Editor's note: This chapter is based on Jo's experiences of working in BBC teams that use the agile methodology. But the advice it contains is applicable to taxonomists working in all sorts of teams. Jo brings her extensive experience and commitment to innovation to a chapter that has lots of tips on boosting the profile of taxonomy work, making the most of team mates’ diverse perspectives and progressing your own career.

Introduction

The natural state for a taxonomist seems to be working in a team of one. Most of us thrive on having the autonomy in our working lives and practices and the control over the quality of our taxonomies that entails. However, if you are offered a role within a team there are definite advantages if you are able to adapt.

Software development teams generally either use an agile or a waterfall approach. Waterfall development follows a linear process where a lengthy planning phase precedes the build of the software – this is the more traditional approach. Agile development is incremental, it follows a cyclical process, meaning a short scoping period before building, testing then moving on to the next incremental change.

The BBC adopted agile development in the early 2000s and it has since been implemented by all our development teams. It allows us to deliver value quickly so that we can maximise the usage of the licence fee while fostering the team in a way you would expect from a public service organisation. Having worked autonomously and in agile teams within the BBC over the last 15 years, I have some insight into how you can make working in a team work for you.

I’ll take you through some of the potential pitfalls of working in an agile team and show you how you can turn these to your advantage, using examples from a recent project that took a sentence and translated it into an image for a comic strip. This project required both a health taxonomy to map from the extracted terms to the images (e.g., from the word alcohol to an image of a bottle of wine) and later an image taxonomy, to define how those images could be used in relation with the image space (e.g., where they would be positioned on the page) and how they would interact with each other (e.g., behind, in front or inside) to create a unique image for each sentence.