Crisp's BlogPage 10

During extraordinary situations and crises, some people stand out and shine. One of these was Lottie Knutson. Lottie led the Crisis team at Fritidsresor during the Tsunami disaster in 2004. While governments were struggling to figure out what had happened, Lottie’s team was already hitting the ground running. Lottie will be speaking at Fast Feedback

Hi! I’ve updated the  Kanban boards  collection with examples from departements outside IT, Product portfolio and Corporate Legal. Download “10 kanban boards and their context” as pdf

Here are the slides from my talk about Spotify Rhythm at Agila Sverige.

The talk is about Spotify’s current approach to getting aligned as a company. It covers:

• what problem we’re trying to solve, and how we’ve gone through two other models (OKR and Priorities & Achievements) before arriving at our current model
• how we define “Bets” using the DIBB framework (Data-Insight-Belief-Bet)
• how we prioritize bets using stack-ranking based on company beliefs and north star goals
• how we visualize bets on a kanban-like company level board, and group them into Now – Next – Later columns
• how different parts of the company visualize their own bets and align with higher level bets, using interlinked bet boards.
• how we synchronize and prioritize our work using different cadences at different levels of the company.
• how this model is used to support squad autonomy
• our challenges and learnings with this so far

Holy crap how did I manage to cover all that in 10 minutes?! Guess I talked fast 🙂

Some sample slides below.

Continue reading

Hi! Here’s the video of our presentation  “Learnings from SAFe @ LEGO” at LKCE 2015.   psst: Meet LEGO f2f at this years Fastfeedback conference 2016 (Stockholm, Sept 21-22:nd). This years focus topic is “Strategy – Turning insight to action”. fastfeedback.se   Cheers Mattias

Based on the experiences with clients adopting Large-Scale Scrum, from 2007 to 2009 Bas Vodde and I wrote the first two books on LeSS:

1. Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum
2. Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum

These are a collection of experiments related to Large-Scale Scrum, organized into three major sections: experiments in thinking tools, organizational tools, and action (practice or technique) tools.

And now, almost a decade after starting our first book on scaling agile development, comes our third book: Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS.

Continue reading

Here are the slides from our evening event Agile at scale that took place at Crisp on May 11th. Thanks everyone who attended for making this a great evening event!

Wow, just Wow!I am very honored to have won the Brickell Key Award 2016! Actually, very glad, surprised and humbled. The competition was impressive, if possible even more so than two years ago when I was first nominated. I want to thanks the Kanban community, David Anderson for his inspiration, Sandvik IT for their trust and

Here comes the slides from the Workshop I’ve held at the Lean Kanban North America 2016 conference in San Diego: From Good-Enough to Great from Christophe Achouiantz What the Workshop is about From good-enough to greatYou’ve had some success with you Kanban System: you’ve managed flow and quickly increased your capability. But now the energy

OK, technically speaking, it was called a networking day.  But that wouldn’t do justice to the content here. The main thing we got out of the ACPN Agile contracting conference was the three different perspectives from lawyers, customers and providers.  That gave us a unique insight into the challenges and questions from each party. Some cool facts: Founders

In this talk I presented a simple 2D platformer written in Java/Groovy and how to use Spock to test it. I’ll make the source code available in a while. By the way, of you’re not using Spock yet, then start!

The Spotify ‘model’ was presented in 2012 and has stired a lot of interest in the agile community and the software industry in general. In May I was asked to talk about this a the Bay Area Agile Leadership Network meetup in San Francisco (where I at that time was working as an agile coach

Last week, I got this great question from Faraz (a manager for an energetic customer support crew) who is experimenting a lot with getting more Agile. “What seemingly normal things do Agile people do?” I realized that we rarely talk about the small things that effective Agile people do. What makes a great difference is rarely the big sweeping change programs, but rather, the small everyday things we do without thinking about it.

So here’s a list of 12 seemingly normal things Agile people do which we don’t pay much attention to that can make a big difference.

Whiteboard problem solving

Continue reading

Good meetings is very much about achieving deep collaboration. But collaboration is often hard. We go into meetings with different modes, intentions, and expectations. How can we make meetings both more fun and energetic? Surprisingly enough: maybe by being more formalized.
Continue reading

Hi! I recently did a podcast together with Dennis (CIO Nordnet) on #slowtofast. I walked into the podcast thinking it was going to be about Kanban and Enterprise Agile. Right! 🙂 Dennis hit me with these simple questions.. The essential elements of proper Product Management The management principles of an Agile leader How the Swedish culture is

Continuous discovery means an open backlog where everything is considered speculation and hypothesis. Continuous validation means that the user experience is validated for each release, rather than up front. This may sound like big budget to you, but let me give you a case study, about how a single team accomplished it on a tight budget.

A small team with a small budget has the advantage of not losing its head with big ideas from experts in different fields, be it architecture or user experience. The budget constraint sharpens your effort in a way that could be healthy even to a larger team.

Continue reading

UPDATE Dec 2016: Wrote an article about LEGO’s agile journey, see here. Includes all of the material below, plus explanations and updates.

Here are the slides for our talk Agile @ Lego at Passion for Projects in Uppsala. Enjoyed discussing this stuff with project managers and the like from all sorts of industries. A common theme from the conference was the power of self-organization, and the role of leadership in creating the right context for self-organization to happen. Our talk provided a real-life large scale example of this.

Continue reading

Candy Crush Soda releases a new version of the game on all platforms every other week, year round. I’ve written about the delivery pipeline and the challenges the team faces on King’s tech blog: https://techblog.king.com/candy-crush-soda-saga-delivery-pipeline/ Previous posts about working with the Soda team: How We Developed Candy Crush Soda Saga What Should We Build Next? Get in touch

I’m currently coaching a team with several stakeholders in different parts of the organization. It’s difficult to know who to talk to when decisions need to be made. The line between what the team can decide about and what the stakeholders need to be involved in is also blurry. To help create more clarity and a better collaborative environment with our stakeholders we decided to create a delegation board. The meetings we ran this week were appreciated by everybody, so I thought I would share what we did and what we learned.

Continue reading

The Kanban and Scrum minibook is now available with Polish translation. Great thanks to Zbigniew Zemla for the translation! Pobierz tutaj (aka  polish for “get it here” ): http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/kanban-scrum-minibook Cheers Mattias

(French translation, Spanish translation, Japanese translation)

A couple of years ago I drew this picture and started using it in various presentations about agile and lean development:

Since then the drawing has gone viral! Shows up all over the place, in articles and presentations, even in a book (Jeff Patton’s “User Story Mapping”  – an excellent read by the way). Many tell me the drawing really captures the essence of iterative & incremental development, lean startup, MVP (minimum viable product), and what not. However, some misinterpret it, which is quite natural when you take a picture out of it’s original context. Some criticize it for oversimplifying things, which is true. The picture is a metaphor. It is not about actual car development, it is about product development in general, using a car as a metaphor.

Anyway, with all this buzz, I figured it’s time to explain the thinking behind it.

Continue reading

We have translated our blog on team size and proximity to english. If you prefer to read it in Swedish it’s called Storlek och närhet har betydelse. The english version you’ll find at Nomad8 site, because Jimmy Janlén is currently in New Zealand. 🙂  

The www.crisp.se website is based on WordPress, with a custom Crisp theme.

This is the story about how we’ve developed our custom WordPress theme, how we’ve made it easy for any Crisper and external consultants to work on the theme, how we’ve setup version control, continuous delivery, staging and production environments on Amazon Web Services (AWS). And how all of this is setup with absolutely no automated tests whatsoever.

Continue reading

Elephants are not giraffes and user stories are not requirements. They share some traits and you may find them in the same context, but that does not make them the same. Despite that, many believe that user stories are the new requirements because there has to be requirements for a project, right? I give that a double “no”, they are not requirements and that is not anything we really need. User stories are about being able to explore options and seize opportunities. Requirements are about deciding up front and sticking with that.

Continue reading

Daniel and Martin have been in the same team since the beginning of summer and they’ve been collaborating in an unconventional way. Yassal interviews them to understand what’s been going on.

You’ve been successfully using mob programming with your team at Expressen for the past 6 months. How did you get started?

Daniel: The project started without any tech solutions in mind. We decided as a team that mob programming was a good way to figure out what tech stack to use. We had no backlog, but we sort of knew what we needed to do

Martin: I remember proposing this as the best way to do discovery work from a tech perspective. We didn’t know what language or tech platform we were aiming for, and this way we would learn more quickly as a team and could come to a decision. 

So, what is mob programming anyway?

Daniel: I don’t really care about the formal definition, to me it’s group programming rather than pair programming. One person is at the keyboard and the others act as support, coming up with suggestions, or researching potential solutions. This helps the whole team stay on the same page, and makes sure that we’re all learning at the same pace.

Continue reading

Process är dyrt. Större team, distansarbete, deltidsarbete samt många specialister leder till mer uppstyrd process. Kanske är detta självklart, men ju fler företag vi lär känna, desto mer upplever vi detta vara något som ignoreras.

Jobbar vi i någon form av agil process såsom Scrum, Kanban, eller Lean UX värderar vi högt samarbetet mellan olika kompetenser. Ett team av olika kompetenser som kan ta en idé från start till mål brukar kallas tvärfunktionellt.

Enklast möjliga agila process för hur dessa personer kan samarbeta ser ut så här:
Continue reading

I recently recorded a webinar where I walk through 5 ways to find slack (to invest in critical improvements),  when a team is under high pressure. Enjoy! http://leankit.com/blog/2015/11/real-world-kanban/  

Hej kära läsare! Mitt namn är Martin och jag är en “process-aholic”. Jag har sett processer (eller avsaknaden av dem) överallt sedan jag var barn. Jag har sett en del människor som gör saker på “fel” sätt och en del människor som gör saker på “rätt” sätt. På universitetet lärde jag mig dock att inte ens när det kommer till processer är livet svart eller vitt, men jag förstod aldrig hur jag skulle kunna särskilja en “bättre” processen från en “sämre”. 11 år senare när jag fann Scrum blev jag glad över att hitta en process med inbyggd processförbättring. Jag kunde äntligen experimentera och sedan utvärdera om det hela blev bättre eller sämre. När jag insåg att de flesta team körde Scrum utan denna del, bestämde jag mig för att försöka lära världen ämnet kontinuerlig förbättring. Detta är ett sådant försök, men det var nog uppenbart…

Vad jag har saknat när jag predikat om tillbakablickar/retrospektiv är tydliga och konsekventa mål. Att nyttja de fantastiska grundvärden som agila metoder vilar på, såsom Extreme Programmings kommunikation, återkoppling, enkelhet och mod (inklusive respekt från version 2) och Scrums öppenhet, engagemang, fokus, etc, har hjälpt mig att sikta bättre på kort sikt. Men det var inte förrän jag lärde mig om två specifika (och överlappande) mognadsmodeller, en via Torbjörn Gyllebring och en via min kollega Fredrik Lingren (tack så mycket till er båda!) som jag förstod hur jag skulle kunna tillämpa en mer fokuserad strategi för ständiga förbättringar. Detta är min strategi:

Continue reading

Help your team improve by visualizing their way working with the fluent@agile game. With the game you can help a team find out where it is on its agile journey and help it find new ways of both fine tuning and make leaps in their daily agile practices.

Me and Christian Vikström made the game together at Spotify during the spring 2014 when we were coaching and helping team to improve their agile skill sets and processes.

At Spotify the teams owns their own way of working. A team is basically only accountable to itself. We therefore needed an coaching tool that could help team take ownership of their self image and improvement strategy.

We also wanted the tool to be opinionated. It should be normative, tell what’s good and not, what kind of practices and behaviour that’s expected and not. But at the same time it should be open to new ideas, new practices and the teams local conditions.

Continue reading

I’m happy to announce that Toolbox for the Agile Coach – Visualization Examples is now available on LeanPub! It’s a 124 page book cramped with visualization examples for teams on how to improve collaboration and communication, as well as shaping behaviours.

It’s been great fun to write. It’s been great fun to get feedback from early readers. It’s been great fun to show it to colleagues and friends. And now, finally, it feels awesome to be able to share it with you!

I planned to release the book in physical and digital form at the same time… but getting it printed have sadly taken forever, and I still don’t know when it will be available on Amazon.

So, I’ve decided to go ahead and release the digital version first. Might be a stupid thing to do from a marketing perspective, but I don’t care about that. I want the book out and available 🙂

Continue reading