There is an old saying – An Agile Transformation is easy, you only have to change two things: Everything you say, and everything you do. But actually, as obvious as that joke was, it is also wrong. You only need to change one thing, you need to change the way you think. Project or Product […]
The last few months have been pretty busy for me and so I have dropped out of the online community for a while. Over the Christmas break I had some free time and so I ventured back in, caught up on some reading and tried to get a feel for the common issues of the […]
I recently presented at a conference on the topic of Work in Progress (WiP) limits, and in particular Little’s law. As part of I gave a demonstration and from it drew the conclusion that WiP limits have no direct bearing on velocity. This caused some controversy so I’ll try to explain again here. Applying Little’s […]
After [reading / posting] a recent article on waste, (read it here), someone asked me why we shouldn’t do work that we will need later if it is more efficient to do it now? You have already dug the hole—doesn’t it make sense to do all the work in that area together? This is very […]
I have a theory that in the context of self-organizing teams in a business environment, there are zones of diminishing responsibility and thus the effectiveness of self organization as the tasks get further from the perceived core purpose of the team or individual. That is to say that a self-organizing software development team may have […]
I found a number of quotes from a popular writer and favourite of Julius Caesar :- Publilius Syrus that I thought were so appropriate to Agile thinking today, it is fascinating how these lessons have existed for millennia and yet we still frequently fail to follow what would seem to be common sense. Here are […]
In the context of Lean manufacturing there have been numerous studies that estimate that the proportion of value adding time in a production cycle is around 5%. The other 95% is deemed to be waste. These studies also conclude that by far the biggest waste is overproduction. Anecdotally I think it is a very similar […]
Which do you use and Why? I have already blogged about some common metrics but here are ten that I use or have used most frequently. It is my aim to summarise them here and expand each in greater detail over the next few weeks. (I will come back and add links as I do) […]
A Product Owner, or development team will often be asked for an estimate or a forecast for a product; a feature; an iteration; or a story. But when you go to a team member and ask them it is not uncommon for the colour to drain from their face, twitching to start, and their pulse to race. […]
There are two ships travelling a busy shipping route, each ship has a complex engine and the engineering team has a chief engineer. Both ships are a similar age and size. The first ship has a very busy chief engineer running this way and that, fixing any and every problem that comes up, he knows […]
I have been to a retrospective workshop this week and I really enjoyed it, I have been facilitating retrospectives for a while, and I’ve read some of the books (remind me to write a blog about recommended reading sometime). Anyway, you get the idea, I’ve been there and got the T-shirt etc. So what value […]
I found a number of quotes from a popular writer and favourite of Julius Caesar :- Publilius Syrus Here are some of his maxims: On agility in planning: “It is a bad plan that cannot be altered.” On commitments: “Never promise more than you can perform. “ On quality: “Nothing can be done at once […]
