from the Crisp Consultants
Last friday, I had the day off. Again.
This was just one of several days that I have had off, not counting weekends and vacations. So am I just a slacker that don’t work 5 five days a week? No, on the contrary! This makes me a better programmer. How? Read on.
Nowadays, when explaining the concept of Agile values and techniques I always start by showing a short and brilliant video from Norstrom Inovation Lab. The video shows how a team successfully delivers an iPad app withing a week. It all starts with an idea: “Our customers often use their phones to take pictures of themselves when trying
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Nyligen så hjälpte jag till med att planera och facilitera en affärsplanering hos en kund. Då jag tycker både utfallet och genomförandet var väldigt bra så kommer här en beskrivning av vad vi gjorde och de olika övningar vi hade. Det var en relativt stor grupp som samlats föra att genomföra den årliga affärsplaneringen, vilket syftade till att utifrån företagets övergripande mål finna vad denna avdelning skall göra under året som kommer. Alla som varit med på dessa tillställningar vet att de kan vara rätt tunga och inte alltid kopplade till medarbetarnas vardag. Jag känner dock att detta tillfälle bröt traditionen, mycket på grund av att de aktuella cheferna fokuserade på att jobba kring det positiva och möjligheter i stället för problem och hinder.
Det var en grupp på 30 personer fördelade i två olika linjegrupper, och huvudmålet var att finna förändringsåtgärder för året som kommer. På vägen mot det målet, en väg som var lika viktig som slutmålet i sig, jobbade gruppen kring sin historia, arbetade fram en mission och sedan en framtidsbild om var de vill vara fem år framåt i tiden.
Agilist these days don’t recognize the true value of proper design. It takes a master to understand the subtle details that make your IT department’s self confidence melt away faster than ice in Schwarzenegger’s pants. It’s all about design. Interior design.
A few weeks ago Daniel Sundman wrote a blog entry about how to test drive JavaScript with Grunt. Today we’ll talk about how to run your Jasmine Grunt setup using Gradle!
There are no standard plugins for Grunt in Gradle, but it’s easy to add all the code manually. After all, this is Gradle not Maven 😉
We’ll assume that node and grunt-cli are already installed see (Test Driving JavaScript with Grunt).
Jag intervjuas om utvecklings- och lönesamtal i tidningen Chef. “Det blev konstigt att sitta en gång om året och bestämma vilka mål mina medarbetare skulle ha på lång sikt, när vi arbetade helt annorlunda i vardagen. Därför bestämde jag mig för att lägga ner utvecklingssamtalen.” Läs resten av artikeln på Chef.se
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Here’s the eBook collecting my articles on building the quality in by stoping the line: Stop The Line – Why it’s crucial to include a human touch to your automated processes
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Christoper Avery, a leading authority on applying personal and shared responsibility for agility and performance, returns to Crisp in Stockholm April 29-30, 2013 to teach his public workshop Creating Results-Based Teams. Space is limited. Register now.
This classic blog post was originally posted on Christopher Avery’s popular Leadership Gift blog on November 1, 2010 — you can find it here.
The basic process for an iteration retrospective is to gather the team for an hour (more or less as required by the length of the iteration), ask the team to generate two lists (what worked well and what the team would like to improve), and then prioritize items on the list.
Few coaches and many teams. How does that work? In the Kanban Kick-start Field Guide you mention that you have kick-started more than 50 teams. How do you keep track of the teams and their status? For our Kanban-coach team, each team really is a work item and, unsurprisingly, we try to see and understand
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The number one factor of power is the fear factor. Fear is essential to keep the resources kissing your feet.
There are of course many ways to invoke fear and I will give you my pro tip here: fire the worst 10% every year. “Worst” here refers to obedience, not performance, hell no. Firing a well paid performer cuts salary costs more, so that is just a bonus.
Can you run a conference where every presenter has to present using code? Why not! Meet ITAKE (Bucharest, ay 30-31). A coders delight. Our friends in Eastern Europe, Mozaic are trying out a new conference format where each presenter has to present using code. Gotta love initatives like that 🙂
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The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide is now available! What is it?The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide is a practical guide to help you kick-start your team into using the Kanban method. It gathers the experience from introducing Kanban to 50+ teams at Sandvik IT. Who wrote it?The Field Guide was written by two lean/agile coaches, Christophe
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Hi! Here are my slides Stop Starting, Start Finishing from Aggro Pekuliar. Thanks for attending! And what a cool conference, nice to hang out with a bunch of non-techies for a change 🙂
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Christoper Avery, a leading authority on applying personal and shared responsibility for agility and performance, returns to Crisp in Stockholm April 29-30, 2013 to teach his public workshop Creating Results-Based Teams. Space is limited. Register now.
This classic blog post was originally posted on Christopher Avery’s popular Leadership Gift blog on February 9, 2011 — you can find it here.
Why is it so hard to build a well-functioning team?
Often it is because we’re looking in the wrong place for answers.
I’ll share a critical secret for success. The primary problem lies in what you are (or are not) paying attention to. When it comes to working with smart people in shared-responsibility situations, all too often I catch myself getting caught up in the wrong game — a pointless game. I bet you do, too.
When I start paying attention to the truly important game, my ability skyrockets. And yes, you can solve this problem for yourself as well.
Improving continuously requires to be truly aware of one’s current condition. A lot comes “for free” when using Kanban (visualization policies, feedback policies and the measure of flow). The Kanban board gives a “snapshot” of the current situation, but a time aspect is needed to better understand trends and evolution. That is where the charts
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I just love Kickstarter.com! For me it has become the best place to discover new stuff on the web. The creativity gathered there is simply staggering! Kickstarter succeeds in raising and focusing creativity by offering a mechanism to finance projects that is not based on risk-aversion and profit-focus, but on anyone’s dream to create something that they
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Finding a bug in your application actually means you have at least two kinds of problems: symptoms and process issues. To deal with quality in a sustainable way, you have to fix both!
Christoper Avery, a leading authority on applying personal and shared responsibility for agility and performance returns to Crisp in Stockholm April 29-30, 2013 to teach his public workshop Creating Results-Based Teams. Space is limited. Register now.
This classic blog post was originally posted on Christopher Avery’s popular blog on January 20, 2011 — you can find it here.
There is a big difference between being an accountable leader and being a responsible leader. I have been working with business leaders for the last 20+ years as a consultant and speaker, and I am committed to showing real leaders the powerful difference.
The following may sound a bit harsh or pedantic at first, but stay with it and you will be rewarded with important distinctions:
An accountable leader focuses on being able to account for his or her actions and results. As a communication scholar years ago I researched “account-giving.” That is simply the narratives (i.e., stories) we make up to explain what is going on — we give accounts.
Here is a teaser for “The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide“.The document is almost ready by now, with some minor work left on the boosts in the “After the Kick-start” chapter. And, yes, there is a section about Depth of Kanban in there. The Cover of the book (it may change) Key Aspects Due to our
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If you’re a TDD addict you know that it’s not always easy to Test Drive your JavaScript. Which testing framework should you use? How do you set your CI pipeline up? Etc…
There are quite a few frameworks out there and it seems like writing a testing framework is what everybody wants to do. I am pretty sure we don’t need any more. We just need them to be easy to use. In this post I’ll show you how incredibly easy it is these days to start using Grunt, Jasmine and PhantomJS.
I had taken on to facilitate a retrospective for my colleagues’ team. They wanted a different retrospective than the usual. So we borrowed Crisp’s office and used Jimmy Cards!
The group was around 15 persons from two teams. They all knew each other well which I believe is crucial as the questions on the cards can be challenging.
In this post I’ll give you the recipe which Jimmy and I came up with for this particular retrospective.
Why do you think projects always are late? That’s because they are designed to be late. But I’ll let you in on a secret: late projects are run by wimps. Unstoppable projects are run by masters. Welcome to the philosophy of power estimation.
You see, estimation isn’t about guessing how long a project will take, it is about getting power. More budget = more power. The best way to get more budget is to leverage the fear of failure by insisting on perfect estimation.
The beauty with estimation is the more people you ask, the bigger the estimation gets. So ask lots of people. Use historical data to cross reference how much off a project can get and grow your estimation by π. Feel the power now?
Have you ever been part of a great team? Or worked with one? I’m ending an assignment at Projectplace, where I’ve been working with team “SNAP”. SNAP is a great team! As I move on to other challenges I’ve been thinking about what makes a team great.
I really got inspired reading Håkan Fors’ article on “Are the Kanban practices in the right order”. Not only did he linked to a presentation Johan Nordin and I did at Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 (which is always good), he also presented a way to visualize the maturity – or depth – of a
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This is a guest blog from Jeff Gothelf who will have an open course in Lean UX with Crisp in May 2013
Jeff Gothelf has spent a 15 year career as an agile product designer, team leader, blogger and teacher. He is one of the leading voices on the topic of Agile UX and Lean UX. In addition, Jeff is the author of the O’Reilly book (2013), Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience (www.leanuxbook.com). He is a highly sought-after international speaker and workshop leader. Jeff has led cross-functional product design teams at TheLadders, Publicis Modem, WebTrends, Fidelity, and AOL. In 2012, Jeff launched Proof, a product design and innovation studio that combines lean processes with strategy, design and technology that has since been acquired by Neo.com where he is now Managing Director.
Here is Jeffs course Lean UX – Cross functional collaboration 20-21 of May in Stockholm >
Expanding my original post on challenges implementing Lean UX in the enterprise, I wanted to add a couple more hurdles that most companies will undoubtedly have to go through to build, collaborative, cross-functional and agile teams.
Many large companies are distributed across countries, time zones and cultures. Getting employees to work together is tough enough when they’re sitting across the hall from each other. The distance between distributed teams breaks down a collaborative culture very quickly.Continue reading
Would you like to try out a tool that has the power to ignite exciting discussions that challenges the team and that possibly inspires to new improvement actions? Then you should try out the “Jimmy Cards”.
So, what is “Jimmy Cards”? Simply put it, it’s a deck of challenging questions and riddles for the agile team.
Sometimes people approach us at Crisp, and ask if we would consider starting a subsiduary in country X or Y. We normally respond with something like “Sounds cool! But we are a Stockholm company and don’t want the hassle of running a multinational corporation, not unless we see a clear and strong benefit (and we
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The other day I read a blog by Uncle Bob. It more or less stated that no matter what situation you are in, writing automated tests will make you go faster. Ok, this is old news I thought, until I checked Uncle Bob’s tweets. A fair amount of people argued against this statement, and that surprised me!
So I started thinking about why there still are fellow software developers that doesn’t believe in automated testing? Have they not seen them in action and understood what they are for? Please, gather around the campfire, and I will tell you one, just one, of my war stories, and then I will tell you why also you should write automated tests!
Kanban and Scrum book is now available in Swedish translation, you can download from InfoQ here Thanks to Johan Natt och Dag!
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With fellow colleague Johan Nordin, I have been working on capturing the “process” (actually “way-of-working” sounds better) that we have been using to introduce Kanban to 50+ teams for the past 2 years at Sandvik IT. The result is “The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide“.What can I do with the Kanban kick-start field guide? This field
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