Crisp's BlogPage 11

Hi! Here’s the video me and Eik’s presentation – “Learnings from SAFe @LEGO”  (presentation at LKCE – Lean Kanban Central Europe, Nov 2015). Best quote: “..this looks exacly like what my 6 year son does in kindergarden” 🙂 Cheers Mattias

We have just released our short comic as a poster, free to download and print! Jennie Discovers is a comic that tells a story about working Agile and Lean. It’s a story of product discovery, the journey from first idea to continuously releasing and updating a product or service. This book is written for product

For more than a year now, I’ve been working with clients that have agile scaling problems. But not the kind of scaling problem everybody is talking about – one product and lots of teams. No, I’ve been busy trying to sort out what to do when you have one team supporting a multitude of products with different architectures, stakeholders, technology stacks and whatnot. This is what I’ve learnt, so far.

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The Pirate Ship is a workshop format that will help you grow amazing teams. It is “speed boat” on steroids. I have now been using it for a couple of years, and the time have come to share this useful and productive format.

I do a lot of workshops with teams. Very often the workshops are about the teams themselves. It can be anything from getting a newly started team up and running to helping a mature and stable team find new inspiration and challenges.

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Here are the slides from my keynote “Real-life agile scaling” at Agile Tour Bangkok. Enjoyed hanging out with everyone!

Key points:

• Scaling hurts. Keep things as small as possible.
• Agile is a means, not a goal. Don’t go Agile Jihad. Don’t dump old practices that work.
• There is no “right” or “wrong” way. Just tradeoffs.
• There is no one-size-fits-all. But plenty of good practices.
• Build feedback loops at all levels. Gives you better products and a self-improving organization.

Here is an InfoQ article with a nice summary of the keynote.

Sample slides:

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Just back from Lean Kanban Central Europe 2015. A great conference that keeps pushing the limits. At the conference I gave a talk together with Eik aka “Captain Agile” from LEGO. We walked through how they introduced SAFe, how they involved other departments and most important, how they experimented their way forward.  (Me and Henrik iterated as coaches

InfoQ has just released an interview regarding my latest book Real World Kanban. In this we walk through the reasons behind writing the book plus why Kanban needs to be matched by long term thinking to improve over time  (aka behaviours like “don’t pass bad quality forward” matters) Check it out:  http://www.infoq.com/articles/book-review-real-world-kanban ps: For anyone interested in the book, I have

(translations: Russian, Turkish)

Agile product development has become the norm in many industries (especially software). That means products are developed by small, self-organizing, cross-functional teams, and delivered in small increments and continuously improved based on real customer feedback. Pretty much as described in the Agile Manifesto – but replace the word “software” with “product” (because it really isn’t software-specific).

That’s all fine and dandy. However when things get bigger, with dozens of teams collaborating over organizational boundaries, things obviously get more complex and painful. Even if the entire organization is neatly organized into scrum teams, you can still end up with an unaligned mess! Here’s a picture that might feel familiar:

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(translations: Turkish)

I wrote this article because of two observations:

1. Many organizations use a “project model” when they shouldn’t.
2. There is a lot of confusion and debate in the agile community about projects and project leadership.

I don’t claim to have “the answer”, but I’ve thought about this a lot and also experimented on my clients (don’t tell them… sshhhh). So, here is my take on project leadership in an agile context.

Oh, and by the way, this article is a Bait & Switch. I’m trying to get you to read What is an Agile Leader. You might save time by just skipping this and going there right away 🙂

Beware of “projects”

The word “project” is controversial in agile circles. Some companies use the “project model” as some kind of universal approach to organizing work, even for product development. However, a surprising number of projects fail, some dramatically. I see more and more people (especially within the software industry) conclude that the project model itself is the culprit, that it’s kind of like rigging the game for failure.

A “project” is traditionally defined as a temporary effort with a temporary group of people and a fixed budget. Product development, on the contrary, is usually a long term effort that doesn’t “end” with the first release – successful products start iterating way before the first release, and keep iterating and releasing long after. And teams work best if kept together over the long term, not formed and disbanded with each new project. Also, the traditional approach to planning and funding projects often leads us to big-bang waterfall-style execution, and hence a huge risk of failure because of the long and slow feedback loop. The project model just doesn’t seem to fit for product development.

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  Just back from Lean Kanban France where I gave a presentation on “Learnings across Kanban case studies, and what happened next” and introduced Skarin’s law: ”The number of improvement initiatives in a kanban system is proportional to the trust members have in that systems purpose” (.. it’s never too late to introduce your own law 🙂

Do you, a developer, have a feeling that the user stories your product owner is but a list of ideas prioritized on gut feeling only? That the relationship between them and their purpose are vague? Impact Mapping is an agile conversational tool by Gojko Adzic that may be primarily for product owners but hey, a developer needs a purpose too!

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When refactoring legacy code, two problems seems to repeatedly occur. One is that the code is all tangled up with interdependencies and the other is that there is no specification of what the system is supposed to do.

Still we are asked to add features or fix problems without breaking anything. Everything in there should stay there.

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Edgeware is a cool hardware and software company helping operators to build efficient video content delivery networks. Read their blog about what we have been up to since August this year: Lean and Agile at Edgeware

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 my Lean Tribe keynote Scaling Agile @ Lego – our journey so far.

Here’s also a more detailed version from a talk that Lars Roost and I did at GOTO conference in Copenhagen: is SAFe Evil (that talk was also recorded).

This is just a brief snapshot of a journey in progress, not a journey completed 🙂

Sample slides below.

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Our goal at the Crisp hack summit last weekend was to migrate our 2 year old shopping app written in Meteor to the latest version and to learn about Google’s material design. Our old app was built as a way for us to learn Meteor. The structure is less than ideal, and as we learn new things we add them to the app, but don’t revisit old parts. So we followed Dan North’s experiment rewriting the app from scratch. We also decided to use Materialize for the UI. We wanted to rewrite the app in 2 days, keeping all the functionality we currently have, but at the same time adding the UI and usability improvements that we really need.

We ended up completing the rewrite in 9 days: 2 hack days and then a couple of hours each day for the next week. Not too bad for a brand new app, but surprisingly longer than we would have guessed. Both Meteor and Materialize are pretty simple to get started with, but adding Materialize to Meteor proved to be challenging. Here are some highlights!

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Otroligt kul att se hur många som fick plats i ett konceptrum i Aula Magna under våra presentationer under SAST Q20! Vi pratade först om kontinuerlig förbättring och sedan om working agreements. Slides hittar du nedan. Kontinuerlig förbättring Working Agreements På Crisp har vi en hel del gratis material och guider, bland annat en Toyota

Are you thinking about electronic Kanban tools? Do you need transparency to end-to-end flow? Do you work across multiple sites? Tired of managing work states in Jira? Here’s a short video demonstrating visualisation, analytics and key features in Swift-Kanban & Leankit. Both combine “simple and flexible” with “enterprise ready”. I also mention an interesting runner up – Obeya. Some things I

How do you decide what to build next? Who comes up with the ideas? How do you decide in what order to implement them? How do you keep track of what you’re working on, and what you want to work on?

Here’s a behind the scenes look at how the Candy Crush Soda team comes up with ideas and decides what to build next!

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The other week I got the idea to create simple conversation cards. Each card represents an agile practice, a conversation topic or an abstract theory. Now I’ve drawn 96 cards. I simply couldn’t stop 🙂

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Last night our Lego Mindstorms robot “Robit” somehow managed to win the Robot Sumo competition at the GOTO conference in Copenhagen! (here’s also an article in Mälarö Tidning)

Pretty frickin’ amazing considering that this was a big software development conference with lots of super-experienced developers competing, and our robot was mostly built by two kids – David and Jenny Kniberg (11yrs and 10yrs old) – the only kids at the conference.  Their robot didn’t just win once – it outmaneuvered and outwrestled the competing robots in every match!

Here’s the final, Robit to the left:

So how could a newbie team win the competition so decisively?

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For  this year’s Stop Starting conference, we asked ourselves three questions: How do you develop awesome products? How do you bootstrap a successful mega project using Agile contracts? How do you use Agile and Lean thinking to turn a stagnant company around? We then picked the brains of people from real companies who have been

Can you develop new products from scratch in one day?

This challenge was taken on by the Medical HW manufacturer Optinova in August. Over the course of two days, we pushed the limits of “what is possible” by applying Agile in a HW environment.

Our hypothesis was that Agile would be a good fit in product development and innovation scenarios. And the result so far from the work that we have been doing with Optinova is promising.

Cross-functional teams, focus, rapid prototyping, close customer feedback and visual overview work just as well in hardware as in software. The training setup we used was as follows:

• Day 1 – Learn basic Agile practices and principles
• Day 2 – Applying them – developing three product ideas from scratch in one day, in a rapid prototyping workshop.

The result: All three participating teams managed to take an idea to working prototype in a day. One team went so far as submitting a bid to a real customer the following day based on their prototype. That’s high speed, even in software terms. But the most important thing wasn’t the result, it was the lessons learned. When we asked the participants if they wanted to continue to build products this way, the votes were unanimously in favor. If we can get it to work, this would help build a competitive and innovative company.Continue reading

TDD är en vana man behöver etablera. Första hindret är ofta när man återvänder efter kurs att omsätta teori i praktik. I detta avsnitt berätta jag om hur man isolerar en enhet så att man kan testa den. Del 6 är i serien “TDD på svenska” handlar alltså om detta och har precis nu publicerats

Vi har byggt en sajt där med goda exempel, för att inspirera företag, myndigheter och verksamheter på väg in i en upphandling att ta steget till Agila kontrakt. Check it out – agilakontrakt.se. Eller följ oss på twitter: @agilakontrakt. Turen har kommit till att berätta om Wunderkraut, som använt Agila kontrakt sedan 2010. Det intressanta är hur de i den ombytliga

Låt oss säga det direkt: att kombinera pm³ och någon agil metod, som t ex Scrum, är en dålig idé. Varför?

Därför att du kommer inte kunna dra nytta av det agila arbetssättet. pm³ är baserat på en helt annan världsbild. pm³ bygger på årsplaner och att verksamheten beställer från en leverantör, typiskt den egna IT-avdelningen.  Agilt har som en grundläggande värdering att reagera på förändringar i stället för att följa en plan. Det agila arbetssättet drivs proaktivt genom utforskande i motsats till att vara en mottagare av beställningar.

Vi har sett flera försök att implementera pm³ och de har ofta misslyckats på grund av att pm³ bygger på tankar om att verkligheten kan förutsägas 18 månader i förväg, att användarna vet vad de vill ha och att det är viktigt att ha en skarp linje mellan verksamhet och IT. Vi hävdar (och flera med oss törs vi lova) att inget av detta är varken sant eller bra.

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Designed as a 30-day action plan, this book will help you understand and implement Kanban – and start seeing results – in a month.

Analyze your current situation and define your goals and wider strategic aims, and begin developing a plan to help you and your team confidently work towards achieving them. Involve your team into driving cultural change, learn how to prioritize, and organize tasks and projects to efficiently use your time and resources.

Create your own value stream map to better understand your processes and identify improvement areas, and adapt and use the features, tips, and examples to overcome challenges you may face when implementing Kanban. Pick up this book and experience the full results of this vital Agile methodology-fast.

Who this book is written for

If you want to simplify your processes, improve collaboration, and manage projects successfully, this guide to Kanban is an essential companion. Continue reading

My new Kanban case book now ships from Amazon (as hardcover or in Kindle format). Learn how we: Improved the full value chain by using Enterprise Kanban. (Find out how we improved time to market and shifted focus from Sprints to Flow to deliver customer value in a traditional company.) Boosted engagement, teamwork, and flow in

One property of legacy code is inflation by irrelevant logging statements. Not only does this increase the size of a bulging code base, I’d also argue that it’s dead wrong.

Quite recently I’ve had the honor of making acquaintance with a piece of code that looked roughly like this:

if (LOGGER.isLoggable(Level.FINEST)) {
    LOGGER.log(Level.FINEST, "foo is now", foo.getValue());
}
boolean result = doSomeActualWork(foo);
if (LOGGER.isLoggable(Level.FINER)) {
    LOGGER.exiting(this.getClass().getName(), "bar", result);
}

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Should the Scrum Master role be full time or part time? What if there is not enough Scrum Master work to do? Can the Scrum Master also do other work in the team? Can the Scrum Master be Scrum Master for several teams?

There was a debate about this and Scrum Alliance created the Scrum Master Manifesto in 2011.

Even though this has been debated by many minds before, I still get asked what my views are on this topic.

I’ve done all kinds of variations on this role. I’ve been a dedicated Scrum Master for a single team. I have done the SM role and a developer role at the same time. I’ve been a Scrum Master for several teams at the same time. These alternatives have their own advantages and challenges. In this post I intend to describe my view and recommendations.

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Samarbete är en svår konst. De flesta organisationer har grava underskott på samarbete. Ännu saknas på många sätt förståelse för vilka mekanismer som driver och uppmuntrar samarbete. På Agila Sverige 2015 pratade jag om samarbetets mystik och gjorde några nedslag i en längre workshop om detta. Bland annat visar jag hur man kan spela ultimatumspelet i storpublik, hur apor reagerar på orättvisor och de fyra pelarna i samarbetets mekanik.

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