While reading a blog post by my Crisp colleague Anders Laestadius I remembered a meeting type I tried a few years ago. We called it “Pomodoro meeting” since it was timeboxed to 25 minutes, just as the time management technique Pomodoro.

This is how it was conducted:

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Here are annotated slides from my lighting talk Agile@Home at Agila Sverige 2012. Have you tried a BBQ board? Or a travel spike? Or a homework burnup chart? How about Limiting WIP in the kitchen, or the closet? How about agile party planning? There are plenty of ways that Agile and Lean practices and ideas

  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 

Continuous improvement is a central part of both agile and lean; it’s the way to increase the productivity and ensure that the organization delivers an ever increasing level of value to the customers and the organization. Lean is derived from Toyota and the Toyota Way, which has inspired a lot of companies in the western world in their quest to increase their productivity as well. But we often focuse on the techniques and practices and do not see the more fundamental parts of the Toyota system that enable their very high level of improvement each year.

I worked at a company that tried to implement the Toyota Way and reach the same level of continuous improvment with what I believe to be the wrong focus. My company estblished a goal to reach seven improvements per employee in average per year. A goal that was inspired from a report that stated that Toyota implemented 1,000,000 improvements per year, which of course, is very high. This is one of many aspects that show why Toyota has managed to grow they way they have done during the last 50 years.

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I’ve published another book! This one’s called “Lean from the Trenches“. It is about how we scaled a 60-person project by combing techniques from Kanban, Scrum, and XP. I chose this title because it really it illustrates how to put Lean principles into practice in a software project, especially the notion of an end-to-end Kanban

Kanban kick-start has been updated. What’s new? Not much but I met David J Anderson and after that meeting I felt I wanted to make some changes to be more compliant with the content of his course “Kanban for Managers”. Please enjoy. http://www.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Kanban-kick-start-v2.pdf If you like to have a version with the changes visualized, please let

Here are my Kanban Intro slides from my Leaders of Agile webinar together with Kent Beck and Aslam Khan on Oct 27. Thanks for participating!

BTW when I did this presentation I was sitting in a small hotel room in Tokyo with 4 sleeping kids. Due to timezone differences it was the middle of the night. Fortunately nobody woke up 🙂

Sample slides:

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Here are the slides for my Tokyo Scrum Gathering keynote “Everybody wants Change, but nobody likes to be changed“. Thanks for attending! Sample 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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A year ago I held an Open Space at Scrum Gathering in Stockholm about Agile Support. I have since received several requests to expand on the topic, so here it comes. Download the article about Agile support with Kanban Good Luck! /Tomas