tech·nic·al·ly agile class·i·fic·at·ion

Tags

Navigate the connected system of delivery, leadership, and engineering—through themes, not silos.

Tags help you navigate the intersection of people, practices, and products. Use them to explore engineering discipline, product strategy, and organisational design across modern agile systems.

Image
https://nkdagility.com/resources/tags/

Overview

Tags on this site aren’t for decoration—they’re how we expose structure in complexity. Each tag represents a recurring theme that cuts across disciplines, roles, and systems of work. Think of them as observability for ideas.

They’re not just labels for content. They’re a way to understand the relationships between engineering practices, product delivery patterns, and organisational strategies.

A tag might connect a post on Evidence-Based Management with one on Sprint Reviews, showing how feedback loops apply at every level. Or it might highlight the role of DevOps in enabling Scrum—not replacing it, but reinforcing its ability to deliver.

We don’t use tags to file content into buckets. We use them to build a map of the work.

Start anywhere. Follow the signal.

Learn More about Tags

Tags

Definition of Done

Getting Started with the Definition of Done (DoD). Every team should define what is required, what criteria must be met, for a product increment to be considered releasable.
Tags

Lead Time

Measuring the time from work initiation to customer delivery, helping teams monitor workflow efficiency and improve value delivery.
    Tags

    Continuous Integration

    Ensure fast, reliable development with Continuous Integration (CI). Merge code frequently, detect errors early, and maintain a healthy codebase.
    Tags

    Shift Left Strategy

    A Shift-Left Strategy brings testing, security, and compliance earlier in development, reducing defects, accelerating feedback, and improving quality for faster, more reliable delivery.
    Tags

    Forecasting

    Enhance forecasting in Agile and Scrum. Use empirical data to predict delivery timelines, manage risk, and optimise value delivery.
    Tags

    One Engineering System

    One Engineering System (1ES) is a strategic standardised, integrated framework designed to streamline software development by unifying tools, processes, and practices across teams. It provides a consistent, scalable foundation that supports high-quality, efficient, and secure software delivery.
    Tags

    Behaviour Driven Development

    Align development with business goals using Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). Improve collaboration and create clear, testable requirements.
      Tags

      Test First Development

      Test First is a practice that defines success before implementation. It supports manual and automated testing, with a strong preference for automation to improve flow and quality.
      Tags

      Evidence Based Management

      Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a strategy for improving an organisation’s ability to deliver value by making decisions based on evidence, not opinion. It enables data-informed investment in agility, innovation, and outcomes rather than output.
      Tags

      Internal Developer Platform

      An Internal Developer Platform streamlines development processes, enabling teams to build, test, and deploy applications efficiently within a controlled environment.
      Tags

      Continuous Delivery

      Continuous Delivery is the practice of frequently delivering small increments of valuable product directly to real users, enabling rapid feedback, validation, and continuous improvement from the very first iteration.
      Tags

      Definition of Ready

      Ensuring backlog items meet a clear, actionable standard before sprint planning.
      Tags

      Technical Excellence

      Technical Excellence encompasses engineering practices and methodologies that enhance agility, improve code quality, and enable continuous delivery.
      Tags

      Value Stream Management

      A strategic approach to improving the flow of value through an organisation, optimising efficiency, reducing waste, and aligning work with customer outcomes.
      Tags

      Azure DevOps

      Azure DevOps is a product from Microsoft that provides tools around CI/CD, collaboration, and agile project management. Other names are Team Foundation Server, TFSOnline, Visual Studio Online (VSO), and Visual Studio Team Services.
      Tags

      Agentic Agility

      Agentic Agility is the ability for humans and AI to take intentional, adaptive action within socio-technical environments, enabling continuous improvement, value delivery, and organisational resilience. It transforms Agile, Scrum, and DevOps from passive execution into deliberate evolution, ensuring agility remains a living capability, not a hollow label.
      Tags

      Agnostic Agile

      Agnostic Agile is a movement that promotes ethical, context-driven agility by prioritising principles over rigid frameworks. Championed by thought leaders like Arie van Bennekum, a Dutch signatory of the Agile Manifesto, it encourages practitioners to adapt methods pragmatically based on need rather than ideology. Drawing from diverse approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and XP, Agnostic Agile emphasises professionalism, critical thinking, and value delivery over brand loyalty or prescriptive practice.
      Tags

      Product Delivery

      The process of delivering usable working software products to customers, including planning, development, testing, and deployment.
      Tags

      Common Goals

      Common Goals are a first principle of effective delivery. They align strategy with execution, enabling every decision, every Sprint, and every line of code to serve a shared purpose. Without them, you don’t have a system—you have disconnected activity.
      Tags

      Continuous Improvement

      Continuous Improvement is the ongoing practice of relentless reflection and adaptation, driven by empirical evidence, aimed at consistently enhancing processes, products, and team effectiveness. It embodies a commitment to incremental and measurable advancements, fostering a culture of proactive experimentation, rapid feedback, and learning to achieve sustainable and strategic business agility.
      Tags

      Team Performance

      Team performance is a systemic indicator of how well a team consistently delivers value, reflecting its collaborative and technical delivery capability over time.
      Tags

      Asynchronous Development

      Enable seamless collaboration with Asynchronous Development. Improve efficiency, flexibility, and delivery across distributed teams.
      Tags

      Agile Product Operating Model

      Transform your organisation with the Agile Product Operating Model, blending agile practices and product management to deliver consistent, customer-focused value.
      Tags

      Open Space Agile

      Open Space Agile is an approach to organisational agility that applies the principles of Open Space Technology—a self-organising, agenda-free format for large group collaboration—to Agile transformation. Popularised by Daniel Mezick and others in the Open Leadership Network, Open Space Agile invites everyone in the organisation to co-create the change process, fostering psychological safety, shared ownership, and authentic engagement. Rather than relying on top-down rollout plans, it embraces emergence, letting those closest to the work define priorities and actions through open, iterative dialogue. This approach aligns with complexity thinking and honours the Agile ethos by enabling transformation to unfold organically, adaptively, and in response to real needs.
        Tags

        Agile Planning

        Master Agile Planning to balance flexibility with predictability. Align teams, optimise delivery, and drive value continuously.
        Tags

        Daily Scrum

        Maximise team alignment and adaptability with the Daily Scrum. Inspect progress, adapt plans, and ensure focus on the Sprint Goal.
        Tags

        Collaboration Tools

        Platforms that remove friction in communication and coordination, supporting Agile teams.
        Tags

        Azure Boards

        Manage Agile projects effectively with Azure Boards. Track work, optimise planning, and improve team collaboration.
        Tags

        Artificial Intelligence

        Leverage Artificial Intelligence to enhance decision-making, automation, and innovation in Agile, DevOps, and software development.
          Tags

          Ability to Innovate

          Ability to Innovate is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management that gauges organizational capability in terms of innovation. It is composed of a group of measures that assess how effectively an organization generates, implements, and sustains innovative solutions. Rather than a single metric, this group may include indicators like the frequency of experiments, innovation throughput, and learning cycles, offering a broad view of the organization’s capacity to innovate.
          Tags

          Lean Product Development

          Minimising waste while maximising learning in product creation.
          Tags

          GitHub

          GitHub is a platform for version control and collaboration, offering tools for code hosting, CI/CD, project management, and team collaboration.
          Tags

          Time to Market

          Time to Market is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management that focuses on organizational capability. It is not a single measure but a group of metrics that evaluate the speed at which ideas are transformed into deliverable products or features. This collection of measures may include lead time, cycle time, and overall development duration—providing a comprehensive view of how quickly value reaches the customer.
          Tags

          Lean Thinking

          Applying Lean principles to reduce waste and improve efficiency in workflows.
          Tags

          Professional Scrum

          Professional Scrum is a disciplined ethos of empiricism, accountability, and continuous improvement that transcends the Scrum framework.
          Tags

          Working Software

          Working software is the tangible, functional output produced during a Sprint, representing a concrete artifact that delivers value to customers.
          Tags

          Service Level Expectation

          A Service Level Expectation predicts how long work items take to complete, helping Scrum Teams improve workflow, identify issues, and set clear delivery timelines.
          Tags

          Scaling

          Coordinate multiple teams to deliver complex products while preserving agility. Focus on alignment, flow, and value delivery across the enterprise using lean principles and adaptive product structures.
          Tags

          Agile Frameworks

          Explore and compare Agile frameworks. Understand their principles, applications, and impact on organisational agility and value delivery.
          Tags

          Working Agreements

          Establishing team norms and collaboration principles for effective teamwork.
          Tags

          Estimation

          Master estimation in Agile and Scrum. Improve forecasting, manage uncertainty, and align expectations using empirical data and collaborative techniques.
          Tags

          Liberating Structures

          Liberating Structures is a set of simple, adaptable facilitation methods designed to make meetings more interactive, inclusive, and productive. Each structure replaces conventional habits like open discussion or status reporting with clear participation formats. Used across Agile, Lean, and organisational change initiatives, they provide structure without control, helping teams uncover insights and co-create better outcomes.
          Tags

          Unrealised Value

          Unrealized Value is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management and represents a group of measures focused on the potential value that could be captured with further improvements. Instead of being a single metric, it includes various indicators that assess untapped opportunities, such as latent market demand or areas for innovation. These combined measures offer insight into how much additional value remains available for the organization.
          Tags

          Beta Codex

          Embrace Beta Codex for decentralised, adaptive, and human-centric organisational design. Enable true agility beyond rigid hierarchies.
          Tags

          Social Technologies

          Social technologies are systems of thought that shape collaboration, decision-making, and adaptability. Rooted in self-organisation and continuous learning, they enable organisations to evolve, innovate, and create sustainable value.
          Tags

          Organisational Physics

          Organisational Physics is a conceptual model that uses systems thinking to analyse and influence the dynamics within organisations, focusing on the interplay between people, processes, and technology.
          Tags

          Organisational Change

          Driving transformation efforts to enable agility and resilience.
          Tags

          Competence

          Competence is a first principle that demands continuous development and demonstrable capability. It is the foundation of professionalism—without it, there can be no trust, no quality, and no real progress.
          Tags

          Acceptance Test Driven Development

          Drive high-quality software development with Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD). Define clear, testable acceptance criteria before implementation to ensure alignment with business needs.
            Tags

            Change Management

            Helping organisations shift mindsets and processes without falling into transformation theatre.
            Tags

            Current Value

            Current Value is one of the four key value areas of Evidence‑Based Management. Rather than being a single measure, it comprises a group of indicators that collectively assess the tangible, real‑time value a product or service delivers. This group of measures includes, for example, customer satisfaction data, revenue impact, and performance feedback—all of which help determine how much value is being realized at present.
            Tags

            Metrics and Learning

            Using data, metrics, and feedback to drive continuous improvement in teams and processes.
            Tags

            Hybrid Agile

            A critical lens on attempts to combine project management with agile delivery approaches.
              Tags

              Revenue per Employee

              A financial observability metric showing how much revenue is generated per employee, used to inspect workforce efficiency and strategic alignment over time.
                Tags

                Company as a Product

                Company as a Product (CaaP) is an organisational strategy that treats the entire company as a continuously evolving product, rather than a static structure. It emphasises designing and refining the organisation based on customer feedback, measurable outcomes, and strategic goals—much like product development. Popularised by thought leaders in modern organisational design and continuous discovery, CaaP encourages cross-functional collaboration, experimentation, and alignment across all levels. Instead of optimising for internal efficiency or hierarchy, it focuses on delivering value to customers and adapting the company’s capabilities, systems, and structures as intentionally as one would iterate on a product.
                  Tags

                  Organisational Agility

                  The ability of an organisation to rapidly adapt to market changes, customer needs, and emerging opportunities.
                  Tags

                  Value Stream Mapping

                  Visualising workflows to identify inefficiencies and optimise value delivery.
                    Tags

                    Customer Retention

                    Strategies to keep users engaged and reduce churn through continuous value delivery.
                    Tags

                    Cell Structure Design

                    Cell Structure Design is an organisational design model developed by Niels Pfläging, rooted in the principles of the Beta Codex. It replaces traditional hierarchies with a decentralised, network-based structure composed of autonomous, value-creating units called cells. Each cell operates with end-to-end responsibility, enabling responsiveness, accountability, and continuous adaptation. Informed by complexity theory, Cell Structure Design rejects command-and-control in favour of dynamic coordination and transparency, empowering people to self-organise around customer value rather than roles or silos.
                      Tags

                      Trend Analysis

                      Identifying patterns and shifts to inform strategic decision-making.
                      Tags

                      Market Share

                      Gaining competitive advantage by expanding a product’s presence in its market segment.
                        Tags

                        Portfolio Management

                        Align strategy with execution through Portfolio Management. Prioritise investments, optimise value streams, and drive organisational agility.
                        Tags

                        Project Management

                        Coordinating people, processes, and tools to achieve project goals across various methodologies and contexts.
                        Tags

                        Miscellaneous

                        Topics that don’t fit into any specific category.
                        Tags

                        Customer Focus

                        Deliver what matters. Shape systems and decisions around customer outcomes, not internal convenience.
                          Tags

                          Lean Startup

                          Applying Lean principles to rapidly test and validate business ideas with minimal risk.
                          Tags

                          Minimum Viable Product

                          Building the Minimum Viable Product to test ideas and validate market assumptions quickly.
                          Tags

                          Complexity Thinking

                          An approach to understanding and managing organisations, systems, and uncertainty using complexity science, emergence, and nonlinear dynamics. Incudes but not limited to Cynefin and Stacy.
                          Tags

                          Market Adaptability

                          Enhancing an organisation’s ability to respond to market shifts and competitive pressures.
                          Tags

                          Platform Engineering

                          Platform Engineering is the practice of designing, building, and maintaining internal platforms that enable developers to deliver value independently, reliably, and at pace.

                          Connect with Martin Hinshelwood

                          If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.

                          Concepts


                          Categories


                          Tags

                          GitHub (3)
                          Scaling (15)
                          Windows (96)

                          Our Happy Clients​

                          We partner with businesses across diverse industries, including finance, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, transportation, hospitality, entertainment, legal, government, and military sectors.​

                          SuperControl Logo
                          Jack Links Logo
                          Philips Logo
                          Milliman Logo
                          YearUp.org Logo
                          Boeing Logo
                          Kongsberg Maritime Logo
                          Flowmaster (a Mentor Graphics Company) Logo
                          DFDS Logo
                          Cognizant Microsoft Business Group (MBG) Logo
                          Schlumberger Logo
                          Graham & Brown Logo
                          Trayport Logo
                          Capita Secure Information Solutions Ltd Logo
                          Ericson Logo
                          ProgramUtvikling Logo
                          Epic Games Logo
                          ALS Life Sciences Logo
                          Washington Department of Transport Logo
                          Ghana Police Service Logo
                          Royal Air Force Logo
                          Nottingham County Council Logo
                          Department of Work and Pensions (UK) Logo
                          Washington Department of Enterprise Services Logo

                          CR2

                          Sage Logo
                          Ericson Logo
                          Slaughter and May Logo
                          Hubtel Ghana Logo
                          Workday Logo