Harry Bailey

Harry Bailey helps agency leaders fix the planning, ownership, and delivery issues behind overruns, rework, and delivery friction. With more than twenty years of experience in project delivery, agency leadership, and operational change, he supports growing agencies to make delivery clearer, less reactive, and easier to manage.

On Medium: You know what Agency Clients love? Certainty.

The article—posted to my Medium account—reflects on the challenges that Agile-first agencies face when they acquire new clients who often have a preference for traditional, Waterfall project management.

When we’re accustomed to agility and flexibility, we must adapt to provide the certainty and structured approach desired by a new client, balancing the innate human need for both certainty and excitement.

This adaptation involves documenting a delivery approach and being less agile about Agile.

But does changing our approach mean we’re no longer Agile?

Read ‘You know what Agency Clients love? Certainty.’ on Medium.

Less-Aligned Stakeholders: How to Carve Out Success

Once your client induction process is complete, you’ll need to make a decision on whether their next project has a key stakeholder that’s going to be high-impact. With those two key stages in the bank, it’s time to evalute the best way to move forward.

Also see: What is a stakeholder?

The options below are not intended to be a definitive list. Indeed I can imagine a rewrite of this article or addition of other options in the future. What you will be able to take from reading these thoughts however is the number of ways you could move forward (or not) with a client who isn’t ready to—or won’t—consider your purely Agile delivery approach.

Right, let’s dive into some less-Agile options!

Continue reading →

High-Impact Agile Stakeholders: Important Traits

Most of us are lucky enough to have worked with amazing clients during our agency careers. Those clients where your key stakeholder doesn’t just pass you a project and stand back. They sell you on it, buy into it, stay by your side for it and celebrate the success with you when it’s done.

But what exactly is it about those people that makes them different from the average stakeholder? How can we evaluate a client early to consider just what their team will bring to a project? Can we build them up to be more aligned before our project gets started?

Continue reading →

Client expectations of the inspect and adapt process

Originally posted as a thread to Twitter (X) October 2023

Let’s compare a sports situation with software dev best practice. There was recently a huge failure in the refereeing of a football match. A decision was made that processes should have corrected. Gary Neville here is saying refereeing is difficult & sorry should be enough here.

[quote tweet from Gary Neville definding the referee]

In software development we do ‘inspect and adapt’. That is we look at our processes and find ways to improve. We’re transparent about failure and actively look for places we can evolve.

A ‘sorry but’ wouldn’t be acceptable. “Oh there is a demand for speed so we’ll fail occasionally” and “that’s just the way it is”

The least we’d offer is…
Sorry
…and here is why it failed
…and here is what we’ve done to improve the situation

When you don’t offer those things, people (clients or stakeholders) will go looking for the improvement / failure themselves

And that is exactly what has happened with the football VAR failure. Where no change is promised, a change is demanded. It’s a valid ask, and a basic expectation of the consumer of any service. Here that’s refereeing.

Check AWS Lightsail Bitnami WordPress PHP version

Before you spend time upgrading to a new lightsail instance in the hope of your PHP version meeting WordPress minimum requirements, it’s useful to know if the version available is high enough.

You can check which PHP version you’re going to end up with using the following steps:

Open your lightsail home page
Click the Create Instance button
Check the ‘Linux/Unix’ option is selected
Look for the ‘WordPress’ option and make a note of the number displayed underneath (Something like a.b.c-d)

Ok, next we’ll check the Bitnami WordPress changelog

Open the changelog file
Search for a matching number from your note above
Check for a bullet which begins Updated php to
If no match, keep reading down the file until you find the first match for Updated php to
That’s the current PHP version you’ll get if you spin up a new lightsail wordpress install

If it’s the same or higher than the message being shown inside WordPress you can go ahead. If it’s not then you need to set a reminder to check back regularly on the lightsail creation page to see when the version updates.

AWS don’t use the very latest version available from Bitnami.

The final thing to consider… strangely is if WordPress supports the PHP version you’ll be upgrading to. WordPress maintain a list of which versions of PHP they support (properly and in beta).

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