"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...

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...

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:

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.

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Have you ever had a conversation and then a couple of hours later you come up with a much better way of stating your matter or a better phrasing?

This feeling is shown to great effect in “The comeback” episode of Seinfeld.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to have a chat with Woody Zuill over Skype. I was a really nice hour that just flew by, where we exchanged stories, ideas and had a few laughs.

Let me, as a side note, just say that I love that; just exchanging stories with people. I always learn new stuff and quite often stories from my own experience pop back into my memory. This is the best part of conferences - meeting, interacting with others. That’s what I miss the most, being a little sidestepped here in Indonesia. Praise the Lord for Skype and Twitter… ah well for the Internet too (although I’m not entirely sure He had any hands-on action on either of those inventions).

I just thought I summarize some of the things that I took away with me from our conversation.

It was never about the estimates,...

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I’ve just concluded a vacation during which I had time to build a lot of Lego (tm) with my sons. That’s really a lot of fun and very developing for the kids I notice. With my oldest, Albert, we have much fun following description and building the house to the left. My other sons more like to build something that just comes up with the pieces they have in hand.

After sitting with Albert a couple of hours I started to recognise the personality the Lego building brought forth in me; this was coaching-Marcus talking.

I think this is a really good exercise and in this short post I’ll show you a couple things that I noticed and that was very eye-opening for...

The last couple of days I have enjoyed the speed and easy-going-flow that Node, KoaJs and Herkou gives me. It’s truly blows me away and I have been tweeting stuff like:

Once @heroku tool belt is set up the first time deployment is SILLY simple. I’m talking 20 seconds, including #mongodb provisioning #amazed — Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) June 18, 2014

and

Again: From idea (we should put this into prod now) to complete: 25 min. #koaJs #heroku #nodejs Like last time: http://t.co/GSvpuV4xsA — Marcus Hammarberg (@marcusoftnet) June 18, 2014

But… In one regard I have lied. I told Woody Zuill (friend and role model) that I could push to production with a single command. While that was true the command (git push heroku master)...

I’m a programmer. But I, for some strange reason, often find myself doing management consulting on different levels. Since my basic schooling is in programming I sometimes often find myself using principles that works well for programming in management.

One such principle was something I picked up about 10 years ago and I’m still reaching for that everyday. Here’s my current desktop background, showing that principle to me everyday:

This is a so called truism that nobody says again, but I fail to reach just about all the time. I find it very useful as a guiding north star both in organizations and programming. But what does it really mean?

I have the good fortune to coach some managers in my...