Crisp's BlogPage 23

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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:

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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

There’s a lot that could be said about metrics. I’m quite skeptical in general in the value metrics gives you in product development or running a department/organization. At the same time I feel that metrics could help you understand the health and status of your group/organization or project, and to know the effects the changes you implement have on the performance. During the years I have used a lot of different software metrics, both targeting the product development performance and the code and design quality. Most of them have been quite complex, and they have in reality given me little value or understanding of how things really are working.

But I have also used a few ones that I feel has helped me see things during product development, metrics that says something about the performance and also direct you to possible improvement areas. Below I briefly describe a few ones that I like.

• The happiness and stress indexes tells you about the health of the team
• The code duplication and test coverage tells you about the health of the code base
• The release burn down and lead time tells you about the health of the project goal

Continue reading

I had a conversation with some of my colleagues about what makes a good daily stand-up, here are some properties: Time-boxed (15 minutes) Everyone is engaged Synchronization is taking place Attention to problems People ask for help The conversation is about stuff that matters to most people, individual issues are postponed Anyone can lead the

Having mentioned the acronym “RUP” at Crisp a couple of times, I am starting to get a better understanding of how Harry Potter felt when he mentioned the name “Voldemort” (if you don’t know who Harry Potter is, just borrow the book from the nearest 13-year old and read it). What is it about RUP that has made agilistas scream in terror whenever mentioned? Is RUP a hideous beast that no one can work with, or is it actually a trainable pet that can be useful when treated right?

Continue reading

The team has its Scrum board as an information radiator. It is an excellent way of getting an overview of the sprint. But what about us, the product owners, don’t we need that too? Of course we do, we too have a need for an overview of our work and to radiate information. The stakeholders pass by and ask “what’s in next sprint”, “when will we migrate”. We’d like to just answer with a light gesture towards the wall. It is all there for everyone to see.

Let me tell you how our project owner board works, as an example.Continue reading

I have just finished reading a neat little book about functional programming for Java developers by Dean Wampler. The book is only sixty pages long so it’s a really fast reading. This is a book for Java programmers and others working in the object oriented paradigm that haven’t read about or done any functional programming before. If that fits you then this book may be a good choice to read. Otherwise, I recommend that you seek more advanced and in-depth books in the subject instead. But this text will not be a review of the book. I will instead comment on the use of the functional structure and its paradigm in languages like Java that is not designed for it.

Continue reading

I like travelling. But I don’t like being away from my family. So I decided to go on a Big Family Trip! And, happily, my family decided to join 🙂 We call it the Big Family Trip because we’re a Big Family (me & Sophia and Dave 8, Jenny 6, Emma 3, Peter 1), and because

I attended the Optimera STHLM conference this spring where SSL was a recurring theme. The speakers convincingly argued for more extensive use of SSL in websites. Consider that without SSL anyone can see what you read online, what you look at and what your interests are… I was pretty confident after the conference about setting up a website with SSL, and I got the chance to test it out soon after. In the process I discovered that sometimes it’s a bit tough to find information when you have a problem with the implementation, or when you want to learn more. So here’s a how-to guide with what I learned and links to the resources I used most. Maybe it’ll help you, and hopefully you can give me some feedback 🙂

So let’s get started!
Continue reading

Estimation of the effort to implement and deliver a set of functionality is an important but not always the most fun part of product development. Estimations are done at different detail levels during the project, for example the high level story estimation and the low level task estimation. It is a few years since I did task estimation; many times it is a waste of time doing low level estimations, so in the following text I will describe a technique that I like when estimating the user stories.

Continue reading

It turns out that I’ve gotten completely side tracked…or maybe not side tracked per se, but at least not completely focused on the client side of the Application. The past couple of weeks I’ve been engulfed in Node. Trying to figure out what it is, what I can do with it and obviously how I can test drive it. I found nodeunit which seemed to be a good testing framework candidate.

Continue reading

Hi! Just back from Devcon11 where I presented on techniques to improve flow. There is plenty to say here so had to limit the material in some way. Hope to come back to this subject again in the future. Anyway, here are the slides

After several years of running our blog on Pebble we’ve made the move to WordPress, and it’s pretty exciting! But how did we get here? It turns out that migrating a blog from an unsupported platform is not very difficult, all you need is a bit of programming know-how and in a couple of hours you’ll be migrated!

Pebble stores all of its data in XML files on the server, WordPress data can be imported from WordPress eXtended RSS format. XML to XML pretty straightforward, you just need to pick a language! I figured I would try out Groovy since it seemed to offer some nice api’s for processing and producing XML.
Continue reading

As I mentioned in my previous entry, the goal of my sabbatical is to build a JavaScript Application. Notice the emphasis is on Application. That is, I don’t intend to build a JavaEE web application with plenty of JavaScript. The goal is to build an Application in the browser. It will probably (eventually), communicate with a server side component for persistent storage and synchronization but for now, that’s secondary.
Continue reading

It is important to have members with excellent technical skills in most agile projects to succeed deliver desired customer value. But even more important is that the members have great collaborative and communication skills. Without the ability to collaborate efficiently the team will have a tough time to succeed with the project. The soft part of product development includes both how the members act against each other, but also how good they all are in introspectiveness and adaptability. They need this to be able to mature as a team compared to just being a bunch of individuals acting under a common project hat.

There are many ways you can improve your ability to inspect your own behavior and adapt and change it accordingly. Working together with others and asking them to give you feedback is one great way of improving yourselves. Last year I found, a bit surprisingly, another way of improving my skills in collaboration and team work; I took on a personal sport challenge with the goal to perform a race one year ahead. This challenge has learned me a lot about myself and has also improved my collaboration skills.

Continue reading