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...

I had the opportunity to test my teaching skills to the max, as I got the question if I could come to my son Alberts class, to teach “some programming”. I have taught TDD to kids before, see this long video for the result. But those kids were 3-4 years old. Adding to the challenge was that this was my own sons class and I felt that I had to make him proud as well as fight a bit for being heard. I took on the challenge and it went well, but I thought I’d share some of my preparation and experiences. A few people have asked me privately and I realize that this is a request that many of us in the IT business might get. If you read this you can avoid my problems at least. I’ve always thought that Test Driven Development suits young, experimental mind and...

The good people at Kanbanize invited me to write a guest post on their blog. I accepted and wrote a post on tracking and learning from Queue Length, a topic I picked up from Donald Reinertsen excellent book Principles of Product Development Flow. Go over there and read the post - I’m happy how it turned out. The rest of this post will be very meta… because it will be about how I can write the post on short queue length fast, by having short queue length. When I got the request to write the post I accepted and then Alexander kindly wrote back and gave me long (2 months!) time to write the post. It was at this point I decided to do it right away. I, maybe a bit rude, wrote this back: Hehe - I cannot do that. It doesn’t get easier for me waiting. It’s just...

I agreed to do something a little bit scary, a couple of weeks back. And then it got even more interesting as new information unfolded. My task was to facilitate a retrospective with 5-6 managers across our organization. That was a bit scary - but then I realized that they all were going to be remote. I had never done a remote retrospective before so that made it more interesting. I didn’t do anything particularly revolutionary, but I was happy with the outcome and the format. You might find this useful too - so I thought I’d share it here. Background The thing we were going to retrospect was a process of writing a vision document that spanned many departments and involved many people, during about 3-4 weeks. I was not at all involved in that process, and at first, I thought that it would be a bad thing, for...

I’ve worked in a few places that have had hack weeks or hack days; a simple little thing where the whole company stops for a while and get to spend some time making something that you’re really passionate about. This was first made famous by Google and their Google Time that have produced amazing products like Google Earth and Gmail. (That linked article, by the way, is showing my point of this post with painful clarity) At every place that has had this kind of opportunities and practices I’ve also seen people skipping those days, because: We are too busy Well, that’s cute - but this real work needs to happen now. Not this week, but next. That’s dangerous. Those silly habits are what is building your culture. Without that (where hack week is just an example) you are not you anymore. Aptitud We have these days in Aptitud, the...

Every other day I meet people and organisation that says something along the line of We’re doing agile for some of our work, but other needs waterfall. I’m getting increasingly annoyed with that statement. Waterfall (phases with big batches of work) is always wrong. You should get out of that thinking as fast as possible. Any agile person reading this will not believe it. But believe it. Waterfall is very much alive and being hailed in most many organisations today, in my experience. Especially on the business side of things. And please don’t believe me about this. Take it from an authority. Let’s pick … Dr. Winston Royce. He’s a good pick because he is the guy that coined the term waterfall in the first place. In the seminal “MANAGING THE DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE SOFTWARE SYSTEMS”-paper. Here’s an extract of page 2 (!) This is a diagram that I’ve seen...

I had one of the more intense writing sessions in my life the other day - getting about 17 pages and 6000 words out in 2,5 hours. But that’s not as important, although fun, compared to the quality and how we did it. I’d been coaching and teaching at a company for 4 days straight, meeting ca 200 people from 12-15 teams to talk about their opportunities and challenges to apply agile and lean thinking within their current context and organization. The obvious question on the last day was: Could you just summarise your thoughts for us? Write some ideas for improvements and next step and stuff. So we did. And I heard that the report was well received (hence I presume the quality was adequate), but in this post, I wanted to talk a little bit how we worked to get this down, and why that helped us (me)...

This week have been a long list of firsts for me, as I have been in China (1st time) and done a full week of training and coaching at a remote client (1st) and also been away from my family for a pro-longed week (sadly not first but seldom). I have also signed a lot of books (1st) and I started to come up with some small sentences of wishing good luck and success for the people I signed the book for. Putting them all together they became a nice blessing for people using kanban and lean thinking in their work life. Ah, well others too, of course but they would discover the value of my wishes through some pain. A blessing is a wish for success and well-being in the future and my kanban blessing is just that - some hopes that if they were true would place you...

User story mapping is a very powerful tool by Jeff Patton and I have used it many times in IT context. With a user story map you list the steps of a user journey in your system on top and then list out the details of each of these steps below (see the picture below because this explaination doesn’t really give the tool justice). This is awesome but one of the things that I always gets hanged up on when doing this is the incremental part of fleshing out the details. I wanted to share one situaton when we created an user story map for a very non-IT situation and I learned a bit on what incremental means. Earlier this year my family and I moved to another appartment. As always planning the move is a undertaking of enormous proportions, but I felt that as a agile guy for close...