Stalled work

I talked recently about how many items in progress (WIP) we have and how lower is better. That’s absolutely true, and yet it’s not the whole picture. Of the items that are started, how many of those are actually being worked on?

Work in Progress (WIP) for a team

I’m frequently asked what is the optimal amount of work in progress (WIP) for a team, and everyone is disappointed to hear that there isn’t one.

Motivation and deadlines

While in a meeting, I heard “It’s easier to get things done when there is a deadline”, and that tells me something about motivation, or more specifically, lack of it.

Sometimes we just need to pick up the fax machine

My friend Dave once got brought in to help with a large project. The company was purchasing a large fax system from a vendor and then planned to extensively customize it to work in their environment.

LEGO Serious Play and Threat Modeling

Here’s a great case study of how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has used LEGO® Serious Play® to do threat modeling around digital identity.

What can we share from a retrospective?

We talk a lot about having a safe space for a retrospective, about creating that environment where it’s safe to open up and honestly talk about the real problems. We tell management that they should have no expectation of knowing about the specific conversations that went on inside a team’s retro, and that’s correct.

Larger retrospectives

In my Retrospective Magic course, I’m mostly focused on team based retrospectives, and I was asked this week what needs to change when we’re doing a larger one?

Appeal to authority and GenAI

“Appeal to authority” is both a commonly used persuasion technique, and also a logical fallacy described in the excellent book Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical Fallacies. It’s when we insist that a claim is true simply because a recognized authority said it was true, and without any actual supporting evidence.

Bad documentation

I grew up in a large city, and when I first moved out to a small town, one of the first differences I noticed was how everyone gives directions based on how things used to be.

Everyone should be able to update the board

Back in the 1990’s, version control wasn’t very common and I recall working with one of the first teams I’d been on, that was using it. The company had chosen to only buy a single license for one person on the team, which meant that any time we wanted to check something into version control, we would email our changes to this one guy and he would do the merge and then email back a copy of the latest code.