ready to be put into the wild — sometimes this means that we allow functionality to go into production with known bugs and occasionally defects enter production without being noticed. I strongly believe that we […]
The True Meaning of “Agile”
Posted on May 17, 2020 Leave a Comment
Agile is a term which has become synonymous with Software Development. For those of us who work in Engineering organisations the term conjures up ideas of Sprints, Burn-down, Iterative Delivery Cycles and Retrospectives. The term itself has a very different meaning: agile — an adjective: able to move quickly and easily. Recently within my organisation […]
Measuring Impact vs Hours Worked
Posted on June 10, 2017 Leave a Comment
I was recently given the pleasure of having a tour of the FaceBook Campus in Menlo Park, California. There are many stories of how amazing Facebook is and it didn’t disappoint. The campus is very much focussed around people. Some examples: There is as much food as you will ever be able to eat and […]
Who are you voting for?
Posted on June 7, 2017 Leave a Comment
I don’t usually come out in support of political parties but I’ve decided to make an exception. On 18th April when the election was announced if you had asked me (and some people did) who I would vote for I gave a very clear answer that I was voting conservative. Over the past 6 weeks […]
WestgarthsWeb 