This will not be an ordinary post. Just a write up of something horrible that happened to us during Christmas. It ends well, but was a horrible time in our lives.

During the Christmas, our family experienced the worst scare and troubled time yet. In Indonesia but also in our lives. It all looks like it will play out alright but many people have asked me to share the story, so I will do that here. If I find the strange I’ll write a follow-up post with some lean-learnings that this could teach us, but not now.

I’m a coach for teams and organizations. At many of my clients I don’t do anything… Or I’m not typing code maybe is a way of formulating it since I’m very much involved in what goes on (and I also want other companies to hire me).

But really I’ve had a hard time to come to grips with what I’m really doing. Many days is just listening (really just that) or maybe make sure that two people talk. Other days it might be sitting down with someone and think. Or redraw a board that we decided to do but everyone found to boring. I’ve also done training, or suggested other trainers to come by or even suggested that we’d just try something new, like mob programming.

But I’m quite often not very busy and when you look back in what is produced it’s hard to see my foot print...

I’ve been re-reading The Goal. For the fourth time. And I still got that buzz from it. It’s such a great book - I recommend it to anyone interested in business and becoming more effective.

The Goal is the best business book I ever read. Re-reading it now, 4th time. Pivotal learnings, great story. Read it now! @GoldrattBooks

The book of course got me thinking waaay to big thoughts for my small head and I went all gaga over it and tried to convince people around me that we need to rethink why we are here etc.

This time however I dared to question the book too. I love it. So much that I think it will take me question it a little bit.

Because there’s one thing in the book that I have a little problem with. And I cannot...

Now, if there ever was a book that filled a need this is it! I cannot count the number of teams and companies that have struggled to get user stories right - this book is packed with practical, solid, experienced based advices on how to improve how you use user stories to your advantage.

Throughout the short book the authors share their vast experience and again and again shows us that user stories is less about the tool and more about the thinking and approach to software development that follows with it.

I like the structure of each idea that gives a background, a rational and some practical advice on how to get started. Add to this the funny, informative and beautiful graphics that accompanies each idea and you end up with just an awesome book.

The book is organized in 5 parts that connects...

I’m waiting at a train station to go back after doing 2 presentations on kanban. It’s super hot, I’m tired and it’s 2 hours to wait before my train, with AC, comes. Perfect time to write a blog post in other words. (I’m also happy, proud and healthy again after my flu - came out a bit pessimistic there for awhile).

One of the things that’s always included in my presentation is a slide that asks for feedback. “I love feedback” is my presenter notes and then I ask the people in the room to give me some.

I have experimented with a few ways to get proper and honest feedback and I wanted to share my latests experiment.

Doing now

What I’ve done up to now is to ask for two different metrics.

ROTI (which in Indonesian means bread… I’ll come back to...

I’ve been very much into Specification by example in my software development consulting. One of the key learnings for me there is to try to make things concrete earlier. Using specification by example we do this by, for each of the features we’re building, sketching down some concrete examples on how that would work.

For example; let’s say that we are building a on-line store and the business rule says Shipping is free for order with 3 items. That’s pretty easy, right? We all have a good opinion on how that rule should be… but is it the same opinion?

When Joakim and I wrote the book we had a chapter on measurement in it, chapter 11 - “Using metrics to guide improvements”. It was intended to show a few ways that metrics can be used in a flow-based process that uses kanban for improvements.

When we wrote it I happened to show it to Torbjörn Gyllebring since he’s very sincere in his criticism. His first words:

You can’t write a word about measurements if you haven’t read “How to measure anything”

When you have not read that book and writing a lot of words on measurements… hearing that has a bit of a “DOH!”-effect on you and your writing. But Joakim had and that made me feel a little better. I was largely satisfied with the chapter too.

But now I have read it and I wanted to share some of the main points that...

Just a short post about data and a common objection. At my current client, we have a lot of data about the customers (patients at a hospital) that we serve each day. We have measured the same way for about 4 months now so it’s pretty accurate.

Lately, I started to see a trend about how the patients are spread. Here’s a typical month. See how the Sundays are really bad (yeah, that’s the super low points). But there’s another trend here. The weeks keep falling - I thought at least. The Mondays are always best and the number of served patients gets lower and lower.

What can we learn from that?

Verification

First, I verified my hypothesis by proper analysis. I created an Excel formula that went through all our data and calculated the average per weekday.

There’s an Excel formula...

I’ve just started to use Jekyll as my blogging engine. It’s mostly nice but I’m getting used to a new tool. And maybe actually the lack of tools since it’s just markdown and git.

One of the things that I found early to be a stumbling block was to create a new post. Since I’m still fresh to the structure of the YAML front-matter, I found myself copying and pasting, missing and misunderstanding.

So I looked for a post generator and found this gist that is used, at the command line, to scaffold up the structure of a new blog post.

Let me show you how I tweaked it and a problem that I ran into, being a newbie.

Tweaking the script

I’m very much a newbie in bash script files so bear with me and please enlighten me if this can be better.

First of all,...

The “Stop starting - start finishing” slogan has been the call to action for Kanban practitioners for a long time. In Stockholm, there’s even a conference each year named just that. And we used it as our first picture in the book.

It’s a great saying and teaches us a lot, and lately, I’ve got a new practical experience of the implications of “stop starting - start finishing”.

The meaning of “Stop starting - start finishing” to me, is like a guiding star and policy that we agree on in the team or in the company: here we try to complete things before we start new things.

I think it was Karl Scotland who said it like this:

“It’s not the more we start the more we finish - it’s the more we finish the more we finish.”

The...