Improving Predictability
Little’s Law is an equation that frequently appears in discussions of Kanban systems. While initially formulated as a part of queuing theory to describe the length of time people would spend in stores it has since been applied to many other contexts from manufacturing to knowledge work (particularly Kanban for the purposes of today’s conversation).
Getting Kanban metrics from the Jira API
If your team is using Jira then at some point you’re going to want to look at some flow metrics to see how you can improve. You’ll very quickly discover that Jira only provides two charts out of the box and that neither one is terribly useful. The cumulative flow chart has known bugs and the control chart is both difficult to read and has problems of it’s own.
The cost of interruptions and how to reduce it
Interruptions can be a significant source of waste. By their nature, interruptions cause a context switch as we lose track of what we had been working on to focus on the interruption. There is a significant cost to that context switch as it takes time and effort away from the task at hand. There is also a real impact on quality as mistakes are far more likely to happen when we’re distracted.
Massively overburdened with WIP
About once a year I run across a team that has at least ten times as many items on the board as there are people on the team. The worst I’ve ever seen was a team of ten people with 227 items in progress.
Flowing value
In Kanban we often talk about flowing value through the system and yet that’s somewhat misleading. The reality is that we can’t know whether a work item is valuable until we’ve actually finished the work and made it available to our customers.
Power of words
The words we use are far more important than most people realize. They have the ability to make deep changes in unconscious behaviour in ourselves, and the people around us.
Pair Programming
Probably the most polarizing of all the Agile technical practices is pair programming. People either love it or hate it and often strongly hold one of those two positions even if they’ve never tried it for themselves.
Classes of service
Many Kanban teams use classes of service to help model their workflow. We’re going to talk about how they work, where they are valuable and why you should avoid them wherever you can.
Neuroscience of psychological safety
I find that many of the conversations we have about psychological safety tend to devolve into platitudes: “It’s good and we should have more of it” or “managers should create safer spaces”. This doesn’t give anyone any context into why it’s actually important or how we can go about improving it.
Book recommendations for Agile Coaches
I talk a lot about neuroscience, psychology, hypnosis, body language, and other topics as they relate to Agile methods and I’m frequently asked: “What books do you recommend as an introduction?” There is no single best book to start with so I’m giving you a bunch of categories to pick from.