At my current “client” we have been employing a lot of activities to increase the number of customer we serve per day. I’ve blogged about this before. Now it turns out that we have succeeded. The customers are pouring in. And the staff finds themselves with much more work than they have experienced in about 5 years. Yesterday was our best day so far and it was amazing to see the difference from a normal day; Everyone was moving fast - compared to sitting around waiting Everyone was focused - compared to not really knowing what to do Everyone was excited - compared to disillusioned and bored Everyone was tired after the day - compared to feeling tired of boredom | | |:———————————————————————————————————————–:| | | | From Wikipedia | In the daily morning meeting the day after (today) we saw that people was tired and thought it was very stressful...

To many of my colleagues and friends writing a book is at the top of the dream list or life goals. I have been very fortunate to have done that, but quite honestly I never even dreamt that I would do it. Or that someone thought that what I had to say was interesting enough to read it. Maybe should have realised that after 500.000 views on this blog but still... Ok, something really strange have now happened. I have been published again. The book is called Architect book which is even more strange, since I don't consider myself an architect. At least not on the levels that this book is about. I was invited to write a chapter about Specification By Example about a years ago. That was very busy time of my life since I was finishing up Kanban In Action, or at least going through the gruesome and long review-process....

Here in Indonesia most companies and organizations have some kind of uniform or at least very strict dress code. For example where I work, the Salvation Army, we have Salvation Army uniform on Mondays and Tuesdays, a set batik shirt on Wednesdays, “pick your own batik” on Thursdays and training clothes on Fridays. Here’s a collage for you to feast your eyes on be scared by; showing some of those shirts: I must say… most of these shirts I’ve found really silly and ugly. The don’t sit right on me. I feel awkward. Let me show you another uniform: What kind of circus-uniforms am I looking at?! I would never put that on. I'd feel like a magician from the 60-ies. Finally let show you a picture: Eeeh, crappy written ... arabic? Well first I haven't got a clue what it says. Or means. Secondly... please can we color within...

If I don’t write this down I will forget it before the end of the day. That right there was the reason I started my blog, ca 900 posts ago. A couple of days ago I was, again, creating a big diagram on a whiteboard. This particular one was pretty high and a lot of data points had to go into it. It turned out to be hard and messy to both update and read. I have done this so many times that I've lost count. I never found a great solution. I don't want to use a small A3 report because I want everyone to see it. And I don't want to print a big A1 sheet every day, because it's to expensive. And I don't want to use a projector because this needs to be physical and tangible. And in front of everyone everyday. Someone suggested to print...

By Ben Currington used under Creative Commons Have you ever try to lift a piano? If you have I bet you have the same experience as me; you go up to the piano and take a good hold and … nothing. It’s like it’s bolted to the floor, or something (oddly enough my exact words the first time I tried to lift a piano). This is impossible. We will never make it. But you get one more guy and then you make another try. Maybe if someone could just slid a mat underneath … And you try again. 1…2…3… and … IT MOVED! Right there! That split second is my favorite feeling in the whole world. Trying really hard, and get the first little sign of that your efforts are in the right direction. When IT MOVED! It of course doesn’t only applies to pianos or not even physical effort but...

"Fry complaining" by Umberto Salvagnin, under Creatives Common - As agile and lean practitioners, why do we always focus on the negative? “It’s managements fault”, “This needs to go faster”, “The quality is substandard”, “You don’t use TDD” … tell me when to stop… Because that where we have “unrealised improvement opportunities”, dummy! But it’s not very attractive and makes our “sell” much harder. Yeah, but it sucks! So it needs to be improved Is there maybe another way to say that so that the receivers doesn’t feel that they suck? Maybe… but it’s very much up to them. They still suck, are they ready to hear it or not? Also, I’m not actually telling them that they suck, of course. I just tell them that “we’re looking for better”. But that means that we’re never satisfied. No exactly! I’m never satisfied. Sucks to be there… No highs… never content with where you...

My good friend and cowrite Joakim Sundén has taught a great deal about agile and lean… and a whole bunch of other things too. One thing that he said, early in my journey, that I didn’t fully believe was: It’s always interesting to see the spontaneous discussions that appear around a kanban board (or other visualisation)… after the meeting (Not the exact quote, because that would be much more well put and eloquent but still…). So Joakim says that just by having a visualisation in place discussions arises. For example, after the daily standup around the board, people linger and discuss about the state of the board, about improvements or other work related things. Have you experienced that? I have. Often. Very often in fact. But not always. In this post I’ll outline a few things that in my experience makes these conversations happen more frequently and some words on how...

David J Andersson (the father of kanban in the software community) has taught me a lot, and that's probably an understatement too. Because I've learned immensely from him. One of the best hands-on tricks that he taught me was really just one sentence. And I'm not sure he meant to say it at that point, but it's proven invaluable for me: > "Ask a simpler question!" The longer version is something like: "If you find that you don't get the answers you want try to ask a simpler question". I think this is a general great tip that can be applied in all kinds of situations and contexts, but in this post I wanted to tell you about how I just did that in order to get an entire company to understand their situation and starting to move towards something *better* (whatever that means, I'll talk about that too). I've been working for...

How’s that for a little topic to clear out in a blog post? I promise this will be just a short thought… even though the title promise more of a book. Well, after the last couple of weeks at my work I just wanted to write down a thought that I keep coming back too. I’m very proud to be part of the Salvation Army and right now we have a world wide leader (aka The General) that I think talks about a lot of good things. Here’s video with his latests message: I like this message for a number of reasons, but the part that stands out for me is "We know we are not perfect. We **want** to become better. We start Now!" I like that kind of transparency and humbleness. The keyword in the message is Accountability. I have a bit of a hard time with that...

Have you noticed that people and organisations that are great have a lot of luck? And the opposite is also true: a poorly managed companies are unluckier. In my experience. Now, I don’t think luck has anything to do with it (no - this is not a post about my Christian faith, please contact me for that :)). Which is good news; because that means that we can control it, do something about it. I’ll share a few stories and then some thoughts in this post. Example 1 - Clarinet players I had the good fortune to do my military service in the Royal Swedish Army Band (1992 version) and playing there had a great influence on my musical life. I also got to meet some amazing musicians and some of them went on to great heights. | | |:———————————————————————————————————————————————————————–:| | | | Nothing to do with Kristian | I’m...