Follow the Amazon press release path to success

For a project to succeed, your whole team needs to build a shared view of what success looks like. Writing an Amazon-style press release is a fun and effective way to do this. Imagine your project is over and you’re writing a press release to trumpet the benefits it’s delivered. Working backwards from success helps you bake these benefits into your product from day one.

Our guide to creating a press release includes a template, instructions for running the activity, and we’ve just added an example press release (PDF) for you to follow.

Getting onto the Agile career path

Are you finding it hard to make progress at work? Our Agile Professional Foundation shows you how you can make a difference every day.

It’s a two-day course that grounds you in the Agile mindset and opens up opportunities as an Agile practitioner in one of eight ICAgile career tracks:

1.  Agile Coaching
2.  Agile Engineering
3.  Agile Testing
4.  Business Agility
5.  Delivery Management
6.  DevOps 
7.  Enterprise Agile Coaching
8.  Product Ownership

Plus you also get to claim 16 professional development units towards becoming a Project Management Institute Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP).

Practical, interactive and entertaining, the course is a fun way to further your career.

The road back to Boost

Developer Dave Harris has spent the past few years building a successful photography web app called Pop-in Portraits, which gives you a running visual record of your children growing up month by month. Now Boost’s special team culture has brought him back into the fold.

The thing he likes best about being a developer is being able to solve people's problems. “It’s really rewarding when you can show people that technology can be used to make their lives much easier,” he says.

Also really rewarding is raising his four-year-old daughter (and Pop-in Portraits model!) Hazel. He also still finds time for long-distance road cycling, not least the 160km 'Round the Lake' Taupo Cycle Challenge.

Free web accessibility clinics

Beyond wanting to give everyone a fair crack, making your website accessible is a great way to increase your traffic.

For New Zealand government agencies, this is more than a nice-to-have. In order to provide equal access to all Kiwis, public sector websites have to meet the government accessibility standards.

To make this easier, the Department of Internal Affairs runs fortnightly 2-hour accessibility clinics.

Anyone delivering digital services is welcome, whether from the public or private sector.

If you have any questions about web accessibility or meeting the New Zealand Government Web Standards, you can just bowl along — no reservations are needed.

Where

45 Pipitea Street, Thorndon, Wellington — DIA HQ

If you’re not in Welly, you can attend via Zoom.

When

Every second Thursday, from 2pm to 4pm.

The next clinic is on 27 February.