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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.
Hero culture revisited
Hero culture is a situation where one person, or a small number of people, take on the majority of the work, and others start to step back. If you hear things like “these people don’t pull their weight and I have to do everything for them”, you may not have lazy people at all. You may have the effects of hero culture destroying the teamwork that you should have.
Optimizing for our own effectiveness
One of the mistakes we make is assuming that people will make logical and rational decisions to optimize for the perfect overall outcome. People do make decisions that seem logical to them, however they do so within their own context. They do what’s right for them, not what’s optimal for the overall situation.
Risk Management
Yesterday I went on a guided hike to teach people how to safely hike through bear country. Specifically grizzy bear country. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any bears, but we did learn an amazing amount about them, and saw some spectacular glaciers and alpine terrain.
Gaming metrics
When I suggest that people will game whatever metrics we put in place, I’m often met with shocked indignation. We would never game the numbers! And yet we do.
OKR’s for Quality
The topic of OKR’s for quality have come up in multiple different contexts, across multiple clients, recently so perhaps it’s worth exploring.
Jira Metrics 2.12
I’ve released JiraMetrics 2.12, with a number of bug fixes, and a new chart that I’ll describe below.
Prioritization
There two different times that we need to prioritize work and we should be using completely different approaches to that prioritization, for each stage.
The big rewrite
I remember once having two back-to-back clients who had just rewritten significant systems in their environment. I asked why they’d chosen to rewrite the system from scratch rather than just fixing them as they were.
Scouting rule
We often talk about the scouting rule of “always leave the campsite cleaner than you found it”, or in a software context “always leave the code a little bit better than you found it”.
Quality
The theme for this week seems to be quality so let’s look at some different aspects of that.