Got a question in an email the other day, asking some advice. Nowadays when that happens I ask permission to publish the answer here to not waste keystrokes into the email-bin.

The question was from my friend Jonas, that works in a start-up that is growing rapidly. He kindly granted me permission to answer here. He was asking this (my translation):

We are on the brink of a substantial expansion and I was wondering if I could pick your brain on experiences and best practices for how to organize a team of developers.

We’re thinking about a team of 4-6 people that has responsibility for a specific part of the product. What roles and responsibilities should be in, or out, of the team?

And in a follow-up mail:

In particular, the product owner role and what that role does and doesn’t do. I like the PO...

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.

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.

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 summarize 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 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 #backlog
99 tickets of work
Take 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 says
98 tickets of work left in the backlog

15 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...

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!

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.

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.

Recently, I had the pleasure of delving into a modern classic: Mark Schwartz’s “A Seat at the Table”. Let me tell you, it’s a must-read.

Engaging with readers of my book (another one in the works) has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my career shift. The questions and discussions that arise often lead to insightful reflections. Recently, Massimiliano Spolverini posed a thought-provoking query:

In your book, the second rule of thumb for determining WIP limits suggests that setting WIP too high can result in idle work items. However, later, the approach of gradually decreasing WIP (the “Drop down and give me 20” experiment) implies that if too many work items are idle, one should revert to a higher WIP limit. Isn’t this contradictory?

In this post, I aim to address Massimiliano’s question and provide clarity on this matter, acknowledging that there’s no singular answer but rather a spectrum of considerations.

Setting the Context

The chapter in question, Kanban In Action chapter 6, delves into the significance of...