I’m a big fan of Keynote and use that to create all of my presentations. Although I try to keep the number of animations down to a minimum, since I think they take a lot of focus from the content, I find that a few, well placed, animations can be very effective. In one of my recent presentation I found the “need” to do a movie credits animation. You know like the thing that rolls in the end credits after a movie or TV-show. First I thought that I’d seen that exact animation, but it turned out to be in iMovie. A search on the intertubes didn’t give me much useful either. But it turned out to be pretty simple to do. In this post I’ll show you how TL;DR Basically we will just use the “Move” Action for our block of text, move it over the entire screen, slow...

Throughout all the things I’ve talked about in this series; mission, vision, strategic plans and kanban there’s a underlying concept. We want to improve. We want to be better in achieving our vision. If you want to improve you will have to be great in fixing problems. Not only fixing the problems but the actual underlying reason for the problem to occured in the first place. Root cause analysis is a powerful tool for doing that. This is what I talk about in this presentation. Here’s all the post in the series (the links will work as I post them): ca 10 minutes on Mission statements ca 10 minutes on Vision statements ca 15 minutes on Strategic plans ca 15 minutes on Impact mapping ca 15 minutes on kanban ca 10 minutes on root cause analysis (this post) ca 10 minutes on effective meetings Please read the reason and ideas...

Sometimes people email questions to me, directly. I love that (although I sometime need to postpone the answering for awhile) because it gives me such nice insight into how other teams work and function. Basically: I learn more and as you can see from the tag line of this blog… I’m into learning stuff. The other day I got a question that I’ve heard before in variants. It’s also very reasonable and a bit complicated to answer: “How big is a work item really?” I also got permission to publish the whole question and my answer here. Here’s the question from their email: We use the Jira platform for managing tickets and are using the in-built kanban board for the same. I would like to know how we can manage Subtasks within Change Requests. Would it be a good practice to have Change Requests and have subtasks in them? Or...

I hear more and more about Elixir from some people that I really trust and respect. That means checking-out-new-technology-time for Marcus. Luckily installing Elixir on Os X (Yosemite 10.10, that I’m running) is super simple with Homebrew: brew update brew install elixir Or is it … Not for me as it turns out. I hope you had a better fate. This is my story. Becasue when that was all done I ran elixir -v to check my version number and got: "{"init terminating in do_boot",{undef,[{elixir,start_cli,[],[]},{init,start_it,1,[]},{init,start_em,1,[]}]}}" In the output from Homebrew I saw just a little warning but nothing that was particularly scary. So I did what every professional programmer does; searched the Internets. And on GitHub I found this issue for Elixir, which sounds exactly like that I was looking for. Yak-shaving: Erlang Ok… it seems like my version of Erlang, since Elixir “leverages the Erlang VM” was out of...

I tweeted this the other day: I think will start to help only the organisations and people that actually wants help. #proTip— Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) June 15, 2015 I continued to think a bit about that, especially after a little bit depressing response I got. What would the opposite to that be? Help those that doesn’t want help. How stupid doesn’t sound? Or “Don’t help those that want help.” I don’t know how much time and effort I’ve spent on the opposite. Trying to convince people that they need to change, when they don’t want too. Or forcing (yes, sorry … they told me to) a new process or methodology on team who were quite content with their ways and procedure. Why do we do these things? How can anyone be this stupid? In many cases I’ve got my instructions from high ranking managers… are they particular insensitive or have...

In this presentation I break it down to the day-to-day management of a project or team. How can we keep our focus? How can we improve? How do we even know what we are doing right now? As no surprise to to readers of this blog this will be accomplished with kanban. Here’s all the post in the series (the links will work as I post them): ca 10 minutes on Mission statements ca 10 minutes on Vision statements ca 15 minutes on Strategic plans ca 15 minutes on Impact mapping ca 15 minutes on kanban (this post) ca 10 minutes on root cause analysis ca 10 minutes on effective meetings Please read the reason and ideas behind the entire series in the first post. It was quite a challenge and very interesting to not only boil this topic down to a digestible format (ca 15 minutes), but also steer...

Having your mission, vision and strategy in place are essential but result in nothing, if you can’t make sure that you execute them. Can’t make sure that you take steps in your strategic plan to get closer to the vision. One of the best tools I’ve seen around this, on the strategic level, is called Impact Mapping. This presentation is devoted to this tool Here’s all the post in the series (the links will work as I post them): ca 10 minutes on Mission statements ca 10 minutes on Vision statements ca 15 minutes on Strategic plans ca 15 minutes on Impact mapping (this post) ca 15 minutes on kanban ca 10 minutes on root cause analysis ca 10 minutes on effective meetings Please read the reason and ideas behind the entire series in the first post. In this presentation I try to be very practical, as opposed on the...

This is the third presentation I’ve done on mission, vision and strategic plans (and other stuff too). The time has come to strategic plans. A strategic plan outlines our ideas, suggestions and plans for taking us from where we are today to … closer to the vision. Here’s all the post in the series (the links will work as I post them): ca 10 minutes on Mission statements ca 10 minutes on Vision statements ca 15 minutes on Strategic plans (this post) ca 15 minutes on Impact mapping ca 15 minutes on kanban ca 10 minutes on root cause analysis ca 10 minutes on effective meetings Please read the reason and ideas behind the entire series in the first post. First of all I realized that we often miss the “where we are today” part of doing a strategic plan, so I have a little discussion about that in the...

This is the second post about my presentation series on Mission, Vision and Strategy and some other things. In this post I will hook you up with my presentation on Vision statements. Here’s all the post in the series (the links will work as I post them): ca 10 minutes on Mission statements ca 10 minutes on Vision statements (this post) ca 15 minutes on Strategic plans ca 15 minutes on Impact mapping ca 15 minutes on kanban ca 10 minutes on root cause analysis ca 10 minutes on effective meetings Please read the reason and ideas behind the entire series in the first post. Vision statements paint a picture of a future where we are executing the Mission perfectly. This is why it’s important to understand and have a great mission statement - that makes creating the vision statement more concrete and a bit easier. With a great vision...

My main task here in Indonesia is to help our hospital to work out good strategic plans. It’s a very interesting task since long-term strategies seems to not be very prominent in the Indonesia culture. There’s also a translation issue about the word itself, Misi (mission), apparently have a different meaning for Indonesians that I use it. In this presentation I clarify how I use the word: as the reason for an organization to exists - our purpose. Here’s all the post in the series (the links will work as I post them): ca 10 minutes on Mission statements (this post) ca 10 minutes on Vision statements ca 15 minutes on Strategic plans ca 15 minutes on Impact mapping ca 15 minutes on kanban ca 10 minutes on root cause analysis ca 10 minutes on effective meetings Please read the reason and ideas behind the entire series in the first...