Anna Dick

Lean Agile Manchester

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This month we welcomed Lean Agile Manchester to our support centre at One Angel Square for the first time. This meet-up ran by Ian Carroll brings together local Agile practitioners from around Manchester and the North West.

Picture of Lean Agile Manchester Meet up
Lean Agile Manchester

The evening started with Tom Loosemore, our Digital Services Director. Tom shared his experiences of introducing an Agile mindset and ways of working to more traditional organisations. It was a really insightful talk on some key learnings he’s made along the way.

Tom Loosemore presenting at Lean Agile Manchester
Tom Loosemore

The night was complimented by some great lightning talks. Gemma Cameron updated us on the upcoming tech events in Manchester.  Ruta Blazeviciute spoke about the importance of changing organisations from the inside. Kevin Rutherford shared with us why it’s critical to bring your developers along on any agile adoption journey.

I closed the night with a brief introduction to an estimating technique that Kevin had introduced to me a few years ago.  Rather than guess the estimate for the story, Kevin’s technique challenges the story to fit into the time and collect data that can be used to relatively size for future items. Keeping the stories small also ensures you’re not spending lots of time estimating work you may never do if priorities change. 

Picture of Anna Dick speaking at Lean Agile Manchester
Anna Dick

Thank you to all the speakers and to everyone who came along.

We’ll be hosting future Agile events in 2017, we’ll share them on Twitter nearer the time.

Anna Dick

Digital ways of working

Co-op5 Comments

Last week we held our first Digital MasterClass. We’ve talked a lot on the blog about the different ways in which we’re working in CoopDigital, Jamie’s post on agile delivery is a great example of this. We’ll continue to blog about how we’re working differently, but we also want to find other ways to share what we’re doing with all our colleagues.

Why would we want to share our ways of working? We’ve found that generally speaking, teams and organisations that adopt agile ways of working have a better chance of delivering the right thing, are happier and more collaborative. It’s perfectly suited to an organisation built on co-operation and doing the right thing for its people.

The first session was a pilot with the objective to provide an overview of digital and agile ways of working whilst gathering lots of feedback from attendees.

Picture of the first Digital masterclass

Anna Dick, Tom Taylor, Amy Wagner and Carl Burton all shared their experiences on topics including;

What is digital?
The habits of behaviours of successful digital businesses
Agile ways of working
Life as a product manager in CoopDigital.

We’re initially providing these sessions for colleagues in CoopDigital and will consider opening these up to other areas of Co-op in the future. The team are looking at lots of different ways for us to share experiences both internally and from people externally who we could learn a lot from. We’re trialling, learning and improving as we go.

We’re now reviewing the feedback to help us develop and improve the content and format for more sessions. We’ll also be talking with colleagues in our Group Transformation team about their work.

Picture of Jenni Moss - Delivery Manager

Jenni Moss
Delivery Manager

Delivery in engineering

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I’ve recently joined the CoopDigital team where I’ll be heading up delivery for engineering. I’m currently supporting the teams getting our new membership  ready for public launch in the Autumn.

Picture of the team working on new Co-op Membership
Some of the team working on new Co-op Membership

As you can probably tell if you’ve been following our blog, you’ll see that we are growing our internal capability to ensure we can support new and existing businesses with digital expertise.

I’ve worked in digital since 2000, but in the last 6 years have specialised in Agile delivery for media or retail applications. Most recently I was part of a BBC team that transformed ways of working for some key TV and mobile applications to ensure that value was delivered incrementally, enhancing the end user experience and reducing waste in getting there. This involved smaller multidisciplinary teams that were product led with the end user at the heart of all prioritisation.

The team here is in it’s infancy but with some exciting work lining up and an open culture where continuous improvement is encouraged I am very excited about being part of the team that can help set this up for success.

If you’re interested in getting involved and helping to shape our Delivery culture why not have a look at our existing vacancies.

Anna Dick