Agile Planning

This page is home to a collection of my writing around the subject of agile planning, agile working and agile enterprise. If you'd like to understand more on the fundamentals of agile thinking, take a look at the definition of Agile Software Development, and The Agile Manifesto. And for more on how I believe agile principles can be applied to modern business and the business of communications, read these posts:

1. Agile Planning (Redux) - A talk and presentation summarising the key principles, and a good place to start
2. Agile Advertising - the post that began it all. Stop campaigning, start committing
3. Agile Planning - taking the thinking further, and setting out a philosophy for a new way of working
4. Agile Marketing - a definition that builds on the principles of The Agile Manifesto
5. Design Thinking, Agile Enterprise - divergent, not convergent thinking within business
6. Porous Enterprise - it's no longer sufficient to focus on protecting existing knowledge stocks because it's increasingly it's about knowledge flow and your assets being more and more about your relationships.
7. Podcast on Agility - a conversation with Johnnie Moore and Robert Paterson on the subject
8. We Need To Rethink How We View Creativity - we put boundaries around creativity, and it needs to stop
9. Agile Budgeting - its no good adopting nimble processes if the way in which you budget for them is still locked in the old linear, industrial, one-way thinking.
10. Unplanning - why it's time to move on from the outdated 'waterfall' planning process that plays out in most organisations
11. The Unbundling Of Advertising - on building relationships and speed bumps
12. The Quiet Revolution - talent complacency in the new world
13. Caught Up In The System - organisations become systems
14. Democratising Industry - how one company set out to be truly agile, and are re-inventing an industry while they're at it
15. Where Good Ideas Come From - agile enterprises create spaces for ideas to mingle
16. The Rise Of Talent Networks - innovating corporate structures to be more nimble
17. Ghetto testing - how building a platform to enable test-and-learn approaches can lead to dramatic success
18. Emergence - on how complex patterns and systems can arise from relatively simple interactions
19. Technology As A Barrier To Change - New technology is usually viewed as both a driver and an enabler of change. But sometimes the reverse is true.
20. Design With Vision, Optimise With Feedback - when to test, and when not to test
21. Making Stuff Hackable - designing for hackability
22. Predicting The Unpredictable - on the untapped value that sits in corporate and public data streams
23. When I Grow Up - the importance of agile company culture in attracting the best talent and winning
24. The Shamrock Organisation (Redux) - on new and flexible organisational structures
25. Planning For Streams - free-flowing and responsive content, and services and applications that are both scalable and portable
26. What's So Wrong With Hierarchy? - Overburdensome hierarchy creates it's own overburdensome process. And it's paralysing
27. Stubborn On Vision, Flexible On Detail - Jeff Bezos on the balance between iteration and intuition
28. Predicting the Present - competitive advantage will increasingly come from not only being able to make an informed prognosis of the future, but an informed prediction of the present. Big data approaches and tools
29. 'Two-Pizza' Teams - how Amazon is able to structure it's business to ensure agility but also a high degree of cutomer-centicity.
30. The Three Pillars of Content Curation (Redux) on how new forms of content curation are changing the way in which we discover and consume content
31. Slow, Fast and Spiky Communications - new patterns of communication and how building long-term value sits with short-term peaks of activity
32. What If An Agency Had An API? - the API as a metaphor for a new way of working
33. Revisiting T-Shaped people - why there's reason to believe that T-Shaped talent will be critical to the future of marketing
34. Playing The Long Game - on the unique view that Amazon takes of it's business
35. Massive-Scale Online Collaboration - new models and economics uniquely enabled by the internet
36. Media = Maths + Magic - on the future of media planning and buying, and the tricky balance between automation and creativity
37. The 70, 20, 10 Model - a model for learning and development, innovation, and now for marketing
38. Content Curation, Stock and Flow - on the new dynamic for content
39. Ideas From Anywhere - creative collaboration and culture in an age of change
40. Distributed and Destination Thinking - adopting a different mindset
41. The Rise of Product Management - a key role in developing agile structures
42. "100 Geniuses Connected By A Travel Agent" - some great fundamentals of agile cultures and structures from an unexpected source
43. The 70,20,10 Content Planning Model - a simple content planning model based on solid publishing principles
44. Concurrent Production - on 'product discovery teams', concurrent development, and how agencies work
45. The Real Marketing Lesson We've All Just Learned - Obama's campaign is the perfect marriage between big data and storytelling
46. Where Traditional Design Meets Startups - on subcompact publishing, design thinking and working on a start-up
47. Communications Planning in 2013 - what's changing, and what's growing in importance in planning
48. Digital Content Trends in 2013 -  what's changing, and what's growing in importance in content
49. The Strategy Is Delivery - the work of the Govt Digital Service, bringing agility to government
50. Growth Hacking - the marriage of product development and marketing

You can access some further reading on agile via my Delicious tag, and I also devoted one my columns for New Media Age, a post on Econsultancy, and one for The Marketing Society to the subject. If you're interested, I've also put a similar page together for my best posts around the subject of innovation.