Blog History

Through this blog I hope to give you a flavour of my working life at Capgemini on the HMRC account, both as an architect and as an agile practitioner. I trust you will find it informative and helpful.

Tim Simpson
#LifeAtCapgemini

2023

Date	Title / Description
31 MAR 2023	Getting "Hands-On" With Technology There's only so much reading around that you can do before you have to roll up your sleeves and get hands-on with technology in order to put theory into practice to see if it actually delivers on what it promises. #AgileArchitecture
16 FEB 2023	The Sprint Planning Differentiator I've yet to meet a project team that enjoys any kind of planning activity but what I have noticed over the years is a clear "Sprint Planning Differentiator" i.e. teams who show dexterity in Sprint Planning often prove to be mature agile teams whilst teams who fail to plan sprints well often struggle with lots of other problems as a consequence.#AgileHealthCheck

Date

Title / Description

31 MAR 2023

Getting "Hands-On" With Technology

There's only so much reading around that you can do before you have to roll up your sleeves and get hands-on with technology in order to put theory into practice to see if it actually delivers on what it promises. #AgileArchitecture

16 FEB 2023

The Sprint Planning Differentiator

I've yet to meet a project team that enjoys any kind of planning activity but what I have noticed over the years is a clear "Sprint Planning Differentiator" i.e. teams who show dexterity in Sprint Planning often prove to be mature agile teams whilst teams who fail to plan sprints well often struggle with lots of other problems as a consequence.#AgileHealthCheck

2022

Date	Title / Description
31 MAR 2022	Project Radar: Recognise And Prioritise When the pressure builds and the cracks start to appear on your project, it's time to put on your super-hero costume and call upon your super powers to save the day! But just like real life, for software projects that's not an option. Instead you need to "recognise and prioritise" - it's what Agile Leadership is all about. #AgileLeadership #AgileHealthCheck
25 FEB 2022	INVEST In Product Backlog Refinement Product Backlog Refinement is an on-going activity for scrum teams alongside other sprint activities. The extent to which you invest in the process can have a massive impact on your work, especially when you architect for success and apply the INVEST acronym to validate your user stories. #AgileArchitecture #AgileHealthCheck
14 JAN 2022	Gaining Value From Sprint Retrospectives When you've been sprinting for a while, you need to make sure that your Sprint Retrospectives remain a regular event and don't become just a tick-box activity that fail to deliver any real value. #AgileHealthCheck

Date

Title / Description

31 MAR 2022

Project Radar: Recognise And Prioritise

When the pressure builds and the cracks start to appear on your project, it's time to put on your super-hero costume and call upon your super powers to save the day! But just like real life, for software projects that's not an option. Instead you need to "recognise and prioritise" - it's what Agile Leadership is all about. #AgileLeadership #AgileHealthCheck

25 FEB 2022

INVEST In Product Backlog Refinement

Product Backlog Refinement is an on-going activity for scrum teams alongside other sprint activities. The extent to which you invest in the process can have a massive impact on your work, especially when you architect for success and apply the INVEST acronym to validate your user stories. #AgileArchitecture #AgileHealthCheck

14 JAN 2022

Gaining Value From Sprint Retrospectives

When you've been sprinting for a while, you need to make sure that your Sprint Retrospectives remain a regular event and don't become just a tick-box activity that fail to deliver any real value. #AgileHealthCheck

2021

Date	Title / Description
30 JUN 2021	Spicing Up Sprint Reviews After all of the hard work that the team has put into delivering the next product increment it's important to keep up the good work and finish well.#AgileHealthCheck
25 MAY 2021	Defect Analysis Defect analysis can provide a vast wealth of information to help you focus your improvements in not just software quality but also in areas such as your development process and developer training.
30 APR 2021	Observing The Invisible System metrics provide visibility into the performance and behaviour of systems allowing you to pro-actively manage and support them and gain valuable operational and business insights.
05 MAR 2021	Designing For Traceability Trace data makes it easier to debug deployments, integration issues and performance bottlenecks and also helps improve the design of processes to make them more robust, self-healing and performant as well as answer "search and rescue" queries from technical support.
09 FEB 2021	Designing For Time Travel One of the requirements in designing software for testability is the ability to "time travel" during testing.

2019 [DDG Capabilities Lead]

Date	Title / Description
18 DEC 2019	Forced To Change Resisting change is futile (ready or not) but it's far better when you are ready and have planned for it on your own terms.
29 NOV 2019	Driving Strategic Learning You could leave people to their own devices as to what they choose to learn and to what depth but if learning is to be strategic then you'll need to give direction as to who needs to learn what and preferably when by.
15 NOV 2019	Two Customers It's not just your customer looking for ROI from a project, your own organisation wants it too. Both have expectations of what's in it for them!
08 NOV 2019	Progress Metrics We set revenue and profit targets, so we should set learning targets too. Otherwise, it's another example of where "failing to plan is planning to fail". There has to be a learning project behind the intention if the learning outcome is to be achieved.
01 NOV 2019	Creativity On Demand Even in this modern world, creativity is not something we can just call up on demand. So how do you get past the mental road blocks and get those creative juices flowing?
25 OCT 2019	Frozen In Time Don't get frozen in the past by a fatal hesitation in these times of permanent change.
18 OCT 2019	Wall Of Champions How recognising achievement can be a great way of motivating your staff and help to build a SME network to drive technical communities, share knowledge and build people.
11 OCT 2019	Building People, Then Products The essence of successful Lean Thinking is “building people, then building products”. Do you see yourself and your organisation doing that?
06 SEP 2019	Capability Smells Some good and bad smells regarding building capabilities within an organisation. How is your sense of smell? Are you smelling success?
30 AUG 2019	Arriving At Destination ... On Cloud Some key lessons learned from developing the page like functionality for DilemmaLearning.com.
23 AUG 2019	Starters And Finishers Over the years I’ve noticed that people often fall distinctly into one of two categories, namely that of either “starters” or “finishers”. What's the difference and why are both necessary?
16 AUG 2019	Almost Likable Page like functionality is making progress albeit not actually visible to end users yet. Continuous progress is the secret to successful learning. Those who make time to make things happen on their learning journey are ultimately the ones who succeed.
09 AUG 2019	Wanting To Be Liked The ambition and quest to add "page like" functionality to DilemmaLearning.com and how pet projects can drive personal learning.
02 AUG 2019	Out-Learn The Competition Lean Thinking embraces the mantra “out-learn the competition”. Do you see yourself and your organisation doing that?
26 JUL 2019	Blast Off From The Past The 50th anniversary of the first moon landing got me all nostalgic. I can’t even begin to imagine the sheer complexity of building such a technical solution.
19 JUL 2019	Continuous Curiosity I am forever hearing about new tools and technologies. This is not anything new, in fact it happens all the time. The question is, how do you deal with it?
11 JUL 2019	Opening New Doors To New Possibilities Training about theory and the different technology choices available are just a sample taste of the possibilities of how technologies might be combined and used for constructing solutions.
04 JUL 2019	A Time To Reflect H2 is here already! Where did the last six months go? I stopped to reflect and made some changes to my personal development plan.
28 JUN 2019	A Big Mistake About Learning A big mistake that people make about learning is to think that learning is not work. Why learning should be treated as a part of normal, daily work.
21 JUN 2019	Birmingham Digital & DevOps Meetup - 18th June 2019 The Birmingham Digital & DevOps Meetup was the first public outing of my "Continuous Learning Dilemma" presentation and also proved a great opportunity for social learning.
14 JUN 2019	How Does A Successful Manager Act To Develop Their Staff? In my research I stumbled upon an interesting booklet by The Campaign For Learning called "Leading on Learning". In part 2 of my analysis, here's what they had to say about how a successful manager acts to develop their staff.
07 JUN 2019	Beyond Training Training and learning are not the same thing. Existing training budgets will prove too limiting in the world of continuous learning and so organisations need to seriously consider how they will invest in growing their own talent or face falling further behind.
31 MAY 2019	Crazy Busy "Crazy Busy" is the enemy of continuous learning. Find out how to step out of the whirlwind of "crazy busy" and regain control of your time and work.
17 MAY 2019	Pluralsight Live Europe 2019 It was great to attend Pluralsight Live Europe 2019 in London this week. Find out what I hoped to learn and what I actually learned.
03 MAY 2019	Overcoming Obstacles To Build A Learning Culture In my research I stumbled upon an interesting booklet by The Campaign For Learning called "Leading on Learning". In part 1 of my analysis, here's what they had to say about overcoming obstacles to build a learning culture.
26 APR 2019	Continuous Learning Initiatives - Technical Communities How we use Technical Communities as one way to achieve knowledge sharing so that people can grow their desired skills to the right depth at the right time whilst staying abreast of emerging industry technologies and trends in a safe learning environment.
18 APR 2019	Continuous Learning Initiatives - Learning Vehicles The Learning Vehicles initiative really lays the foundations for the other initiatives to build on downstream. Explains how our office is equipped for learning and the ways of learning we make available.
12 APR 2019	Rising To The Challenge Of Continuous Learning Formulating the approach to rise up and attack the continuous learning dilemma. Introduction to the continuous learning spectrum and the early initiatives I planned.
05 APR 2019	The Continuous Learning Dilemma Explanation of what I mean by the term "the continuous learning dilemma" that I believe IT people and organisations are facing today. It's no small challenge!
29 MAR 2019	Prologue About me, who I work for and how this blog came about.