Are you just looking for the latest articles and want to skip all the preamble and summary? Click here.
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!
-
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.
-
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".
-
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.
Using dates to motivate
I sometimes see teams that make up arbitrary dates to “motivate” the teams to get work done faster. Not only does this not work over the long term, it often makes things worse.
No single right answer
All too often we focus on a single problem and make statements as if solving this one thing will solve everything. While that one thing might certainly make things better, it’s never the only answer. Everything we do is within the context of a complex adaptive system and changing any one thing will have ripple effects everywhere else in the system.
Driving to the airport
Imagine we wanted to estimate how long it would take to drive to the airport. You might see that it’s 50km to the airport and that your car can drive at 100km/hour. Therefore it will take 30 minutes, right?
WIP by Parent
One of the charts built into JiraMetrics is WIP by Parent, as shown below. What this shows is the total work in progress (WIP) on each given day. The WIP is then grouped by colour according to the parent (Epic in this case) that the original ticket belonged to.
Orientational metaphors and WIP
We all have an unconscious bias that says that up is good and down is bad. Lakoff and Johnson expand on this in their classic book “Metaphors We Live By”.
AI and Critical Thinking
While it doesn’t seem surprising that reliance on AI tooling would blunt our critical thinking, I am surprised how quickly it’s happening. AI tooling really hasn’t been in common use for all that long and already there are enough observable effects to be able to have studies on it.
Social proof in meetings
I’ve been in quite a few meetings recently where people are speaking in a passive voice, and saying things like “maybe someone could do this thing”. Naturally nobody does.
SpecFlow becomes Reqnroll
A number of my clients use SpecFlow and this will be relevant to them. SpecFlow has been end-of-lifed and replaced by ReqNRoll.
Jira’s Start Standup Button
For a while now, I’ve been noticing a “start standup” button at the top of Jira boards and I’ve been wondering what it did. Today I pushed that button in the hope that it would do something to help make the standup more effective, and now I wish I hadn’t.
Explaining technical work in business terms
IT people are notoriously bad at explaining technology issues in business terms. So it should be no surprise when the people funding the projects don’t want to spend money on things that sound like gibberish to them. There are real product gaps that they want fixed and they have no time for “cleaning up technical debt” or “doing automation” or “upgrading framework X to version 2”.