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All of this content used to be spread over three different blogs at three different domains and it's now been merged into one. Why was it ever three? Because at the time it seemed reasonable that each of them was for a different audiences, and yet over time I've found that the lines between topic areas got blurrier and tended to overlap. So now they're all together in one place.
If you encounter things that seem broken, let me know and I'll get them fixed.
Browse by topic area:
| Category | Formerly found at |
|---|---|
| Psychology & Behaviour | UnconsciousAgile.com |
| Flow, Kanban, Scrum | ImprovingFlow.com |
| Metrics and Forecasting | ImprovingFlow.com & MikesHardMetrics.com |
| Technical Practices | AgileTechnicalExcellence.com |
There's a lot here and if you're not sure where to start, here are some popular starting points. From these, you'll find crosslinks to even more topics. Enjoy!
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Neuroscience / Psychology
- Psychological Safety: An overview. For the science, see the SAFETY model. For Google's research into why it's important for high performing teams, see Project Aristotle. What happens when we don't have that safety?
- Anxiety and Stress: For the science, see Polyvagal Theory or a description of some neuroscience, illustrated with a bear encounter. To let go of that anxiety, see the Anti-Anxiety toolkit.
- Generally more about the brain: Cognitive bias, motivation, default mode network, systems 1 & 2 and neurotransmitters (chemicals) that drive behaviour.
- Language patterns: Why language is so important, and Clean Language, a specific language pattern that has excellent application for coaching.
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How to improve...
- Meetings: The common problems with meetings. Improving the standup / daily coordination meeting. Retrospectives are covered in my popular video course Retrospective Magic. Then what if your people won't participate?
- Improving learning: with neuroscience and LEGO.
- Improvement: Continuous improvement in general. Understanding the metaphor of "lowering the water level".
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Flow of value
- Metrics: Flow metrics, probabilistic forecasting.
- Waste: Overview of waste. Understanding the cost of interruptions, and the kinds of waste that gets in the way of flow.
- Work in progress (WIP): Setting initial WIP limits. What to do when we're overwhelmed with WIP
- Metrics and Forecasting: All of these have their own category now.
- Technical practices: Continuous integration, TDD as design, and ensemble programming.
- Ensuring we're building the right thing: Slicing stories and epics. Understanding the context of what we're building. Knowing how to prioritize that work.
- Something fun: The millennial whoop, and inattentional blindness.
- Recommended reading: I'm often asked for book recommendationsbook recommendations.
Imprints in the ground
After a forest fire has passed, some trees will be left standing but scorched from the fire. Others, however, will have disappeared entirely. Sometimes the trunk and then the roots will continue to smolder until there is nothing left but ash, and then with some rain, even the ash will disappear.
When “make it visible” is the wrong approach
My general approach to fixing almost any organizational problem starts with “make it visible”. Make the problem visible enough and sometimes other people will step in and fix it without any effort on my part.
Delivery pressure
I once engaged with a team that had just finished the development of a new service and were blocked, waiting for legal approval, before they could turn it on. They effectively had nothing to do and so management thought this was a good time to bring some coaches in.
Why people don’t use Monte Carlo
A few weeks ago there was a question on Reddit, asking people who don’t use Monte Carlo forecasts, why they don’t.
Controlling emotions
Brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor talks about the 90 second rule for emotions. She describes the chemical release of an emotion only lasting 90 seconds. Effectively that means that if you’re feeling sad or angry, you’re only feeling that for 90 seconds at a time.
Close those bugs
Do you have bugs that have been open for a long time and that are low priority? Cancel them.
What to measure
I frequently talk to clients about metrics, and there is usually an understandable desire to measure too much. “Let’s measure these fifty things everyday so that we know if everything is ok.”
Code coverage revisited
I’ve had several conversations recently with people arguing that mandated code coverage numbers are a positive thing. For example “all code must have 90% code coverage”.
Choice blindness
The excellent book “The Illusionist Brain: The Neuroscience of Magic” talks about an experiment done with supermarket customers, where they were asked to sample and then choose between two different kinds of jam. After that decision was made, they were asked to try the jam they had selected again and then explain why they had selected it.
Jira API: Sprints
If you’re extracting data from a scrum board then at some point, you’ll need to extract sprint data, which is stored in two different places, inconsistently.