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Rethinking Agile Procurement and Contracts
Posted on February 12, 2016 1 Comment
One of Edward Deming’s 14 Prinicples from his book Out of the Crisis (1982), contains a very astute principle that procurement should grasp: End the practice of awarding business on price tag alone. Instead, minimize total cost – move towards a single supplier for any item, on trust. I was recently interviewed for an article […]
Leadership Debt
Posted on October 29, 2015 2 Comments

For the past 10 years I have been working with various organisations to humanise the workplace, help improve the leadership capability and dampen the toxic culture that may currently exit. A recent article (28 Oct 2015) in the news has provided no relief. The article indicated that the thinking and culture of tomorrow’s leaders being taught at school’s […]
LAST Conference 2015 – Agile Start Me Up – Using the Minimum Viable Discovery (MVD)
Posted on September 18, 2015 Leave a Comment
My presentation at last year’s LAST Conference 2015 titled “Agile Start Me Up – Using the Minimum Viable Discovery (MVD)” is available on Slideshare.
Malcolm Turnbull – The Agile Australian Government
Posted on September 16, 2015 2 Comments
The Australian Government took a pivot 2 days ago with a new Prime Minister after a leadership spill. In his acceptance speech, Malcolm Turnbull talked about a more ‘agile Australia’ and urged Australians to ’embrace disruption’. He said his government would be “focused on ensuring that in the years ahead as the world becomes more and […]
The Improvement Paradox – Too Busy To Improve?
Posted on August 5, 2015 Leave a Comment

A bad system will beat a good person every time. – W. Edwards Deming. I believe that everyone does their best given the context and environment at hand. I subscribe to Deming’s views that it is the organisation as a system, not the people working in the system that determines the organisation’s performance. The other […]
What is the relationship between Systems Thinking, Lean and Agile?
Posted on April 24, 2015 1 Comment
I was recently approached about the relationship between Systems Thinking, Lean And Agile. Without going into too much depth and using too much terminology I have tried to summarise it in the following diagram. Agile Agile is an iterative and incremental approach for developing product and services through collaboration between self-organising, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive […]
Meet Chris Chan (AgileTODAY)
Posted on January 22, 2015 Leave a Comment
In the last issue of AgileTODAY, I was interviewed by SlatteryIT to find out more about myself as one of the Agile Australia chairs. For Agile Australia 2104 I was one of the chairs for the ‘Approaches’ stream and in 2015 I will be chairing the ‘Build Measure Learn’ stream. Here’s the transcript of that interview […]
Agile Coach Camp Melbourne 2015 on InfoQ
Posted on January 15, 2015 Leave a Comment

Towards the end of last year I was interviewed by Shane Hastie from InfoQ about Agile Coach Camp. The interview was published in the article An Update on Agile Coach Camps Internationally. Coach camps are volunteer organised events which typically happen over a weekend and are designed to be cost neutral, sharing the venue and […]
Digital disruption starts with disrupting your business model
Posted on August 22, 2014 Leave a Comment

Recently I was posed the question “how can we shape organisations to be successful in an environment of digital disruption?” The convergence of technologies, such as cloud, social, mobile and information (the Nexus of Forces) …. are driving the Digital Industrial Revolution (Gartner). The convergence of these technologies has formed what Fred Wilson has described as the Golden […]
Spotify breaks the rules when Scaling their Agile Engineering Culture
Posted on April 1, 2014 Leave a Comment
“One of the big success factors at Spotify is the Agile Engineering Culture.” – Henrik Kniberg Spotify started as a Scrum company in 2008 but the standard Scrum practices were getting in the way as they grew, so they made them optional. Here’s an awesome video how Spotify scaled their Agile Engineering Culture. They decided that: […]