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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.
Technical Debt
The term “technical debt” is widely used in the industry even if there isn’t a clear definition of it and almost nobody uses the term in the way Ward Cunningham meant when he first coined it. It’s most commonly used to describe things in our environment, usually but not always code, that slow us down. These are things that are working - not bugs - but that are implemented in a poor way that makes them more difficult to understand or modify.
Pre-requisites for Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is a process of constantly seeking out ways to improve and optimize performance, processes, and overall organizational success. An agile environment hinges on this notion of continuous improvement. We don’t expect to be perfect today but we do expect to be improving over time.
Multiple boards for a single team
Many teams assume that they have to fit all their work on to one board and that’s not true. Kanban boards are there to help you visualize and manage the system. If one board can do that well then one board is fine. If it would be easier or better to visualize and manage across multiple boards then that’s what you should do.
Who should define the workflow?
We regularly talk about optimizing the workflow but we don’t talk as often about who should be doing that optimization. Should it be the manager, or some dedicated process specialist, or should we be leaving it up to the team to figure out their own workflow?
One Thing vs Multiple Things
When creating a forecast first ask yourself whether you are forecasting One Thing or Multiple Things. It’s not always clear which of these situations you are in but the approach you take to creating the forecast will differ significantly. This post will help you to figure out which approach to take.
Presentation: Neuroscience of psychological safety
Defining a workflow
The Kanban Guide defines three core practices. The first is “define and visualize a workflow” and while it describes what needs to be in that workflow, it doesn’t give any guidance on how to facilitate as session with a team to do that definition. In this video, I describe how I facilitate a session with teams to define their workflow.
Staying within our WIP limits
In a Kanban model, one thing we find most teams struggle with are WIP limits. Everyone wants to just start one more item even if we’re already at the limit. Surely one more can’t hurt. Except of course, it does.
Improving Predictability - Consistent Units and Conclusion
This is the last in a series of posts on the four assumptions behind Little’s Law. If you haven’t read those previous posts I encourage you to go back to understand the background. As a reminder, the four assumptions are listed below.
Improving Predictability - Average Age
In a previous post I’ve introduced the four assumptions behind Little’s Law and discussed the first two assumptions in detail. If you haven’t read those previous posts I encourage you to go back to understand the background. As a reminder, the four assumptions are listed below.