Frequent releases and no urge to finish

Yesterday we had a couple of very interesting discussions in the team, that got me thinking on being clearer around the purpose of kanban.

In this team we have made a lot of changes lately to try to improve our lead times and throughput. One simple thing that we changed and that made a significant improvement was to simply release more frequently. When I first arrived here the releases were done every 6 weeks. Going to every 4 was just a simple change, and increasing frequency to ever 2 weeks was a very natural next step that no one objected to either.

But then a question came…

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What are you optimized for then?

I was in a couple of very interesting discussions yesterday, through the mean of a SAFe course. Just sitting in the room with your peers and stakeholders, off-site, discussing how to work more effectively is really powerful - it turns out.

“Who knew?”, he exclaimed with some irony in his voice but still some hope and joy.

Ok, in our discussion I, again, ran into the point where I simply don’t understand the reason for organization your company in a certain way.

I just have to write this down, and see if it becomes clearer for me. You can read it too if you want.

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Thoughts after a SAFe course

I’ve been on a SAFe course. I was very interested, because like many people I’ve heard much about this, had opinions on it but haven’t experienced it first hand.

The context of the training was that it was given for my client. Not as “let’s get started with SAFe” but rather to align and give us all a common understanding on nomenclature and concepts.

I wanted to share a few thoughts in this post. If you were looking (or hoping) for a SAFe-bashing by a Kanbanista… Sorry - I’m not that guy. I’m also in way too good mood to bash anything right now.

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The Brickell Key Award - I am nominated!

Something amazing has happened! I am one of 6 nominees to the prestigious Brickell Key Award.

Not in my wildest dream did I think that the kanban community would appreciate things I’ve been involved in enough to nominate me for this award.

You can help my nomination by supporting me in the form on that page.

But first - let me tell you a little bit about why you should do that, and what this price even is and some other questions that might go through your mind.

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ClaudiaJs and console.log

AWS Lambda functions are really great since the server is out of the picture. We don’t really need to care about it, since AWS will handle scaling, patching, starting and stopping for us. It’s just us and our code. Ah bliss!

But wait a second: what if I do a console.log? Where will that be output? There’s no console, since I don’t have a server. Or is it?

Spoiler alert: Claudia got you covered.

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Electronic process management tools - proceed with care

I’m a fan of physical boards. But I have to say: many of the tools I’ve used are amazing (like JIRA, LeanKit etc.) in that they support working with the tool in a great way: shortcuts, intelligent search and great design.

But I can’t get around the fact that I don’t think that they support me and my teams. Already now I can hear defenders of these tool racking up arguments and showing me better ways to do the things that I’ve experienced as problems.

This post is not about that. This problem is about the general notion of any tool has it’s limits and that I run into more of them in electronic tools than I do using physical board.

Also this is my experience - your mileage may vary.

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S, M, L estimate should not start with a date span

Many teams I visit nowadays have ditched story points and start to use Small, Medium, and Large (aka T-shirt sizes) estimation instead. I like that. But very often a smell is creeping into the estimation, removing the “relative” out of “relative estimation”. Here’s how this problem will reveal itself. When someone suggests that you’ll use S, M, and L for your estimates you will soon hear:

Ok - so a S is 1-2 days, M 3-5 and L 5-10 then or what’s the scale?

Don’t do that - it’s the wrong way around. In this post I’ll explain why and what is a better, more trustworthy, candid, and transparent approach.

Why attaching day-span to the estimate is bad

Well, it’s quite obvious isn’t it; doing that (S = 1-2 days) is just giving “1-2” days another name. From that follows “resource-days”, then Gantt Schemes and the suffering...

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