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from the Crisp Consultants

Continue reading: Agile @ Home (AgileEE keynote)

Agile @ Home (AgileEE keynote)

Here are the slides for my third(!) keynote at Agile Eastern Europe. The guy who was supposed to do the afternoon keynote couldn’t make it, so I was invited to jump up and do another one (talked about Spotify, but I don’t yet have permission to publish those slides, sorry). And then that one finished early, so I filled in the last 20 minutes with this short talk about Agile @ Home. Three keynotes in one day must be some kind of record 🙂

Thanks for listening, and glad to see that so many of you were so excited about the idea of using Agile outside of work 🙂

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Continue reading: Lean from the Trenches keynote @ AgileEE, Kiev

Lean from the Trenches keynote @ AgileEE, Kiev

Here are the slides for my keynote “Lean from the Trenches” at Agile Eastern Europe, Kiev. And here is the book/ebook, in case you want more details. Thanks for attending!

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Continue reading: Interview with Christopher Avery

Interview with Christopher Avery

In April this year we had Christopher Avery at Crisp giving his two days workshop Creating Result Based Teams. I read Christopher’s book about creating effective teams a few years ago which I found very inspiring and it was loaded with a lot of wisdom about working with teams. I was therefore very excited to

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Continue reading: User Story Mapping: konsten at dela upp kravbilden pĂ„ “rĂ€tt” sĂ€tt

User Story Mapping: konsten at dela upp kravbilden pĂ„ “rĂ€tt” sĂ€tt

Nu finns OH-bilderna tillgĂ€ngliga för min presentation om User Story Mapping pĂ„ NFI’s “Krav till System 2012” konferens pĂ„ Slide Share.Konferensen den 9 oktober Ă€r fullbokad (200 personer) men en ny omgĂ„ng planeras in januari pĂ„ grund av att sĂ„ mĂ„nga ville deltag. HĂ„ll koll pĂ„ NFIs webbsida för mer info.Inom kort tĂ€nker jag skriva

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Continue reading: Analog Clock Revisited

Analog Clock Revisited

Screenshot of the analog clockI have been playing around with JavaFX on and off since it came out and I got really inspired by Per’s blog post about the analog clock. So I decided to spend my time at the Crisp Hack Summit trying to improve Per’s design both in code and visually.

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Continue reading: LĂ€gg ner!

LĂ€gg ner!


Septembernumret för tidskriften Personal och ledarskap har utvecklingssamtal som tema. Tidskriften Àr medlemstidning för Sveriges HR-förening och Sveriges ledande tidskrift inom personal och human resources. Inför numret blev jag intervjuad om den frÄgan eftersom jag som utvecklingschef pÄ Atex Polopoly lade ner utvecklingssamtalen.

Artikeln finns hÀr, men man mÄste man vara medlem för att komma Ät den.

Eftersom texten Àr lite svÄr att komma Ät bjuder jag pÄ ett par citat frÄn den, som inleds med ingressen:

Peter Antman, konsult pĂ„ Crisp kallar utvecklingssamtal för ”TjĂ€nstemĂ€nnens tidsstudieman”. Som utvecklingschef tog han ett drastiskt grepp – och lade ner utvecklingssamtalet.

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Continue reading: Agile Evening with Alistair and Henrik

Agile Evening with Alistair and Henrik

On Tuesday Oct 2 Alistair Cockburn and I are hosting a free evening event at Crisp. I’ll be talking a bit about my current client Spotify, which has a cool scaling approach with “tribes”, “squads”, “guilds”, and “chapters”. Then Alistair will talk about whatever topic the participants choose. Then we’ll have discussions and finger food. Feel free to

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Continue reading: Interviewed by InfoQ

Interviewed by InfoQ

Here’s an interview by InfoQ. I talked about my books, my travels, the agile manifesto translation project, coaching coaches, agile trends, and various other stuff. The interviewer (Craig Smith) had a great set of questions, and I’m pretty happy with my answers 🙂

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Continue reading: From therapy to continuous improvements

From therapy to continuous improvements

I had recently a conversation with a business partner of mine, Erik Andrén at Macmann Berg. We were working on the material for the next workshop in a leadership program we have at a client. This time the workshop was about coaching, both in general terms but also from an agile perspective. Erik has a background as a therapist but is nowadays working as an organization and management consultant. At our meeting he described his view about coaching based on a therapy model he had used as a therapist, and we then had  a very interesting discussion about the model and the connection to continuous improvement of teams and organizations. This post discuss this connection since I believe we have a lot to learn from how therapists approaches patients when trying to help them create a better life for themselves.

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Continue reading: Backbone: Orderly JavaScript

Backbone: Orderly JavaScript

Backbones aren’t the usual fare for tech blogs, but if you’ve been following frontend development, then you’ll have heard of Backbone.js. From their site: Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions,views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.Continue reading

Continue reading: JavaScript Development – A Year Later

JavaScript Development – A Year Later

As some of you may remember, a year ago I took Q3 off to focus on building a JavaScript application. I learned a lot especially about Node.js. Yassal and I have a pet project called FeedMe that we have worked on over the years. FeedMe implements a shopping list for us to use when doing

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Continue reading: Advanced Agile with Alistair Cockburn, Oct 1-2

Advanced Agile with Alistair Cockburn, Oct 1-2

On Oct 1-2 Alistair Cockburn is in Stockholm teaching Advanced Agile together with me. He has been here twice before and course reviews have been great! Alistair has a very pragmatic down-to-earth style, while maintaining the theoretical depth needed for an advanced course. He’s not only a Fun Guy, he’s the guy who (literally) wrote

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Continue reading: Using CloudBees for teaching XP practices

Using CloudBees for teaching XP practices

We are doing a course called “Certified Scrum Developer”.  We are of course proud of being one of the few eligible by the Scrum Alliance to hold such a course. But what matters most to us is teaching some modern development practices. The certificate bit is more of a bonus.

Crisp had recently its fifth installment of a code camp, the “Crisp Hack Summit”. It is an occasion for everyone at Crisp to go bananas on some project of their liking. We took the chance to work on the technical platform for the CSD course.  We know from experience that you can loose a lot of valuable lecture time if  the technical environment decides to hassle. Murphy, will you be there?

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Continue reading: Country Ambassador for Agile Testing Days 2012

Country Ambassador for Agile Testing Days 2012

A while ago I was asked to become one of the Swedish country ambassadors for the Agile Testing Days 2012 conference. I said yes, because I think it’s a great conference. As country ambassador, I help in promoting the conference. I chose to do it, because I think it’s a good conference and I already recommend it to my friends.
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Continue reading: How to hire a real star developer

How to hire a real star developer

What makes the difference between a star developer and a day coder? First of all, with a star developer I don’t mean star as in ”famous”, rather as in ”elite”.  And, a day coder is OK to be, no disrespect here. We need you as much as we need the elite.

My point here is that if you wish to hire a real star, you need to know what to look for.

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Continue reading: Min första kurs

Min första kurs

Jag har precis lagt upp min första kurs hĂ€r pĂ„ Crisp – Testning av webbapplikationer med Selenium WebDriver. I detta blogginlĂ€gg tĂ€nkte jag förklara lite mer ingĂ„ende vad kursen Ă€r tĂ€nkt att lĂ€ra ut. Mina kolleger har ocksĂ„ kommit med vĂ€rdefull feedback och frĂ„gor som sĂ€kert kan dyka upp igen.
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Continue reading: Window, Scene and Node coordinates in JavaFX

Window, Scene and Node coordinates in JavaFX

Here is an illustration on how the coordinate systems of the screen and JavaFX objects relate to each other. It is a great thing with JavaFX that you seldom bother about screen coordinates. Instead you rely on layout managers to position your nodes on screen. A node has its own coordinate system, should you like to do some positioning, e.g. in a game.
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Continue reading: Light-weight problem solving template

Light-weight problem solving template

Here’s my default approach to problem solving and organizational change. Basically a light-weight version of the A3 problem solving approach and Toyota Kata.

(BTW my keynote at ALE2012 next week is on a similar topic: “Everybody wants Change, but nobody likes to Be Changed”)

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Continue reading: A Crisp New Web

A Crisp New Web

As a visitor to the Crisp Blog, you may have noticed that we’ve launched a new web site on www.crisp.se?

Apart from a new design, we’ve also changed CMS from imCMS by imCode to open source WordPress.

Old site, based on imCMS
New site, based on WordPress

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Continue reading: Lean from the Trenches @ Agile2012, Dallas

Lean from the Trenches @ Agile2012, Dallas

Here are the slides for my talk “Lean from the Trenches” at Agile2012. And here is the book/ebook, in case you want more details (unfortunately sold out in the conference bookstore). Thanks for attending!

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Continue reading: Web Whiteboard – the simplest way to write and draw together online

Web Whiteboard – the simplest way to write and draw together online

OK, nothing beats face to face. But suppose you’re not in the same location – because you’re on the phone or a skype call – and you still want to write and draw together. Or you’re on a distributed team and want a simple shared workspace, just like you would if you were in the same

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Continue reading: An Analog Clock in JavaFX

An Analog Clock in JavaFX

JavaFX is great fun but there are so many ways of doing things. You can use FXML, you can use images to build things piecewise or you can write code for a live, scalable design.  The latter is the case here where I show how I created an analog clock using Java code.

Analog Clock with desktop in background
The clock is designed with the clockwork in a separate class and the face in another.

This text shows some example JavaFX code in Java slightly above introductory level. You should have your development set up and done at least a first program.

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Continue reading: R<sup>3</sup> – den agila formeln

R3 – den agila formeln

För ett halvt decennium sedan nĂ€r jag skulle börja som utvecklingschef pĂ„ Polopoly kĂ€nde jag att jag behövde ett verktyg som hjĂ€lpte mig att sammanfatta andemeningen och de praktiska konsekvenserna av Agile, Scrum, XP och Lean. Var och en av dessa innehĂ„ller en rad – i viss mĂ„n överlappande – begrep, som Ă€r tydliga och om man kan dem inte sĂ„ svĂ„ra att förklara – om man har mĂ„nga timmar pĂ„ sig. Men hur minns man hela denna komplexa vĂ€v? Hur kan man uttrycka den enkelt, snabbt och koncist?

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Continue reading: Self-organizing a 50 person party

Self-organizing a 50 person party

Sunshine. Over 35 adults and 15 kids milling about, playing and socializing. Some down by the beach eating snacks and windsurfing. Work going on in the background: Pototoes being boiled, tables being set, drinks brought out, BBQ lit. Nobody is giving orders, things are just happening. Looks rather chaotic. But then at 16:30, precisely on

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Continue reading: Responsibility the Agile way

Responsibility the Agile way

I am a teacher of Agile methodologies which means that I teach collective responsibility. I often get the response that ”everybody’s responsibility is no one’s responsibility”. To make everyone really take responsibility we need to define what we mean with responsibility the Agile way. Here is at least my version:

We are all responsible for contributing with our intelligence and senses for the best of the product and the process. We are also responsible doing what we have said we will do and being transparent with our progress.

If you think that is too fluffy, here comes more details about what I think Agile responsibility means:

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Continue reading: Setting-up a Kanban system: the picture

Setting-up a Kanban system: the picture

I would like to share a picture that I have beeing using a lot when helping a team setup a Kanban system. I just love good pictures. They are so direct and can help you grasp a whole context and how to act on it. Actually, a dream improvement of the A3 thinking would be

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Continue reading: How to align Teams Priorities after Re-org?

How to align Teams Priorities after Re-org?

My current customer went through a re-organization of the whole IT department in search for a faster, more value-centered IT. The ambition looks great on paper and the future will tell if it helped. Anyway, a lot of teams were disolved and new teams were formed in the wake of the change. These new teams

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Continue reading: Speaking at NFI’s “FrĂ„n Krav till System 2012” Conference

Speaking at NFI’s “FrĂ„n Krav till System 2012” Conference

As you may have noticed, I am quite into User Story Mapping right now. I find it an excellent way to establish a constructive dialog between the customer(s) and the team, as well as between the different specialists within the team. Such a dialog is the best insurance to get the “right” product/service that will

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Continue reading: A New Look at IID

A New Look at IID

I was quite impressed by last year’s Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 (LKCE11) conference. The speakers were great and the organization of the conference was outstanding. So, I decided to try to repeat my feat from last year by getting invited as a speaker. Just to make it bit more challenging, this year my contribution

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