I recently returned from three days of coaching at Nintex in Kuala Lumpur. During this time, I had the opportunity to work with six teams consisting of 40 people. What struck me most during this experience was the level of trust Nintex showed in me. Despite the inability to micromanage my coaching, they placed their trust in my expertise. This trust is foundational for effective coaching and collaboration.

One topic we discussed extensively was the concept of “Order Point,” a key element in the Kanban methodology for replenishing backlogs just-in-time. Unlike traditional approaches such as planning at the start of an iteration (common in Scrum), the Order Point enables teams to dynamically manage their workload based on demand.

Understanding Order Point

The Order Point, as described in Kanban In Action, serves as a signal to replenish the backlog when it reaches a predetermined threshold. This threshold, illustrated...

I’m reading Reinventing Organizations right now and it’s an inspiring read to say the least. Finally someone puts words and structure to what I’ve tried to do, achieve and explain to others.

And the stories about the self-organization, trust-embracing, hierarchy-demolishing, performance-through-the-roof, best-place-to-work-organizations are truly truly amazing.

I’ve several times wiped tears from my face reading these stories. Not because it’s so great but because it comes down to trusting the people in the organization. As one founder of such organization puts it when he describes his organization FAVI:

The organization that believes that mankind is good

I don’t care what they are doing - I want to work there. I know I can belong! Luckily I work for a company, Aptitud, that strives towards this.

But what is common for these organizations?

Mind you I’ve only read 1/3 of the book… this might be answered later and then...

My favorite thing with blogging is the feedback I get. In fact; that’s the reason I blog. There. I’ve said it. I love to see many read my stuff and get back to me with questions and suggestion. I’m not even ashamed to say so.

Sometimes people even ask me to blog about something. I really love that, even though I’ve have to find time to do so. I got a very nice comment from James Gardner asking me to blog a little more about supertest.

He specifically asked me to show how to “split test into separate files for big APIs”, so I’ll do that in this post.

But that sprung a few ideas about things that I’ve started to use a lot and I thought I’ll do a little mini-series here. Here are some posts I have in mind:

• Splitting API over several files -...

Yes, it’s another post on change management. As a consultant … well that’s basically your job. And most of my engagements are of consultancy type. But change management is very trick to do right, frustrating and … simply wonderfully rewarding if you get it to work.

Sadly this post is describing my frustrations rather than a “one size fit all situation” solution. Of course, since those solutions don’t really exists in reality. Where I work.

I wanted to share a thought that went through my head one day when I was particular frustrated. And then tell you why it was stupid and how I now changed my thinking about this problem / situation.

Yes - it will be great fun. Mmmmmm frustration…

Just kidding but I will try to write this so I can use it as a nice reminder post for when I fall into this reasoning again. Maybe...

I’m starting to realize that the biggest advantage I, personally, will get from my three years in Indonesia is a lot of experience in change management, under some extreme conditions. As I’ve blogged about, twice, I am now in a culture where questioning is not done. It’s not encourage, not praised, not sought for etc. You simply don’t do it.

Again please don’t read that as I think that they are stupid or ignorant - it’s just their culture. There’s a lot of strange things going on in our culture too. Just step outside your own box and you’ll see it.

In fact; that’s what this post is about; stepping out of my box. A simple question that I’ve found very valuable for me to understand “them”.

Getting to the point

First let’s get back to my intro a bit. I think that everything I’ve...

One of the things that I’ve been told that upset me the most during the last couple of years was this sentence:

Please don't question the process

Instead of going angry and rant about the stupidity of that I’d thought about the opposite. Or what I’d want to do. If I ever get to hire people to a company I will tell them, on their first day:

Please question the process. This is only as good as we've got so far. In fact - one of the big reasons you are here is to make us better. You cannot do that without questioning and challenging the current state.

If you ever feel that something could be done better or in another way - please say so.

Please question the process means that we are humble about that we are not the best we will ever be. It also sends a...

I’ve been writing quite a lot of Koa applications, but most of them have been small. Now I’m doing a little bit bigger website. It consists of three parts:

• A public site that is just static html, served with static-now. The site will do API calls back to the server for the content.
• An administration site for administration of the text content of the site. This will be based on my example koa example blog
• An API serving the content from use form the static site.

Absolutely nothing humongous but still big enough that you need to think about application structure a little bit.

That’s when I came to think about koa-mount. In this post I wanted to show you what I’ve learned about this powerful little middleware, at the heart of Koa thinking.

Last autumn I met one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto in real life. At the Agile Singapore conference.

I didn’t think much about that until he (James Grenning) mentioned it in the beginning of one of his talk. He told some anecdotes about that meet-up. In honestly so would I if I was at that weekend in Snowbird.

There I was. Also a speaker at this conference half-around the world. Working with management for the Salvation Army in Indonesia, being invited to the conference since I’ve written a book on Kanban.

The last 10 years of my career has been involving agile in one way or the other on a daily basis. And evolving me for the better, mostly daily.

You know where this is going: I just had to thank him.

In a previous post, I explored the concept of a world without WHY in Indonesian culture. Reflecting on my experiences in Indonesia, I delved into the challenge of motivating individuals in a culture that often lacks a clear sense of purpose. Building upon those insights, I aim to share practical strategies for motivating individuals within this context.

Before we proceed, it’s essential to acknowledge the following:

• My observations are based on close to 1.5 years spent in Indonesia, interacting with various individuals.
• Indonesia is a diverse country, with significant disparities in wealth, education, geography, and culture.

While I may make generalizations, they are rooted in my personal experiences. Any shortcomings or inaccuracies in my observations stem from this context.

However, studying Indonesian culture has provided valuable insights into my own culture. Many phenomena observed here mirror aspects of Swedish culture, albeit to a lesser extent.

Let’s delve...

I’ve been diving into io.js recently for reasons that will soon become clear. In doing so, I’ve used my favorite Node version manager, Node Version Manager, to handle different versions of Node.js and io.js.

Switching between versions is straightforward, but occasionally I end up running code on a version of Node/io.js that the code doesn’t support. For instance, running EcmaScript 6 let statements in Node.js.

I hoped for a warning or even an error to alert me to this mismatch, but none appeared. So…

In this post, I’ll explain how to use the package.json file to get warnings and errors when running code on an unsupported version of the framework.