M: “… hahaha, exactly. And speaking of RT*M, you know what I did yesterday?”
H: “No, but I like it already. Tell me more.”
M: “So I wanted to whip out a fast little Koa site. It’s sooo good for those”
H: “Yeah, I know. You told me like a million times.”
M: “Ok… sorry. Off to the terminal I went and went through the usual steps:”
mkdir newAwesomeApp cd newAwesomeApp git init npm init npm install koa koa-route --save touch app.js
H: “Dude, is this a screen cast or are you going to tell me something interesting already?”
M: “Well hang on for just a few seconds more. I wrote my first simple route, to verify it. And I’m glad I did”
var app = require("
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How we created the need for an emergency lane
In my last post I told you about some practices and policies around emergency lanes. Today, when I visited my client I realized that we, ourselves, had created the need for them. That’s great news because that means that we can also take that need away.
Let me explain what I mean.
The board that my client, a hospital, have doesn’t really look like your normal kanban board, we saw another need here. It’s also in Indonesian but don’t worry, I’ll walk you through it. Here is how the board looked a couple of weeks ago.
- The board has 4 lanes
- The top 2 lanes are for bigger projects that will run for considerable time, up to 6 months
- The lower 2 lanes are called “Perbaikan” or “Improvements” and is used for smaller things that we want to improve...
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Things I say often: I don't care about efficiency
I’ve talked more about effectiveness vs efficiency than you all care about. The reason for this fascination might be that the word is mixed up in Swedish I guess; there’s only one word for these both concepts. Boooh… Swedish.
Because the difference is paramount.
In the excellent book the Goal Dr Goldratt puts it like this:
Productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is
This is the same thing. I hear many people talking about efficiency, or that we should become both effective and efficient and yes, but all means, become efficient. BUT don’t speak another word about that until we all have a shared view on what the goal is. Without a clear goal - there can be no effectiveness. And then efficiency is pointless, as Dr Goldratt said.
My favorite explanation for the difference of effectiveness and efficiency makes this very clear;
Usian Bolt...
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Emergency lanes - some tips
One of the things that first made kanban known and loved was the introduction of emergency lanes. Or at least the lack of fixed scope for a sprint where sudden urgent work items was hard to handle in other methods.
Many kanban boards have an emergency lane. However often I see it abused (or being feared to be abused) and hence it will not be as useful as it could be. It’s a really great tool, both for “product owners” and the team alike. In this post I wanted to share some policies that I’ve found useful to manage emergency-lanes (or equivalent).
Emergency lanes
The rationale behind having a emergency lane is that sometimes works comes in that is truly is an emergency and it then feels a bit strange to put it a Todo-column and wait until it’s time for it.
Emergency is emergency. And...
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