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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Where I currently work there’s been a problem with budgets for traveling. And another with authority. Which basically mean that the people that I’m here to try to help will not get my help; there’s no money to travel there and I have no authority, which is basically a deal-breaker in Indonesia.

What to do? Well, since I grow bored very fast without anything to do I tried to find a way.

I started a series of presentations about the topic I wanted to talk with “my clients” about, recorded them and uploaded to YouTube. I even made extra effort to do great subtitles, in two languages, just to increase the chance that they will understand me.

Before anyone tells me; yes - I know that this is maybe the worst possible way of making sure that you get an important message across to someone that needs it....

This post is brought to you in cooperation with… just kidding.

The other day, I took my kids to McDonald’s here in Bandung. For some reason, it’s still a cause for celebration for them. “Yay! Soft burgers with hard-pressed meat!” And me? Well, I’m happy when they’re happy.

As I stood in line, I noticed a problem: the queue of customers kept piling up, but no one was getting served. Being the analytical type, I tried to dissect the situation and realized that a McDonald’s restaurant is actually a great way to explain flow.

In this post, I’ll attempt to elucidate what I mean.

One peculiar thing I noticed was that there were people at every cash register, feverishly taking orders and fetching drinks. But still, no one was getting served.

Instead, we all stood around the counter waiting, inadvertently blocking access for other customers. The cashiers kept taking orders,...