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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.
“Everything that’s old is new again”
When we look at the agile technical practices, there’s a tendency to believe that these things are new and unproven and nothing could be further from the truth.
Should remote workers have cameras on?
For remote workers, the issue of cameras on or off keeps coming up. There’s no question that having cameras on allows for much richer interactions. We can start to interpret body language and can pick up on so many subtle hints that just aren’t possible when the cameras are off.
Fixation errors
Back in the 1990’s, it wasn’t uncommon for people to check code into the repository that didn’t work. Sometimes it wouldn’t even compile.
Learning to say no
A team I was coaching was coming up on an important deadline. Specific functionality had been promised for a certain date that was now eight weeks away, and they wanted to know if they were going to make it.
All we are is change
We often hear that people are “resistant to change”, and yet as a friend of mine is fond of saying “all we are is change”.
Ability to deliver quickly
I was talking to a team that maintained a year-end batch process. Their code only ran once a year, on the first day of the new fiscal year.
How developers and testers think
One of the first times I’d seriously paired with a tester on code, we were working on some date/time logic.
Zero Bugs (Defects)
For many people, the notion of Zero Bugs seems like an unsustainable dream and yet the teams that do it are tremendously successful.
Validating assumptions
I was coaching a team once and I made a suggestion to one of the developers about something they could do differently. The actual suggestion isn’t important to the story so I’ll ignore that.
Premature optimization
In the early days of Java, I recall reading a book talking about performance characteristics of various things in Java. One of the tidbits that I latched onto was the suggestion that the default size of a Hashtable object was inefficient if it had to grow in size beyond the default.