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Measuring Productivity = Continuous Improvement?
How do you measure the productivity of a team? Some answers that leap immediately to mind are: Story Points Throughput Function Points Features And I’m sure there are dozens more. But as I consider...
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Give the 360 Back to the Team
Tired of doing the same old retrospective every sprint? You know how it goes: what went right/what needs improvement/action items. Are you running out of ideas for improvements? Here’s an idea: at the...
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Defining Impediments
I have a confession to make: I’m a scrum master and I can’t see impediments. It’s terrible – I know I should be able to see them, but somehow they pass right by me every day without my noticing them....
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Classifying Impediments
Categorizing things can be a very useful tool for understanding the world around us. I watch my 2 year old daughter doing it all the time. She points at a robin in a tree and chirps, “Birdy!”...
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Treating “Impedimentia”
Why is it so hard to come up with impediments sometimes? I know that impediments are all around me – literally everywhere I look. So why is it that when we do the daily standup and answer the three...
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Managing Impediments
As many have already pointed out, identifying, tracking, and resolving impediments are some of the most important things you can do for your team. The question that naturally arises is,...
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Continuous Improvement & Risk
I witnessed an interesting pattern today while running Boris Gloger’s “The Ball Game” exercise with a team. The basic idea is to iterate a team activity, stopping to make improvements each iteration....
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Standard Work for Personal Improvement
Standard work is a notion from the lean manufacturing world that refers to having some sort of pre-defined standard way of doing things for a given activity or process. Actually, in the lean lexicon...
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Exploring The Project Jungle
Grab your pith helmet and join me for a little journey. Shhhh! Be vawy, vawy quiiiet, we’re hunting for projects! We move through the jungle with exaggerated stealth, placing each booted foot with...
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Punctuated Disequilibrium
I’ve heard people talk about the gradual gains that agile teams make over time as they engage with continuous improvement, but I’m here to tell you that isn’t what I see in the real world. I guess the...
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Culture Eats Impediments Too
I stumbled across Pawel Brodzinski’s blog on Software Project management. In “Why Kaizen Boards (Typically) Don’t Work” he talks about the importance of having the right culture that will support...
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Is Improvement really Continuous?
I don’t want to get on a rant here, but…In the Agile community and perhaps in the IT community in general there is a tendency to use the term “Continuous Improvement” to describe some sort...
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My Personal Andon Cord
Have you heard of an Andon Cord? On the assembly line it’s that cord you yank on to stop the entire line when a problem is found. The idea is to stop everything until the problem you encountered is...
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