Mattias Skarin

If you prefer this as an article – you can download it here.

What is continuous improvement?

Continuous improvement always starts by observing previous results. That is our baseline for improvements forward on. We strive to improve steadily, a little at a time – 10% is great! But first step is always to accept the facts, regardless if we would have liked it to be better.  It is way too easy to sweep failed projects under the carpet rather than used as a baseline for improvements forward on. A mistake easily made is to base improvements on dream targets rather than previous results, it is hard to learn something from failure to meet those targets.

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Aaaaaah…  Nice. *Dumdi dum di dum*   .. what? Ah! I can walk around and pull from the other side!  *clever* 🙂   Darn! Not always easy being a kanban coach 🙂

Hi! Just back from a great conference – LKCE 2012 –  and a great town – Vienna. A really cool thing was the illustrator who worked around the clock to visualize how he interpreted the difference presentations. He did a great job (see below). What would you do – learning from charts I challenge the

I got a number of questions recently in how we at Crisp work with changes. So I decided to write it down. Here’s how we think and coach change 🙂 Cheers /Mattias

The safety belt is off.  Focus is intense.  Standup?  Tdd?   Rubbish!  Crisp hack day! 🙂

I got the chance to meet Luke, the founder of innovation games this week. I find his view refreshing – humans are basically creative. We need to provide the platform for ideas to emerge. Some of my reflections after listening to the stories: It’s serious play, these games shape the outcome of of real products

  Just finished my session at SDC 2012 where I’m arguing for less hierarchy and economically aligned decision rules that  enables local teams to do tradeoffs.  Mary Poppendieck commented it as “traditional product management”.  Maybe that’s where we are heading 🙂 Anyway, here are the slides

Not long ago I met with a manager who during a discussion ruled out the possibility of success of a solution. I was a bit surprised and afterwards asked why that was not doable. It turned out one of the reasons was the managers fear the team would kick off with unrealistic expectations and leave 

Last month market the launch of the Kanban Accreditation scheme.  Let’s give our view including why we have chosen to engage ourselves as members of the advisory board.

Why the Kanban accreditation scheme?
Kanban is a word that needs meaning. So what meaning do we want people to connect with the word? This matters (to us..) . Stumbling upon about kanban classes declaring it will help you “resource optimize”  it makes me think there is a need. (To any unfamiliar reader.. kanban helps you improve flow, quite a different thing..)

Any accredited class will contain some core messages that we care to share. The best way we could think of to make sure that messages is good was to engage ourselves in the process 🙂

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Hi! Tim Yevgrashyn has made an amazing job translating my 10 kanban board article (included poorly crafted English 🙂 into Russian. Thanks! It is available here! I did study Russian once, but it’s a far cry now from where I left it. Proud over:  Once fooling a guard at the Kremlin tickett stand that I

I’ve updated the ol’ 10 kanban board samples.  Some additions: From marketing to released product – sample kanban board Release manager kanban Operations – online platform maintenance You’ll find the kanban samples here. /Mattias ps: new link! If you get “file is damaged” – try to reload page once.

Back from Zurich. I presented at the ReForum, a gathering for requirement engineers and product owners, arranged by SAQ. My topic was “Exploring requirement options with kanban” and more specific, what you can do if you do have a more complex development scenario (ie. large customer base, not just one team..) I always enjoy coming

Hi! Just back from Devcon11 where I presented on techniques to improve flow. There is plenty to say here so had to limit the material in some way. Hope to come back to this subject again in the future. Anyway, here are the slides

I’ve been thinking lately about the effects of transparency and information on decision making. After observing situations like:

• Teams flooded with report requests
• Costly measurements requests, but without explanation of why they are requested
• Holding back decisions in wait for complete information (even though just enough information seems to be present)

I’ve have wondered if more information can actually delay your decision making and what is really required to make correct decisions.

In short: More options can actually impair your decision making (more likely for inexperienced people). Experienced people are more likely to make the right decisions even in situations with incomplete information.

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You can embrace lean in different ways. You can make use of Lean tools, you can attend lean courses and you can embrace Lean values  (Toyota production system “TPS”  to be correct).

But how do you know you are a Lean organisation?

1. You define value from the eyes of the end customer
2. You have a value stream/process to deliver this
3. Management is continuously decreasing the Lead time across that value stream

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A couple of years ago during a visit to Japan I had the the great fortune of talking to the CEO of Fujitsu Applications, Jun Watanabe. Before we left, I asked him  "What is the most important thing in your work?" He’s response was  "At the end of the day, all that is asked, is what have I improved"

Jun is a manager who expresses his commitment to improve the capability of his organisation. And to improve it, you first need to understand it 🙂

What is capability? It is your team’s systematic performance, what it is constantly delivering. Examples could be your teams cycle time, your velocity or the number of production bugs you are getting.

How are you doing in this respect? Test yourself by answering these three questions in your mind:

It’s been two busy weeks. First attended and presented at Lean Software and Systems 2011 and the week after at Goto Copenhagen 2011. Lot’s of timezones.. but met inspiring people, had plenty of good discussions and and a great time.

Many great presentations and if you have the chance, go see Benjamin Mitchell present.  Also, the   "Kanban Primer Play" (by Arne Roock, Bernd Schiffer and Markus Andrezak) is great way of demonstration real lean and cooperative concepts revolving around a kanban board.

I held a talk about pitfalls implementing kanban. Here are my slides!

A short while ago we gathered 24 people to try out the GetKanban game.  Here you see Håkan Forss giving instructions to the teams.

I heard a question if Limited WIP Society was only for invited – absolutely not, that is a great misunderstanding. Maybe the name is somewhat misleading.. . It is open for anyone interested in applying Lean, Kanban or Theory of Constraint principles in software, sometimes due to in limitation in our facilities, we have to limit attendees but it is always on first come first serve basis.

We announce the events on the agilesweden list as well invite earlier attendees. If you are interested in the events, just email me and I’ll put you up on the invitation list. Hope to see you there next time!

Cheers
Mattias

Ps: David Anderson is holding a special Kanban Training for managers in Stockholm June 20-21. Check it out: http://www.crisp.se/kanbanformanagers

Ever seen a cool feature in software and wondered, "wow – who got the time to do that?"

It happens from time to time that I meet business people who tell me how happy they are that after Agile their teams are now releasing software at a regular rythm. "Before they just never seemed to finish, there was always something left to do". 

While this is a great leap, let’s look at some of the dangers of extending this practice to all the features of your system.

Besides Lean & Agile, we also have experienced developers doing coaching, injecting themselves into teams to build skills "from within".  To avoid confusion (amongst ourselves) we have developed a custom terminology for our coaching work:

Seal		Seals dive deep down and stays down for a long while. They are faithful, they like problems and to stay with them until solved. Equipped with a great sense of smell, they can track bad code miles away and home in their buddies on the prey.
Duck		Ducks will swim along at the surface on the pond, tracking what goes on. Occasionally they take deep dives. Ducks are especially well equipped with improving teams engineering practices and removing complex obstacles. A duck will follow a team until new ducks evolve and can pollinate other areas.
Albatross		Albatrosses are quite noisy and you will find them talking passionately until new food is available.  They like to keep perspective on things. Albatrosses search for buddies at courses and training events. The secret inner wish for an albatross is to return to the pond and to play with the ducks.

.. what kind of coach are you? 🙂

At ScanAgile I had the pleasure of talking about options for a Scrum team, ways to pimp your process. A reminder that there always exists two solutions to every problem.

At ScanAgile I really enjoyed the continuous database deploy session with Peter Bell.
It always feels familiar visiting Finland 🙂

Anyway, here are the slides

I have rounded up 10  (ahum..)  12 different kanban boards as used in operations, development, sales and marketing. Maybe it can help to spark some ideas.

I didn’t make the boards perfect, you need to think about what WIP limits and policies that fits you. After all, a system is best if it has been designed by the people who works in that context.

You can download it here

There are a lot of interesting experimentation going on within the kanban community regarding visualization. While I truly support this (seeing the problem is the key to understanding it’s nature) and find this promising and exciting, I doesn’t correspond all that well to the problems team’s I have helped have had to struggle with.

Let’s face it:

• What good do WIP limits do if there is no one ready to take a stand for them?
• What’s the added benefit if visualizing a problem that no one cares about solving?

So a question (going through my mind for quite a while) is: Shouldn’t we be expecting something from management, and if so, then what?

We have three interesting events coming up:

Kanban Training with David Anderson, Nov 8-9
– Learn how to introduce Kanban in your organisation from the source: David Anderson.

Kanban Coach Camp with David Anderson & Mattias Skarin, Nov 10-11
– As a kanban practitioner, evolve your skill in incremental improvement

Second generation Lean product development – as if economics matter, Don Reinertsen, Dec 2-3
– As a CEO or business owner, learn the principles and economics driving product development

We are especially pleased to welcome Don Reinertsen to Stockholm, he has been on our "people that we really have to bring to Stockholm" list for a long time! Don is author of one of our favorite books "Managing the Design Factory", and his teachings have been a key source of inspiration to other thought leaders such as Mary Poppendieck and David Anderson.

Don is keen on making us differentiate between Lean for manufacturing and Product development, and points out that understanding the economics involved helps us improve way beyond charters and improve our decision making. Be aware, you will not leave untouched.

  …or "how we learned the right process needed to solve our problems".

I presented at Lean & Kanban Europe yesterday. It was great to meet people from so many disciplines, Here are my slides.

First week of September we had Christian visiting us and demonstrating how Danish National IT & Telecom agency have utlized Agile contracts in real projects. I took the time to ask some questions to Christian about Agile contracts.

Hi

There is much talk about designing Agile contracts. What is missing I feel is experience from the field. So I brought in Christian Vindinge Rasmussen @  Danish Ministry of IT and Telecom, who have used Agile contracts as a client to software project for four years. Enjoy!

www.crisp.se/agilecontracts

June and July have been busy months. I’d like to share a few highlights from other speakers in USI 2010 in Paris and the Lean Software and Systems gathering in London on which I had the honor of presenting.

Long term sustainable releases with 99% backward compatibility [USI 2010]
 
In "The challenges of long-term software quality in open source" Jürgen Höller  described how they worked in the Spring team to achieve 99% backward compatibility  by avoiding revolution and using evolution, even when radical new features are fit in. During the last seven years the Spring team have absorbed 4 major JDK’s and 4 generations of J2EE.  I was sure this was possible and Jürgens team shows it is. A challenge to all of us the next time we want to restart from scratch 🙂

Learning to Learn – becoming a Lean startup [Lean SSC]

In this presentation Damon Morgan shows how they as a company now have reached a level where they continuously do set based engineering of business ideas. He showed using their Quote web page how experimenting with not so obvious changes lead to a jump in business leads. I noted another experience which I have seen –  when you get flow going, estimation is redundant.

Using Kanban to get knowledge and continuously improve [Lean SSC]

Benjamin Mitchell blew me away with his presentation. I had some seriously great laughs 🙂 But there are some serious learnings as well. Benjamin has done some great efforts in experimenting with statistical process control in software. For example, he could demonstrate that a bulk part of the product portfolio wasn’t generating value to cover the complexity it brought by.  But what does help if there isn’t a thinking process in the organization capable of absorbing these learnings? I will highlights his takeaways,  which we all can improve on:

• THINK for yourself in your context
• Get KNOWLEDGE by studying your process as a system, end to end from the customer’s point of view
• RUN EXPERIMENTS  to learn while you work

…  If you have the chance, go see him.:)

  At the NDC 2010 conference I ran a workshop demonstrating the  principles behind Kanban (showing there is more too it than a visual workspace..) . My approach was to do it using a set of games.

Anyway, here are the slides

Ps:  A great conference for an old MSoft geek 🙂

The next Limited WIP Society meeting (Stockholm, Sweden) will be focused on experiences from the trenches. Six speakers testing Kanban will do 10min lightning talks, sharing their top 3 experiences.

When: Monday May 31:st 18.00 – 20.00
Where: Avega’s office, Stockholm

How do I join? mattias.skarin( at )crisp.se