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Bridge Strategy to Delivery
Expert Insights from the Frontline of Transformation
Discover how leading UK enterprises are closing the gap between strategic vision and delivery execution. Real stories. Real metrics. Real results.
Insights Used By 117+ Organisations Across Financial Services, Gaming, Government & More
Authors With 50+ Years Combined Delivery Transformation Experience
Proven Results £13Bn+ Delivered Through Insights-Led Transformation
Featured This Month
Why Product-Led Growth (PLG) Fails in Big UK Organisations - and How to Do It Properly
Most UK enterprises want the outcomes of product-led growth - lower CAC, faster scaling, stronger retention - but very few want the operating-model surgery required to achieve it.
PLG isn’t a tactic or a funnel. It’s a multi-stage organisational journey that demands new teams, new governance, modern architecture and genuine autonomy.
Here’s how to do it properly.
6 days ago7 min read
AI Isn’t a Bubble-It’s a Wildfire. And We’re Already in It.
People often reach for metaphors when faced with uncertainty. It is a world-old instinct: to make sense of the unknown we compare it to what we already understand.
Lately, my entire feed seems to be holding onto one such metaphor - the idea that AI is a bubble about to burst. Maybe. I should say I respect the provenance of the “bubble” metaphor - it comes from decades of market cycles and hard-earned lessons about hype
Nov 205 min read
Competing with the Big Boys & Girls: Building an AI Centre of Excellence
For years small companies have been fast and nimble whilst larger firms are slow to adopt new approaches, but an uncomfortable truth about AI adoption is that large enterprises have the resources and dedicated teams to drive rapid transformation. The scale of benefit they can achieve is huge and has therefore made it a real focus for them. Smaller firms, by contrast, often struggle to give AI innovation the sustained focus and bandwidth it will need if they want to stay ahead
Nov 183 min read
Read by Topic
Strategy & Leadership
For CTOs, COOs, CPOs navigating transformation. How to align strategy with execution, lead through change, and build sustainable delivery capability.
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Delivery Excellence
For Scrum Masters, Delivery Leads, Agile Coaches. Practical frameworks to improve predictability, eliminate waste, and build high-performing teams.
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Product Thinking
For Product Managers, Product Owners, Product Directors, and CPOs. Move from output focus to outcome focus. Build products customers actually want to use.
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Scaling & Transformation
For enterprise leaders scaling delivery. Frameworks for SAFe, team topologies, portfolio governance. How to maintain agility at scale without bureaucracy.
Featured Post:
Culture &
Teams
For HR, Team Leads, and People Leaders. Build fundamental trust, psychological safety, and essential accountability. The critical human side of transformation.
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All Insights
Guacamole is the Answer
Turns out guacamole is the answer. I’m not entirely sure what the question is (on a side note, I just found out there is a new Douglas Adams book called 42 that comprises a treasure trove of his unreleased personal stash of notebooks, letters and scripts) Anyhoo, Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so, so let’s move on. If guacamole is the answer, the question is, obviously, “why - in Agile - do we only improve only one thing at a time. Take Scrum retrospectives, for i
Abbas Dhanani
Apr 3, 20242 min read
Do they ever think about what comes next?
Scrum Masters eh? Do they ever think about what comes next? I don't mean in terms of work, but for yourselves. How long have you been a Scrum Master? More than five years? What comes after Scrum Master? Have you planned for your next step? Are you ready? As a seasoned Scrum Master, you’ve honed your skills, navigated sprint cycles, and facilitated countless ceremonies. But what lies beyond the Scrum board? How can you elevate your impact and propel your career forward?
Abbas Dhanani
Feb 7, 20244 min read
Is Timesheeting Bad and Evil?
Clearly from those that have to do it or manage it, the answer is a resounding yes. Is it that clear-cut? Of course not. So let's delve into it, by firstly asking why firms want it. There are a few reasons to want staff time tracking, we’re going to focus on delivery teams but fundamentally the issues are the same: 1. A lack of trust - Management wants a good idea of who’s doing what and is time being spent effectively. Are people doing what they should be? To be honest if
Simon Maurer
Jan 8, 20244 min read
Outcomes Over Outputs - 10 Steps to Becoming an Outcome Focussed Org
We set Sales teams quota targets, but we don’t tell them they need to close a specific deal on a specific day. We ask marketing teams to commit to driving a certain number of leads within a specific time period, but we don’t tell them that a particular campaign needs to drive those leads. And yet, we ask our product development teams to deliver specific features by specific dates and produce roadmaps of features to give the comfort of ‘certainty’. Feature roadmaps set the wr
Darren Emery
Nov 6, 20234 min read
Why Leaders Don’t Care About Culture
I was reading an article the other day from one of the big consultancy firms about organisational culture and why cultural change efforts fail. Honours degrees get you the prestige, but they don’t buy the experience: I swear these big consultancies haven’t ever been on the ground in the workplace because a lot of what is said is nonsense. Their number 1 reason why cultural change fails was “Leaders lack commitment”. I hear similar comments from the agile community when I ask
Darren Emery
Oct 17, 20233 min read
A Lesson from Golf to Transform Your Organisation
In my consultancy work I use sporting analogies a lot. My hero growing up was Andre Agassi, and he once said that every tennis match is a life in miniature. Sport mirrors our human experience – the drama of the game, the unpredictable outcomes, the highs and lows of emotion, the winning, the losing. I spent last weekend following the Ryder Cup and as I watched the European team lift the golden chalice for the ninth time since I became a covert of this event in 1997, I realise
Darren Emery
Oct 3, 20233 min read
Your Strategy Sucks: 3 Ways to Fix It
Here’s a stat for you: 5% of employees are aware of and/or understand their company’s strategy. Or an even better one: 71% of employees cannot recognise their own company’s strategy from a multiple choice list. (these stats are from the Harvard Business Review btw) And I think it’s a problem. A big problem. When confronted with the question “what is your strategy?”, most CEOs retaliate with a Powerpoint slide deck full of animations, colours and charts - we’ve seen some nic
Darren Emery
Sep 19, 20232 min read
How Not To Do An Agile Transformation
Many of the organisations agilicist are drafted into have already been through an “agile transformation”. But they aren’t “transformed”. Let me tell you a story. Probably 80% of our clients have been through these big transformations already. Usually they have been led by one of the very large, and very famous consulting groups who sell with the A-Team and deliver with the D-Team (at A-Team prices). These consultancies know all the theory, they say all the right things; The
Darren Emery
Sep 5, 20233 min read
3 Essential Things to Make Offshore Development a Success!
Agilicist have been parachuted into a multitude of organisations to fix issues they’ve had working with geographically distributed teams. So what does it take to make offshore development a success? Even before the pandemic, moving development offshore was becoming common-place. There are lots of reasons for this, but often it’s due to perceived cost. They look at the rate card of a supplier and think, we can save £X by moving our entire development function over to India, M
Darren Emery
Aug 22, 20233 min read
Want Productivity? Build a Culture of Trust
FACT: Higher Trust = Higher Productivity and more engagement. But how do you create a culture of trust in your organisation? ..... I was reading some research the other day that people at high-trust companies report 50% higher productivity and 76% more engagement than those at low-trust companies. According to Harvard researcher Paul J. Zak, there are 8 strategies to drive that trust culture but I wanted to talk about one in particular. I remember a number of years ago Agilic
Darren Emery
Aug 8, 20232 min read
Productivity: 3 Reasons Your Teams Aren't Getting Results
“The teams aren’t productive enough!” At Agilicist , we hear this a lot from senior management. And usually it’s because of one of these 3 things: Insufficient Clarity Teams need a clear understanding of what they are doing, and why they are doing it. If they don’t have that, they get distracted by low priority work, they duplicate effort, things fall through the cracks and there is confusion which results in delays, waste and a hard time achieving goals. If your teams are re
Darren Emery
Aug 7, 20232 min read
The Death of The Scrum Master
Why Enterprises are moving away from Scrum and back to traditional delivery management. Companies are ditching the Scrum Master role. They are switching to Technical Agile Product Design Programme Delivery Managers. Anyone know of any? Basically someone steeped in agile transformation experience with a traditional project management background who has been a developer and also worked with design thinking and product. Except, unicorns don’t exist. It seems like these companies
Darren Emery
Jul 28, 20232 min read
The No1 #agileframework!
With all this talk, I’m going to share the best #agileframework out there. This framework helped Agilicist drive multiple successful transformations. Ready? Here you go… There isn’t one. Are you joking? Why do people persist in trying to find “the perfect methodology”, as if it was some secret sauce that could automatically fix all your organisation's problems? You’ll have a better chance taking mindset advice from Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. Here’s what to do instead: Ali
Darren Emery
Jul 14, 20231 min read
47% of Agile Transformations Fail.
47% of Agile Transformations Fail. Why? Because companies do one of these two things: They focus on Practices They think that doing Stand Ups, Sprint Planning and using story points is going to make their organisation “agile”. They think that by creating the role of Scrum Master and filling it with Project Managers they are going to become more predictable. And then they wonder why all of these impediments that are now visible aren’t magically resolving themselves? They focus
Darren Emery
Jul 14, 20231 min read
The Paradox of prioritisation:
Does prioritisation Equal Good Strategy? In the dynamic and fast-paced world of business, strategy plays a pivotal role in shaping the success of organisations. At the heart of strategic decision-making lies the concept of prioritisation. Leaders constantly face the challenge of allocating limited resources to an array of goals and objectives. However, a crucial question arises: does prioritisation alone equate to a good strategy ? This article delves into the paradox of prio
Darren Emery
Jul 12, 20233 min read
Social Conformity Leadership and Cultural Change
I recently saw a video on social conformity that caught my eye, a modern take of the classic psychology experiment by Asch (1951). The video shows a group of people, majority actors and one being the ‘test subject’ sitting in a waiting room and rising everytime there is a beep. The ‘test subject’ eventually joins in, although confused at first. Once she is the only one left in the room she continues to rise on the beep. Watching this, even I thought, "I would never do that"
Abbas Dhanani
May 4, 20232 min read
SAY HELLO TO SAFe 6.0
Following its ethos for continuous improvement, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has recently announced SAFe 6.0 - an updated and evolved version of the Framework. Here are a couple of the major changes we spotted. Language changes: You can view the full updated vocabulary list here , but what rubbed us the most was the deprecation of the word Program in favour of ART (Program Backlog is now ART Backlog and Program Execution is now ART Execution) and the switch from Scrum M
magdalena valkova
May 4, 20232 min read
Is The SAFe Framework worth doing?
PI Planning is at the very heart of any SAFe implementation. But do we really need it? Well, as Dean Leffingwell states: ‘If you aren’t conducting PI planning, you aren’t using SAFe’ so perhaps the more pertinent question is, do we need SAFe? Nowadays most organisations develop their software using Agile at the team level, however traditional waterfall processes persist at the programme and portfolio levels of the enterprise as the flexibility, uncertainty and incremental rev
Darren Emery
Jan 9, 20233 min read
7 Pitfalls to Agile Testing
“Whether your company is working in waterfall or agile, your testers will have the same basic skill-set and knowledge, the real difference is in their way of working.” Those testers who are used to working in an organisation that delivers projects in waterfall will be used to receiving a set of requirements early in the project and building their test cases around these before receiving an operational system to test. In agile, testers are expected to be contributing to the fl
Darren Emery
Jan 9, 20232 min read
Why Should Agile Teams Write Objectives?
One of the most often misunderstood (and often skipped) parts of the PI process is that of Objectives writing for the agile teams. The bit people get wrong is knowing the difference between objectives and features. At best, agile teams resort to paraphrasing their features into business language. Having driven scaled agility across several organisations, the importance of PI objectives cannot be understated. In our experience their proper use does three key things: 1. Validat
Darren Emery
Jan 9, 20232 min read
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