Why don’t we collaborate more?

In an office environment, it’s always been obvious when there’s a major production problem. You’ll see everyone standing around a single desk; everyone working together on the same problem at the same time. If there’s a blocker to what they’re doing, one or more people in the group will immediately do something to remove that obstacle, to ensure that the main work continues uninterrupted.

Priorities

Out of the box, Jira offers up five different priorities for any given ticket, which implies five different classes of service. Since the option is there, many teams will use all of them at different times.

Secondary Gain and Work in Progress (WIP)

I think by now we all understand that having too many things in progress at once is a negative on almost all counts. We get less accomplished, our quality drops, and we generally feel more overwhelmed. Yet, we continue to start more work than we can finish, over and over again. Why might this be?

Speeding up the daily coordination meeting (AKA standup, daily scrum)

When I first engage with a team, I’m focused on ensuring that we have an effective daily meeting, and I’m less concerned about how long it takes. Are we talking about all the things that we should be talking about? Are are actively collaborating on the work?

Supporting the new hires

I’m seeing more posts saying that new hires need to be in the office because they ramp up faster, than if they’re remote. There’s a fundamental presupposition in these statements that once we’ve hired these people, we’re immediately going to throw them to the wolves and have them work all by themselves.

A decade with LEGO Serious Play

I just realized that it’s been ten years since I first took LEGO® Serious Play® training with Robert Rasmussen. I have this listed on my business cards and it’s amazing how many great conversations this starts. LEGO seems so out of place in a business context, that people immediately want to know more.

When we don’t have safety

While we often talk about psychological safety, we often don’t prioritize fixing the environment to make it better.

The facilitators role

If you’re facilitating the daily coordination meeting (standup, daily scrum, whatever you want to call it), and you’re doing all the talking, then you’re doing it wrong.

Constraints enable creativity

With retrospectives, we generally have specific formats that we follow, rather than just pulling people together and expecting them to talk. This feels very counter-intuitive for many; surely we don’t need rules or formats to get people to come up with creative ideas. Yet doing that will dramatically improve the results we get.