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:
- Fax arrives and is printed by the fax machine
- Paper is picked up by a person and carried to the scanner where is it digitized.
- 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.
High WIP invalidates prioritization
The more items we have in progress at once (WIP), the less important our initial prioritization is. When we work on one item at a time then items get done in the order we started them so we are completing them in the order of most importance.
YAGNI (You Aren’t Going to Need It)
YAGNI (You Aren’t Going to Need It) is a principle that keeps us from over-engineering the system. Build today only those things that you need today. Things that we need tomorrow, we can build tomorrow.
Hot-fixes
It used to be common that we would have two different ways to deploy something to a production environment.
Perceptual positions & Halloween
I had a client once that went all out for Halloween. Just about everyone showed up in costumes and there were prizes for individual or team costumes. At the time I was there, it was commonplace for work to be outsourced to India so my group decided to do a team costume of “IT outsourced to Mars”.
Hybrid teams
For decades before covid, were were already using a hybrid model. We’d outsource part of our development teams to other countries, like India. We’d then have part of our teams collocated in our offices and some people calling in from that other country.