Crisp's BlogPage 22

I am currently working as a Scrum Master for multiple teams at Projectplace in Stockholm, Sweden. One of those teams is the Mobile Team. They are developing Action Boards for both iOS (iPad) and Android platforms. These Action Boards are also available in the Customer Preview of the Projectplace web service. Both Web Team and Mobile Team share the same API’s. The iPad app is planned to be released in 2-3 Sprints from now.
This case study can be written from many perspectives, but in this article I am going to focus on how we are working with the challenges of having a distributed Scrum team.

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I have been reading Gamestorming lately and found that I’ve practiced many of the games and followed most of the principles of game design already. However, there are a lot of new things in that book that I’d like to try. Today I tried drawing a Visual Agenda for the first time. I think it was well

I just finished working on a short presentation that I will give this week about agile and lean development. In the presentation I display a few quotes by Deming regarding management and the system perspective managers should have in their work. One of the quotes is the famous one stating that 94% of all improvement possibilities are in the system and only 6% by special cause (in other words, only 6% are caused by the individuals).

“I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to the proportions something like this: 94% belongs to the system (responsibility of management), 6% special”

This got me thinking about the 1-on-1 and performance review meetings that I have used at previous job positions, and of which I have written about before in this blog.

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Last month market the launch of the Kanban Accreditation scheme.  Let’s give our view including why we have chosen to engage ourselves as members of the advisory board.

Why the Kanban accreditation scheme?
Kanban is a word that needs meaning. So what meaning do we want people to connect with the word? This matters (to us..) . Stumbling upon about kanban classes declaring it will help you “resource optimize”  it makes me think there is a need. (To any unfamiliar reader.. kanban helps you improve flow, quite a different thing..)

Any accredited class will contain some core messages that we care to share. The best way we could think of to make sure that messages is good was to engage ourselves in the process 🙂

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My mother’s sister is past 80 and still running her own company. Naturally, I do her IT-support since -95 when she realised that it was important to utilise a computer for her business.
The other day I was installing an invoice program for her. She has been using an Excel template, designed by my wife. But new regulations on VAT made her go for specialised software. She choose a well established product. It turned into a lesson for me.
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Mercurial is my first serious foray into distributed version control systems (dvcs). When I started gathering my notes for this entry I knew that this would be a really negative review of Mercurial. The first version control system I actually liked was Perforce. Several years later I encountered Subversion, it took a while to adjust but eventually I grew really fond of it. For the past 3 months, I’ve been using Mercurial… definitely not impressed. Or so I thought, but as I looked through my cons, I saw pros all over the place. So here are my [not-so-negative-after-all] thoughts on using Mercurial!

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Surprisingly often an organization exposes itself to a multitude of risks by not knowing enough about its systems, infrastructure, and applications. This doesn’t manifest itself as a lack of “enterprise architecture” documents (while some could help). The implications are far more down-to-earth. Does any of this sound familiar?

• Upgrading both hardware and software is unproportionally difficult and the outcome isn’t predictable
• There exist tasks that must be performed by a specific person
• There exist artifacts that everybody thinks need to be there, but no one dares to touch, delete, or upgrade
• Introduction of new employees is difficult

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Have you ever wondered why Spring MVC supports @RequestParam but not @RequestAttribute? There are probably plenty of philosophical reasons for this – good or bad. But if your hands are tied and you’re stuck with, let’s say a CMS, that insists on passing context as request attributes what are you going to do? As usual,

Every organization has its culture that you can see when you observe people at their daily work. This observed culture should be aligned with, or congruent to, the official organizational culture. In reality there is often a gap between the intended culture and the real observed one. For example, management might say that quality is above everything else, while pushing  to release new versions of low quality product riddled with defects. Or an organization touts its focus on learning and removing impediments, while the reality is the complete opposite. This post discusses the impact and importance of cultural alignment.

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Great retrospectives are amazing, they have a way of really getting a team to work together and to energize them ahead of a new challenge. But even a great retrospective becomes boring and routine after a while. Luckily, there are a lot of us at Crisp working with different teams, so we got together this evening for a peer to peer exchange about retrospectives. We each got to pitch retrospective exercises and games that we’d like to try, or that we wanted to share. We ended up discussing and trying out 9 of them. Here’s a summary  in case you’d like to try some of them out at your next retrospective!

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Continuous improvement is a central part of both agile and lean; it’s the way to increase the productivity and ensure that the organization delivers an ever increasing level of value to the customers and the organization. Lean is derived from Toyota and the Toyota Way, which has inspired a lot of companies in the western world in their quest to increase their productivity as well. But we often focuse on the techniques and practices and do not see the more fundamental parts of the Toyota system that enable their very high level of improvement each year.

I worked at a company that tried to implement the Toyota Way and reach the same level of continuous improvment with what I believe to be the wrong focus. My company estblished a goal to reach seven improvements per employee in average per year. A goal that was inspired from a report that stated that Toyota implemented 1,000,000 improvements per year, which of course, is very high. This is one of many aspects that show why Toyota has managed to grow they way they have done during the last 50 years.

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I’ve published another book! This one’s called “Lean from the Trenches“. It is about how we scaled a 60-person project by combing techniques from Kanban, Scrum, and XP. I chose this title because it really it illustrates how to put Lean principles into practice in a software project, especially the notion of an end-to-end Kanban

Hi Brazil! I’m happy to say that I’ll be visiting you in a few weeks. I’ll be involved in two public events together with Samuel Crescêncio: Feb 10: Public seminar about Lean & Agile (in Florianopolis). More info coming soon. Feb 13-14:  Certified ScrumMaster course in São Paulo. The course will be in English, but Samuel

Hi! Tim Yevgrashyn has made an amazing job translating my 10 kanban board article (included poorly crafted English 🙂 into Russian. Thanks! It is available here! I did study Russian once, but it’s a far cry now from where I left it. Proud over:  Once fooling a guard at the Kremlin tickett stand that I

Most companies today uses differentiated salaries for their employees. This is something that is in general considered to be the way it must be; the companies needs the system in order to attract and keep talent employees to secure future profits for the business. This was also my belief until a few years ago; I thought that companies should pay more to the ones that produce more value to the business. Even if I saw cases where I thought people got too big salary increases and others too low at the annual salary review, I believed that in the long run the salaries would reflect the true values of each employee.

But during the last few years I have started to think differently. I do not believe in differentiated salaries any more, at least not for knowledge work like product development. There is too much evidence that the system you need to have in order to enable salary reviews each year, is impeding the progress of the business and lowers its result and profit. Knowledge work is based around motivated employees that have the support and environment they need to be creative during their daily work. Appraisals system, which is needed to implement differentiated salaries, is demotivating for the employees instead, and is therefore working against the high performance of the organization. Also, differentiated salaries is created under the belief that it is external motivations that drive people to be high performers, but as Pink describes in his book, Drive, it is autonomy, mastery and purpose that motivates people, i.e. intrinsic aspects instead.

This is also like Dr. Deming says in his book Out of the Crisis:

Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review… The idea of a merit rating is alluring. the sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise

My own experiencealign to this as well, both as an employee and as a manager, where I personally have witnessed the negative effect the system has had on its people and the company.

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In Feb 2001 17 thought leaders from the software community met at a ski resort in Utah to discuss and compare notes on how to succeed with software development. These people had independently been creating new methods such as Scrum, XP, and Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM). During the meeting, they discovered a strong common ground: a shared vision of how to succeed with software development. This became known as the Agile Manifesto. After the meeting they agreed on twelve principles behind these values.

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I am first and foremost an agile guy. I try to be as agile as possible at my assignments, and I coach and teach agile ways. But I know that there still are several companies that use RUP, and this is written for them.
As I argued in my previous blog post, you can do RUP and be agile. In this blog post, I will give you my top 3 RUP anti-patterns that I have experienced at various projects, and often enough the solution to them is to work in a more iterative way as the creators of RUP intended (more agile if you like). If you want to know what you can do about them, read on. If you can top them, please share your experiences with me 🙂

Doing the same thing every day for a long time can get boring. You might even forget why you started doing it in the first place; you just keep doing the same thing, and don’t reflect on what you are getting out of it. The scrum meeting at my current client had gotten into this rut, it had devolved into a status meeting. The participants routinely answered the three questions; what I did yesterday, what I’m going to do today and what impediments I have, but they didn’t really tell each other much about what they had actually done, or what they were planning to do today. They almost never reported any impediments either.

This team has been using Scrum for almost two years. It is a very well working team from a technical perspective; they produced an even amount of user stories each sprint with a high level of quality. But they had lost the energy in the scrum implementation. They felt that they could do more; that they could perform even better if they just could just somehow improve their scrum implementation.

We started working on the daily scrum meeting. Our goal was to use the meeting to give the team a good start to the day with energy and desire to start working on the tasks discussed during the meeting.  In order to do this we made a few changes, both large and small in how we perform the meeting.

• The structure of the scrum board
• The process of how we perform the scrum meeting
• The location of the scrum board and the meeting
• The metric that we uses to monitor how we are improving the meeting

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Here’s a useful simulation that illustrates how bad multitasking is, and how easily we get drawn into it. The article is primarily written for teachers and facilitators who want to know how this simulation works and how to facilitate it successfully. However, anybody else reading the article will probably gain an appreciation for the issue

I’ve updated the ol’ 10 kanban board samples.  Some additions: From marketing to released product – sample kanban board Release manager kanban Operations – online platform maintenance You’ll find the kanban samples here. /Mattias ps: new link! If you get “file is damaged” – try to reload page once.

In April Reza and I traveled to Teheran to teach the first CSM course in Iran. It was my first time in Iran, we had a great time! We had 30 participants in the class and they were absolutely amazing! They spent at least 30 minutes after class discussing, taking pictures, and joking around.

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The past few days at my current coaching assignment have been great. We created a new backlog for all work they need to accomplish in the months ahead. The meetings where we laid the foundation for the future were marked by a high degree of collaboration between the participants and energy. It has been really fun to work with them so far.

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Kanban kick-start has been updated. What’s new? Not much but I met David J Anderson and after that meeting I felt I wanted to make some changes to be more compliant with the content of his course “Kanban for Managers”. Please enjoy. http://www.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Kanban-kick-start-v2.pdf If you like to have a version with the changes visualized, please let

I have just, as a guest blogger, posted a new post at the blog owned by the development team at TV4 Digital Media; “Några övningar vi gjort under retrospektiven”. It´s a post, in swedish, describing a few retrospective exercises we have done during the last sprints. I’m contracted by TV4 Digial Media as an Agile

Here are my Kanban Intro slides from my Leaders of Agile webinar together with Kent Beck and Aslam Khan on Oct 27. Thanks for participating!

BTW when I did this presentation I was sitting in a small hotel room in Tokyo with 4 sleeping kids. Due to timezone differences it was the middle of the night. Fortunately nobody woke up 🙂

Sample slides:

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I made a presentation to introduce agile and lean to some colleagues and customers during Sogeti Inspiration’s Day in Borlänge. I wanted the attendants to get something concrete with them from my talk, something they could apply directly whitout any certified process, method or tool. Something that would start their journey towards delighting their customers.

This is just a blog post to point to my presentation of the aforementioned subject. Or should I say, “prezi”, because there are no slides, just a big picture with a path through it. That’s is the way of Prezi presentations and as a first timer, I felt liberated. Slides are so dull!

The content of my presentation is aimed at those with some experience of unit testing that would like a dose of philosophy on testing styles. Classical or Mockist? State or Behavior? Also, if you are not that familiar with Mockito, take this prezi for a spin!

Here is the link to the prezi! That’s all for now.

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Yuval Yeret from Agile Sparks really liked a picture I made for the Sandvik’s case study “Igniting Change in 20 teams within 6 months”. The picture demonstrates the power of visualization and is the results of discussions with Johan Nordin from Sandvik. When he showed it to his colleagues they really got inspired and decided

Here are the slides for my Tokyo Scrum Gathering keynote “Everybody wants Change, but nobody likes to be changed“. Thanks for attending! Sample slides:

Back from Zurich. I presented at the ReForum, a gathering for requirement engineers and product owners, arranged by SAQ. My topic was “Exploring requirement options with kanban” and more specific, what you can do if you do have a more complex development scenario (ie. large customer base, not just one team..) I always enjoy coming