A few months back I blogged about the practice of big room planning made famous by SAFe (™) through their Product Increment planning session.

For the record I still think it’s a great event and every time we have run it we have come out the other end in a more aligned, enlightened and excited state than when we went in. And for the record I still think it’s just a phase in our process improvement that we should move away from, in a suitable pace.

I’ve been running 3 or 4 big room planning sessions now and I’m starting to see pattern of what bites us the most and what is the foundation of being successful in these session.

In this post I wanted to share the top 3-4 (there might be few slipping in there) things that I’ve found paramount in order to have...

I’m very proud of my church (or corps as we say in the Salvation Army - the Vasa Corps of Stockholm. The moment I came there I felt right at home and I’m more than happy to, voluntary, spend a lot of my leisure time in the different groups of the church.

About a month ago I heard someone, that is new to our congregation, say something that summarised a lot of the spirit in the church:

Here people are saying kind things about each other

That did not only make me feel very proud and happy, but also signals a culture that holds true for many of the great place I’ve been working in or associated with.

A daily stand-up is a really common and very good practice among many agile teams.

It was popularized by Scrum but is very useful in almost any setting.

Over the last 4-5 years I’ve seen how many of the initial practices and recommendation have change a bit. For me the primary factor for these changes has been the focus on flow.

In this post I wanted to share a few of the things I’ve seen changed and also a reason as to why. There’s a sentence in this post that (almost) got me fired … so this will be valuable for us all, so that we don’t end up in that situation again.

The other week I saw the most amazing transformation of a person I’ve seen in a few years. The number one spot is taken by Ibu Elsye.

As many of the other times I’ve seen changes like these I realize that the transformation, as well as the state before and after, are solely (not largely, but solely) created by the system we create for people.

I’ll elaborate on that as soon as I’ve described the change that I saw.

We had a process improvement discussion the other day in one team I’m working with now and we realized that we were actually would slow down our process a bit now, but in the long run gain flow.

I asked the team to design their work to help us flow better, but it would of course, initially increase, the workload. Basically we would increase work in process, which of course felt strange for everyone, not at least me… since I was the one recommended.

In this post I wanted to explain why this can sometimes be a good idea and hopefully give you some ideas as to when this can be a useful option.

My current team have a practice to do something “learning, inspiring and future-leaning” on every other Friday. We called it LAME (Learning Afternoon Mob Experience) since we started to run it on Friday afternoons first, but have recently changed into running it for a full day every other week.

The other week we decided to give TankWars a go. It great fun and educational, and I got to observe an interesting phenomena about learning and feedback.

One of the things that many agile approaches, that I’ve been involved in or nearby, get stuck on is the role of the Product Owner. The role simply doesn’t sit right in bigger organisations. I think there are many reasons for that and I will share a few in this post.

I also wanted to share an unlikely but great example of a great product owner that I met at my current client.

Finally I will share some ideas on how to remedy the problems often found around the product owner role in big organisations (where I mostly worked).

But first let’s meet a great product owner.

Ten years ago today I started this blog.

I really can’t believe that sentence just looking at it. But during that time I’ve learned so much by putting my understanding into words and out on the internet that I really cannot value the experience of having a blog enough.

In this post I wanted to share a few highlights from the 1066 posts (including this) I’ve written and all the stories and relations it has created.

From time to time we might end up with policies and ways of working that just seems like it’s “the way we do things here”. It can be tooling, procedures and even contractual policies but also many of the practices that we take for granted in agile and lean software development; stand ups, boards or user stories.

I’ve found that thinking outside of the context that we have created for ourselves is often very hard, and I am the first one to default to things that worked for me before.

In this post I wanted to introduce you to two questions and thoughts that helped me pushed me out of my comfort zone and let me ponder;

Is this really important? For who?

I’ve just completed my first ever big room planning meeting (a type of exercise made famous by SAFe in their PI Planning). That was quite an excerises and I’m totally worn out. But also immensely impressed by the team and the amount of learning that took place in the room today.

It was quite noisy at times but after 8 hours we went home with our sights aligned and a much better feel for what we will do the upcoming period (5 weeks in our case).

Still I could not get one thought out of my head. It stuck there a few days back and won’t get unjammed:

This big room planning stuff is really an anti-pattern and should be eliminated

In this post I want to explain why and also tell you why I still think it was great.