When I started to learn about lean I naturally heard a lot of Toyota stories - it’s pretty inevitable since the whole thinking comes from there. One thing that I learned about was translated as autonomation. I was pretty sure it was a mistranslation.
But the other week when one of my team members said:
What’s the big deal of many things going on? If I’m blocked on a few items I can equally well just start a few more.
(Not his exact words but still those lines of reasoning)
At that point I saw the time to implement some jidoka (as automation is called in Japanese) in our project
Read on ...Just a short post on a little thought experiment I’ve been testing out.
I am right now in a big company trying to apply agile and lean practices for software development. We struggle because we meet the current organization that is not built to move in the way we want it to.
[Please fill out the rest of the story from your own experience while I yaaawn]
[…]
[…]
… and now everyone wonders why things take so long and we are not getting more through the system.
[I’ve been through this many times]
Read on ...I have a problem; I often have a hard time connecting our vision and overarching goals to the items that we are actually working on. I want to be able to pick up anything we do and understand why we are doing this now and how it will take us closer to our goal.
I’ve blogged about this before and in my time in Indonesia I even thought I had a great way of uncovering what those high-flying goals really means, by simply asking this question:
What can we measure to see progress to that goal?
But it turns out, understandably once I think about it, that question is too hard. The gap between the vision and the work is quite simply too big.
To me often the connection between vision and our work reminds me a lot of the business of the underpants gnomes in South Park:
It’s like
Vision: “we’re gonna rock the world”,
…,
…,
sticky on my board: “Make the button blue”.
I don’t like it. There’s no connection. Or worse we try to make up the vision/goal, the why, from the work that we do. But I have an idea. We are trying it now at my current client. I wanted to share it with you.
Read on ...I’m writing this post in a small crappy hotel room that will be my home for a few days. It’s quite the change after being station at the nice, beach-side hotel where Lean Kanban North America 2016 was held.
I was very honoured to take part in this event - first time for me at Lean Kanban Inc. conference (I think… ) and it was really something special.
I wanted to jot down a few thoughts and comments.
Read on ...A few weeks back a team mate, developer and agile dude extraordinare, said something profound:
I’m used to people coming to me with problems they need solved. Not solutions.
It was in a backlog grooming meeting and we were discussing if the item was ready for the development team to start to work on or not. It was. Well and ready. But the people writing the requirements felt that it was not worked through enough.
At the time I just giggled a little about this but it got me thinking and herein lies the heart in how the work with a backlog changes when you start to “do agile” or work in shorter releases.
Read on ...I got a request by a nice man call Brandon Garlock to share some failure of mine. My contribution will be part of a:
collection of stories about experienced and established developers (such as yourself) and the failures, setbacks and hurdles they overcame over the course of their careers. It will serve as an educational guide, motivation and reference for burgeoning programmers as they learn their craft.
You can read more about the project at http://www.iamascrewup.com/
That sounds both fun, worthy and useful. And I’m very honored to be part of the story. Any experienced developer will tell you that the greatest learning came from overcoming, maybe not always doing, great hurdles.
I asked Brandon if I could share my story on this blog, as that how I mostly write stuff, and he kindly agreed.
Read on ...This post could be summaried as you summaries an argument among kids; and then he said, so I replied, and then she went, and I’m like SAY WAAAHHAT?! but also hmmmmm… and then I went back home and asked a few friends and then I went Aaaaaah!
And then I learned something deeper of what I until that point only was a belief.
The last week I was in a lively and good discussion, again, about user stories and value. I think user stories often is misused as just another tool to write requirements in.
Also we discussed that flow is something that we really should strive for, but to what extent? Over value?!
As often, for me at least, it took a few days to think this through. That and some excellent help from some friends and tweeps.
Read on ...The last couple of weeks an old “friend” has made it’s appearance; fear. This time it is a special kind of fear that I’ve seen many times in organisations that started their agile journey: the fear of forgetting important things.
In this post I wanted to rant talk a little bit about that just as a concept and then give a few pointers and indicators on what you can do to get rid of that fear.
When I started my current gig about 3 months ago the tension around releasing was tremendously high. Also we had failed the last couple of releases resulting in even worse relationships with our customer and messy rollback handling and procedures.
We have now done three very simple changes in our process and technology that made a big difference for us and for the relationship with our customer; ditch iterations, shorten release cycles and feature toggling.
In this post I wanted to tell you a little bit around how we did those and the benefits it had for us.
Read on ...I downloaded a new markdown editor called Typora that looks amazing. Now I just wanted to try it out, and needed something to write about.
Also I’ve noticed that Claudia has come out with some new releases and that AWS Lamdba now supports Node 4.3.2 - which is awesome.
This post gave an opportunity to fix both itches above in one go. So this is an updated “Get started with Claudia JS for AWS Lambda”-post.
Read on ...At my current client I don’t have a role name. Or rather I do but that’s not what I do, nor what I am there to do. It struck me that I have had this problem before. Many times.
Here’s some way it manifests itself:
I’m not “development manager” that some people call me. I have no formal authority, no staff and no budget. And I have responsibilities that stretches over the development team.
I’m not scrum master that is the fall-back term for anything that is around agile and doesn’t fit the normal organizational scheme. However none of our teams work with scrum and i’ve not worked with scrum for at least 6 years. I’m also pro-flow-based processes rather than iteration-based.
I’m not a agile coach since that’s a term that I barely myself understand what it means. I don’t want to be a coach to make people more agile - I want to make the system work better to flow idea faster to production.
So I tweeted:
On Monday I'm requesting a new name for my role: Flow Manager - measured on lead time. #lean #agile #Kanban
— Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) April 9, 2016
Let me describe what I mean.
Read on ...Yesterday we had a couple of very interesting discussions in the team, that got me thinking on being clearer around the purpose of kanban.
In this team we have made a lot of changes lately to try to improve our lead times and throughput. One simple thing that we changed and that made a significant improvement was to simply release more frequently. When I first arrived here the releases were done every 6 weeks. Going to every 4 was just a simple change, and increasing frequency to ever 2 weeks was a very natural next step that no one objected to either.
But then a question came…
Read on ...I was in a couple of very interesting discussions yesterday, through the mean of a SAFe course. Just sitting in the room with your peers and stakeholders, off-site, discussing how to work more effectively is really powerful - it turns out.
“Who knew?”, he exclaimed with some irony in his voice but still some hope and joy.
Ok, in our discussion I, again, ran into the point where I simply don’t understand the reason for organization your company in a certain way.
I just have to write this down, and see if it becomes clearer for me. You can read it too if you want.
Read on ...I’ve been on a SAFe course. I was very interested, because like many people I’ve heard much about this, had opinions on it but haven’t experienced it first hand.
The context of the training was that it was given for my client. Not as “let’s get started with SAFe” but rather to align and give us all a common understanding on nomenclature and concepts.
I wanted to share a few thoughts in this post. If you were looking (or hoping) for a SAFe-bashing by a Kanbanista… Sorry - I’m not that guy. I’m also in way too good mood to bash anything right now.
Read on ...Something amazing has happened! I am one of 6 nominees to the prestigious Brickell Key Award.
Not in my wildest dream did I think that the kanban community would appreciate things I’ve been involved in enough to nominate me for this award.
You can help my nomination by supporting me in the form on that page.
But first - let me tell you a little bit about why you should do that, and what this price even is and some other questions that might go through your mind.
Read on ...In writing the last post I stumbled into a little nugget of gold that I never tried before claudia test-lambda.
This is a quick and simple way to verify and smoke test your lambda function once deployed.
And it’s super easy to use. Tag along
Read on ...AWS Lambda functions are really great since the server is out of the picture. We don’t really need to care about it, since AWS will handle scaling, patching, starting and stopping for us. It’s just us and our code. Ah bliss!
But wait a second: what if I do a console.log? Where will that be output? There’s no console, since I don’t have a server. Or is it?
Spoiler alert: Claudia got you covered.
Read on ...The last week I saw yet another time when embracing uncertainty and embracing an experimental mindset, gave us great benefits and potential productivity gains.
I wanted to share the story since I think it highlights these different mindsets and approaches in an awesome way.
It’s also a great story…
Read on ...I’m a fan of physical boards. But I have to say: many of the tools I’ve used are amazing (like JIRA, LeanKit etc.) in that they support working with the tool in a great way: shortcuts, intelligent search and great design.
But I can’t get around the fact that I don’t think that they support me and my teams. Already now I can hear defenders of these tool racking up arguments and showing me better ways to do the things that I’ve experienced as problems.
This post is not about that. This problem is about the general notion of any tool has it’s limits and that I run into more of them in electronic tools than I do using physical board.
Also this is my experience - your mileage may vary.
Read on ...In my last post on Claudia JS we only created a very simple function that echoed some data back to us. Still amazingly cool since that echoing scales to whatever load we will put on it, but a bit meek maybe.
In this post I wanted to up the ante a little bit and store some data, more specifically in the AWS Document database called DynamoDb
Read on ...