This is another post in the impromptu series “Marcus explains his tweets in more detail”.

In this post I wanted to talk a little realization that I’ve grown into the last couple of years

There are no best practices is knowledge work.Only good practices and context when they apply. Learn principles-adjust and develop practices

— Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) September 23, 2016

It might sound obvious at first (or not) - but I see many signs of that we, especially in the agile community, do the opposite. Let’s see if I can explain my thinking or if I make a fool out of myself - that alone might be worth reading this. Lets go!

I’ve from time to time said things like:

No heroes - is a great starting point to make process improvements

— Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) September 20, 2016

but at the same time I think that it’s a good thing to:

Stand back and let people be awesome

In this post I wanted to try to sort these two separate statements out and see where the common ground for them are.

I’m re-reading the Toyota Kata book right now I had forgotten how much it influenced my thinking. If you haven’t read it - go and do that now. Don’t read this post - read the book. I won’t mind.

Toyota Kata is what the author, Mike Rother, calls the mindset and practices that Toyota employs to get continuous improvement to work. Note that Toyota themselves might not recognize the term Toyota Kata, because it’s just how they do.

The book is filled with wonderful stories that shows clearly about how the Toyota mindset influence every aspect about the continuous improvement work there.

In this post I wanted to relate one such story that I meet so often in my daily work and reason a little bit why Toyota (and other lean organizations of course) navigates out of those problems with ease. Whereas I get stuck again and again.

The other week I attended a course that introduced a lean and agile mindset to a group of leaders in a company. My role was to sit back and observe (and to shoot in some of my experience during the training) - here’s one thing I observed.

At one point in time, after we’ve been through the agile manifesto and the principles, and finally the principles of Lean Software development a high ranking manager next to me raised his voice and said:

This all sounds very good. I buy all of it. Its common sense. But the one thing that I don’t get is why we realize this now. We are doing something very different than this now - have we been stupid before?

The discussion that followed was very fruitful and the people in the room learned a lot. But I wanted to go...

Have you ever said something profound and deep?

No - me neither… or rather not on purpose. Sometimes though, when I look back I both realize that some things I said was actually pretty good - and also that I didn’t really understand it when I said it.

I wanted to share such a moment with you and then explain why I think it was actually pretty good.

In this post I suggest that you should:

Lead like all the people in your team/org/companies are volunteers

I’ve just downloaded and started to read the Imposters Handbook., by Rob Conery. It’s a book about all those things that you don’t want to reveal that you don’t know. I most of them I should know since I have read Computer Science. But I don’t. It’s a great (in all senses of the word ≈500 pages!) read and promise to deliver even better things ahead. Go get yours now!

As I started to read it I heard a familiar voice in my head. Rob Conery’s. And I just realized how much I’ve learned from him.

Before the summer I showed you how to build a Slack bot using Claudia - it’s a very simple ping command that you could run from a Slack-client. However that implementation had a flaw; if the command takes more than 3 seconds to complete it fails.

This has to do with a restriction in Slack that doesn’t allow requests to take more than 3 seconds. In my mind created a super complex and beautiful solution including me handing a message of to a queue and that I then polled and called back to… I ran out of time figuring out.

Which turned out to be a great thing, since the Claudia team not only created a new beautiful site https://claudiajs.com/ but also wrote a tutorial on this exact topic

In this post I will re-implement pingu using a delayed response as in that tutorial.

Since the first time I heard the term mob programming it has intrigued me. I love things that challenges me and me perceptions.

The idea behind mob programming is deceptively simple and yet powerful: have all the team member (3-5 seems most common) working together on one keyboard, one computer and one feature at the time. Or as Woody more eloquently puts it:

All the brilliant people in the same room working at the same problem at the same time

What struck me is that this simple idea solves many problems that I often see teams struggle with.

I’ve written before but never been full time member in a mob. However just before the summer I saw two excellent examples in action, and I have number of friends that have been full time members of a mob for more than a year. My interest with...

About six months ago I got home from the adventure of our life time in Indonesia. At the time I was actually feeling very underwhelmed and that we’ve failed in our work there.

But the more I think about it and the more I speak and write about our experiences there, and especially the mind blowing transformation we led in Rumah Sakit Bungsu - the more I realize that this is an once in a life time thing that have happened.

I’m writing a book about that journey. with my good friends at Oikosofy. But I have also given a few presentations on the topic.

This post is just an update about the progress of the work around the “Salvation Army hospital that rose again” that I’m calling it.

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted:

I'm not far from saying; if your #backlog contains features you've already failed. #impactMapping #userStoryMapping #agile #lean

— Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) June 2, 2016

In this post I will explain what I meant. And also give a suggestion on how to do something better. I know it’s better - I’ve tested it many times. Just this last hour to be exact :)