Mob mentality podcast

I was interviewed on the latest Mob Mentality Show, a podcast devoted to mob programming, also known as ensemble work or software teaming.

Only one ticket per work item

We should only have one ticket on the board for any given piece of work. This should be obvious and yet I see this problem on a regular basis.

Basic Flow Metrics

Flow metrics tell us about the activity in the system; how well is the work flowing. These are often the first metrics that I consider when trying to improve a system. I start here partially because these metrics are easier to collect than many others, and because I can still make many effective decisions based on just this.

Survivor Bias

“Survivor bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.”
— Wikipedia”

Cognitive Bias

It would be easy to think that all cognitive bias is a bad thing. When we hear people talking about it, it’s often in the context of the collection of biases that make up racism or sexism or other generally negative things. Yet, the truth is that cognitive bias is the way that our brain manages energy use and is overwhelmingly a positive thing for us.

Continuous improvement

Back in the days when faxing between companies was a popular thing, I recall a client that had a workflow like this:

  1. Fax arrives and is printed by the fax machine
  2. Paper is picked up by a person and carried to the scanner where is it digitized.
  3. Paper is immediately shredded because there was confidential information on it.

Focus on Value

Whatever we focus on, we’ll get more of. If we focus on the flow of value then we’ll get more value. If we focus on being busy then we’ll get more of that.

Visualizing Flow Efficiency

I’m playing around with visualizing flow efficiency in my JiraMetrics tool. Flow efficiency is the percentage of time that we’re actually adding value to the work item divided by the total time. So if a ticket is open for 10 hours but in that time we only spend 2 hours actually working on it then the flow efficiency would be 2 / 10 or 20%.

Looking for improvement

I was asked recently what things I’d look at to determine if a team or group is improving and there are three main areas. In all three cases, none of these prove that improvement is happening. What they do provide is a place to me to start asking questions so that I can discover more.