I’m talking less and less about agile and even lean, these days. Instead, the poison I’m selling now is flow. In all honesty, it might be better to put it like this: Opening peoples eyes for the benefits focus on flowing work smoother and faster, alleviates discussions about lean and agile later. Flow is an eye-opener and shifts your perspective. Things that previously was paramount (ensuring people are not idle, for example) becomes irrelevant or uninteresting. New ways, practices, and innovation quickly spur. But also new problems occur. One of the most common ones is the fact that flow is severely hurt by tasks that have many dependencies. I think I talk to teams about 4-6 times a week about this. In this post, I will offer a few thoughts on how to handle this type of situations. You say ‘problem’ - I say ‘unrealized improvement’ First of all -...

As a consultant, you get to see many, different organizations and look deeply into what makes them tick. This is a great benefit of my job, but at the same time quite hard to find from time to time. The reason for that is that most organizations have very lofty and worthy values but what is lived out is something else. But I’ve found… who am I kidding … stolen a way that make values more tangible and important in our everyday life. It’s a simple trick that you can start using tomorrow. Regarding these lofty values I mentioned in the intro, you know what I’m talking about, right? The values are words and statements that basically no-one would disagree with: Fun! Have you heard anyone say; No - I'm not fun. I don't want to be part of that Professional! - BAH! That's a fad. It will pass Open...

I had another opportunity to learn a thing or two about Google Sheets and it’s internal functions. Again. On a similar topic as last time. This time around I had to summarise the data from 4 different sheets and then let the user filter the data dynamically. To do this, I had to look up a lot of things, learn a little bit about the QUERY-function and then jump through some hoops. I write this down here so that I don’t have to learn this again. You can read it if you want to. I’ve created a sheet with some example data, similar but not the same as the data we had. This was also, as last time, a survey about the state of our office that we needed to summarise for a meeting. We had asked for input and asked people to classify the data in 4 areas; “Urgent”,...

I was asked to join a team for a backlog grooming session. We went into the room and opened the backlog in JIRA. It was exactly 99 items long. Not too shabby, but still… 99!? Ninety-nine items of work we hadn’t done. Yet. This of course triggered this jolly team to start singing and we soon where humming along: 99 tickets of work in the #backlog99 tickets of workTake one down, pass it around, throw it out because it is not required anymore, even Done but we didn’t update JIRA or we might not understand what it says98 tickets of work left in the backlog15 minutes spent #agile— Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) January 23, 2018 In this post, I wanted to share how we cut the backlog in half in 45 minutes. And then share some thoughts on backlogs that I have running in my head. Complete half of the backlog...

As a consultant and coach, I find it very fascinating to see how the same topic has a tendency to arise in many different place and conversations I’m in. All of sudden everyone needs to chat about flow, or estimation or what-have-you. I like telling stories, as a mean to teach and explain abstract concepts. Often when I’ve told a story once it has a way to surface back into conversations in the near future. I partly blame it on my limited imagination, but when it fits the conversation it’s interesting to notice how you tell the same thing several times a day. The last couple of days people have been asking me about slack, and I’ve related a story about the pastor that married me and Elin. He was excellent in manage his own time and respected a good slack! Slack, in this context, is the time you get...

When I started my blog, almost 12 years ago, I often wrote posts of things that I would need to look up again. Sure enough, I sometimes stumble into my own posts when searching for solutions to problems I have. This post is one of those posts. I was asked to conduct a survey throughout our department and needed to do some slicing and dicing of the stats. I used Google Forms to collect the data and then did the analysis in Google Sheets. It all came out pretty nice and allowed people throughout the department to drill down into the data in a quick and simple way. I will not talk about the form since that was very easy to set up. Only know that Google Forms store its data in Google Sheets. This means that it’s pretty simple for us to continue to process the data. Also, there’s...

The other day a co-worker (Anders - awesome guy!) pointed me to a change management tool/methodology called Viral Change. I read about it and got quite hooked I have to say, but I’m not yet ready to make a report on how it works or it’s merited. However, in one of the documents I read they made a little remark that I found very interesting as it brushes on many of the problems that I often have when trying to “do” agile or change into agile. This post is about that but I have to give a little backstory and my current understanding of Viral Change. Viral change - my current interpretation Viral Change is a change management methodology and way of viewing change management work. It focuses a lot of networking and peer-to-peer change. They got me right at the start by saying: There’s no real change until we...

I’ve just read a classic. Mark my words - we will mention, refer to and hear a lot about Mark Schwartz great book “A seat at the table”. It’s an amazing book - you have to read it. This book is written in a laid-back, funny and content-packed format and contains useful information for any leader in a modern IT-organisation. I have throughout the book been screaming out loud “YES!”, “Exactly that!” or “Where were you when I was in the meeting last week?!” from the well explained and laid our arguments that Mark presents. The book talks a lot about how the CIO role changes as lean and agile practices are adopted. Practices like DevOps, autonomous squads or automated testing all comes with a change in mindset and culture and this of course needs to be adjusted for in how IT leaders lead their organsiations. I particulary liked the...

Writing a book (psst - there’s another one on its way) has changed many things for me and opens so many doors in my career. But my favorite thing is when I get to talk to people that have read my book, learned something and is applying kanban in their everyday life. Sometimes I get some really insightful and interesting questions. Massimiliano Spolverini, for example, presented me with one of those questions just the other days: I have been reading your book the second time and I have found it brill. Though, there is a doubt playing on my mind which I cannot sort out. The 2nd rule of thumb to find a WIP limit (page 111) explains that when the WIP is set too high, then the team can see some work items not being worked by anybody, which no one is responsible for. On the other side, at...

When I do workshops on kanban/lean I often always include a game, since I think that adds to the experience of the principles I try to teach. One of my favourite is the Number Counting game that I, one very boring day did an animation of in PowerPoint. You can flip through it here: Numbers simulation - less is more! from Marcus Hammarberg This game very clearly illustrates the benefits of limiting work in process as the lead time for all the projects goes way down, as well as the lead time for each individual project. While quality often improves. However, every time I’ve done this exercise I have to resist the urge to throw in a couple of curve balls and changes. I resist it because I think it would be quite hard work and stressful. Now I’ve tested them on myself and I wanted to share the outcomes...