I kicked off our third 'Projects and Agile Community of Practice' event in early December with two teams of six participating in a 'work in progress' exercise. Each team had a timer, four project team members and a project manager. The four project team members were assigned a Greek character - Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta. They had a backlog of 30 cards, where card by card each team member would put their specific colour sticky dots on spots on the card that referenced their character, before handing it onto the next team member. The project manager collected the completed cards (work) at the end of the line. Two rounds of work were completed.

Having worked as a project manager, general manager and Agile coach I have become interested in leadership and how great leaders help create teams who are engaged, motivated and deliver the results organisations need. On Wednesday evening, I delivered a presentation on '10 traits of effective IT leadership' to a group of Equinox IT clients and staff. In this post, I summarise some of my key points from this presentation.

On Thursday last week I presented at the ITx Conference in Wellington on the topic 'How to make sense of your role as a Project Manager or Sponsor on an Agile project'.

Certified Scrum Trainer Rowan Bunning and Equinox IT have a new training course Advanced Certified ScrumMaster that is now available in New Zealand.

Shane Ross introduced Daniel Scott-Raynsford of IAG New Zealand at our client event a couple of weeks ago, and in the process he provided some context on why we approached IAG to speak. Many examples of successful DevOps, Agile and Cloud adoption focus on start-up and high-growth companies who are able to bake in these approaches from the start, unencumbered by legacy technology, strict regulatory controls and deep-rooted structures and ways of working.