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.

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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.

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  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

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 >

Lean UX in the Enterprise: 5 hills to climb

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.

Co-location is a dirty word

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.

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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

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!

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Kanban and Scrum book is now available in Swedish translation, you can download from InfoQ here Thanks to Johan Natt och Dag!

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

Agile People is a network for people interested in applying agile principles and values to HR started by the superblogger Calle Blomberg. We recently hosted one of the networks meeting at Crisp. Petter Weiderholm talked about Peoples Operations at Spotify. We featured Jimmy Janlén with his fantastic spaghetti exercise. I talked about Agile HR from

Kanban and Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata are really made for each others. Håkan Forss has already written a lot about that; even made it exciting using Lego. So, I just want to re-inforce this by adding my point of view and an illustration. For a team to evolve towards a specific vision of excellence, it must start working towards

I have been working as a consultant for about 6 years by now and under that time there is one thing that has had me really frustrated: how do I make it stick? Success It usually worked like this: I introduce some measure of Agile to setup a project to succeed or to make an

Here are the slides from my keynote Starting Start Finishing from the LeanKanban Nordic conference.

Thanks for the great response! It seems like this was exactly the type of stuff people needed to hear! Some of the most tweeted quotes from the presentation:

• “Organizations with slack are faster than organizations where the goal is to keep people busy all the time.”
• “Those who can’t say no to anything, are those who burn-out and must say no to everything”
• “Time is free! You get 24hrs per day!”
• “I wanted a long term client because then I can see the consequences of the bad advice I’m giving” (hmmm…. maybe I shouldn’t have said that… lol)
• This tweet warmed my heart: “@henrikkniberg has totally done it for me today. I need to change my life! 🙂 #sssf13”

Below are some sample slides. I had a lot of fun drawing the pics for this presentation! Thanks for giving me an excuse to waste spend time on that 🙂

Oh, and before you ask. I used ArtRage (software) and Intuos5 (drawing tablet).

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I keep a close watch on these tests of mine I keep my Jenkins open all the time I see a defect coming down the line Because you’re mine, I stop the line A zero bug policy is the only valid way to look at quality, just like there should never be any broken windows

Those agile geeks think it is important to have so called retrospective meetings so that they can improve. But they should improve when we tell them to, right?

However, a tip to use if they persist in having those meetings during office hours, is to have some of your allies present and write a protocol and report to you. Video cam is even better.

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I have finally found the time to create a webbinar from the talk I did for “Från Krav till System 2012” conference about User Story Mapping. I attended the conference in October but managed to catch the flu for the January re-run and had to cancel. So here it is on Vimeo for those who

Februarinumret av tidskriften VD-tidningen har agilt ledarskap som trendspaning. Tidskriften är riktad till VD:ar och styrelseledamöter med en upplaga på runt 10 000. Den kallar sig själv “Varje VD:s bibel”. Inför numret blev jag intervjuad om min syn på agilt ledarskap.

Eftersom texten är lite svår att komma åt bjuder jag på ett par citat från den, som inleds med ingressen:

Kunden bestämmer. Chefen är coach och medarbetaren har makten och ansvaret. Agilt ledarskap är en filosofi som föddes bland mjukvarutvecklare och som nu sprider sig till andra kunskapsintensiva branscher. Målet? Att öka kundvärdet.

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If you don’t dare to stop the line, continuous integration might be waste. Here is the second part of my three-part series on building the quality in on the SmartBear blog. In the first post of this series, I wrote about Toyoda Sakichi, the founder of the Toyota industries, who invented a loom that would

We in the software industry are still far behind when it comes to automated quality checks. Toyoda Sakichi for example invented the automated loom with stop the line capability almost 100 years ago. I write more about that in my first blog in a three-part series on building the quality in on the SmartBear blog.

Agile India 2013 in Bangalore. Wow, what an awesome conference! I was amazed by the energy level of the participants, spent hours talking to people about all kinds of really interesting challenges. Based on the fully packed rooms and incredible feedback, it seems like my talks were exactly the kind of information people were looking

In software, one of our favorite tool to deal with uncertainty is iterations. But is it always the better option?

The last week I’ve got the question two times of how to address critical in deliveries from subcontractors. For example: hardware, preparation of land, machinery, buildings or third party platform updates.  How can these be addressed? Do iterations hold the answer? Are there better options?

Let me introduce lean flow thinking and show how it can be used to improve the outcome of critical third party in deliveries in your projects.

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Over lunch, the kids were griping a bit about how the winter vacation is too short, and how it should be MUCH longer! The vacation should be several weeks, or months, or even years! Imagine that!

So Mr Evil Coach Dad decided to try an idea on them 🙂

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Finns nu i bokform på Leanpub

Detta är den fjärde posten i en serie om agil HR “from the trenches”.

Del 1: Continuous investment
Del 2: Lägg ner utvecklingssamtalen
Del 3: Lön är rättvis ersättning – inte belöning
Del 4: Släng titlarna
Del 5: Ny kunskap – ett gemensamt ansvar, avsnitt 1
Del 6: Hitta rätt folk – släpp dem lös

Släng titlarna

Låt oss börja med två okontroversiella påståenden: Företag bygger på vertikala hierarkier och horisontell specialisering Ok?

Låt oss ta det en gång till.

Företag är hierarkier. Jag skriver här medvetet företag och inte organisationer i största allmänhet. Huruvida organisationer måste vara hierarkiska låter jag nämligen vara en öppen fråga, men företag är hierarkier, per definition.

Det finns förvisso många olika teorier om varför företag finns, men i princip alla går ut på att förklara varför människor som utför aktiviteter på en marknad “väljer” att karva ut en bit av denna ekonomiska aktivitet och där slopa marknadsmekanismerna.

Huruvida skälet till detta är att det minskar transaktionskostnaderna, eller att det löser problem med så kallade externa effekter (marknadsmisslyckanden), eller för att det ökar effektiviteten i hantering av olika egendomar, eller för att det ger makt att hantera ekonomiskt överskott, eller att det helt enkelt ligger i den mänskliga naturen att dominera andra, spelat för vårt resonemang här ingen roll.

Poängen är att kärnan i företag är att någon (företagaren) skriver långsiktiga kontrakt med en eller flera (anställda) som avsäger sig vissa av sina friheter för att i stället bli företagarens agenter. Som en av pristagarna till Sveriges Riksbanks pris i ekonomi till Alfred Nobels minne sammanfattar: Företagaren “försöker utforma avtal med agenterna som ska stimulera dem att öka hans vinst, och han kontrollerar deras prestationer”.

Eller som Henry Ford uttryckte det i lite mer klartext: “Jag tänker betala er tillräckligt mycket för att ni ska finna det värt att acceptera mina diktat i jobbet”.

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Crisp has the luxury of working with small, medium, big and very big companies. We help through providing education. We coach and mentor projects, teams and organizations adopt and master the agile way of working. Last week we at Crisp invited a couple of our clients to participate in a round table discussion regarding agile transformations. The unifying theme were the challenges surrounding large scale agile implementations.

We at Crisp offered a platform and forum to share and learn in a neutral and safe environment. Four companies attended. One to four participants from each company. The participants were directly involved, and in one way or the other, responsible for the agile transformation taking place in their respective company. The size of the department or company involved in the change varied from 300 – 1500 people.

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A cross-functional team I was working with last year had three testers offshore in India. The rest of the team (about 15 people) was co-located here in Stockholm.

Some team members had a nagging feeling that they could go so much faster if the testers also moved to Stockholm so they went to their boss and asked. The reply was that testers are so much less expensive, by a factor 2.3, so it was not possible, unless they could settle with fewer testers.

So they decided to do an experiment for a few months. They moved one of the testers from India to Stockholm and dropped the other two testers (re-allocating the other two to other teams) to see how that would work.

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Order the Evil Coach’s Fake Burndown Ruler ™ TODAY! With this brand new innovative plastic ruler you can now help your team create awesome Sprint Burndowns. Every day! Every sprint!

It’s fast, it’s cheap and as a bonus you get rid of some “waste”. The Evil Coach’s Fake Burndown Ruler ™ makes the daily estimation of remaining work unnecessary.

The Scrum Master no longer needs to do the painstaking exercise of manually adding up the hours on all the post-its. Simply hold up the ruler on your chart and draw you burndown! It’s that simple! If you are lucky, the Daily Scrum is over in less than 90 seconds.

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The software industry is going through a shift of mindset.

Agile basically solved the problem of how to deliver software. Most any company that applies an agile method and mindset can get working software out the door. Now, the biggest waste in software development seems to be building the wrong product, or the wrong features.

“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all” -Peter Drucker

This insight has given rise to methods and techniques such as Lean Startup, Impact Mapping, Story Mapping, Feature Injection, etc. But is there a common denominator, a set of underlying principles?

On Feb 11, Gojko Adzic organized a full-day meetup in London with people deeply engaged in this issue, people like Jeff Patton, Mary Poppendieck, Ingrid Domingues, Chris Matts and others who have been inventing and spreading techniques for dealing with the how-to-build-the-right-stuff issue.

It was a very inspiring day! We compared our different approaches and experiences, extracted the core principles, and (to our surprise) managed to condense it into this shared message:

Great results happen when:
1. People know why they are doing their work.
2. Organizations focus on outcomes and impacts rather than features.
3. Teams decide what to do next based on immediate and direct feedback from the use of their work.
4. Everyone cares.

There. So now just go do it! 🙂
Actually, if you want a more detailed description of each point see Gojko’s post.

Posts from the other participants:

• Gojko Adzic – The February Revolution
• Karl Scotland – Heuristics for building the Right Thing

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Every organization needs to find it’s path, where to go next. Or it can choose just go “wherever” 🙂  But let’s imagine your want to grasp the state of your hope, dreams and future of your creative people to understand what opportunities to grasp and which to let go of. Let’s imagine you need to do that among a group of self going free radicals, working in different places that does not regularly meet. Wait- that sounds like Crisp 🙂  Let me share how we grasped our future vision.

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Here are the slides from the Jfokus talk that Anders Ivarsson and I did on Scaling Agile @ Spotify.