Leanway

The people are the system!

2013.04.17 – 12:59

A couple of years ago I ranted about the way that people have created a religion around Deming and take his statements as absolute facts. In particular the statement Deming made about the importance of the system versus the people irked me. Recent work has made me revisit this topic and ...

Posted in agile, english, smidighet | 8 Comments »

The end of planning?

2012.11.07 – 22:33

If you think about it there are only two fundamental approaches to solving a problem. Either you plan how to solve it first and then try to follow this plan or you just jump in and start solving the problem without planning at all. Between these two extremes one can ...

Posted in agile, english, smidighet | Comments Off

When Scrum fails

2012.02.06 – 20:48

David Andersen used his Meetup talk i Oslo last week to describe a start-up’s journey from Scrum to a more Kanban based way of doing things. I seldom work with start-ups, but David’s talk resonated with my experiences in contexts that have little do do with start-ups. I summarized the ...

Posted in agile, english, smidighet | 1 Comment »

Failure demand in software

2012.01.13 – 20:47

A lot of people seem to like John Seddon’s concept of failure demand. Me too. But Seddon mostly talks about service delivery in areas such as call centers and housing repairs. I tend to work with software development organizations. When Seddon mentions IT, it is in the context of how ...

Posted in agile, english, smidighet | Comments Off

When systems(thinkers) collide

2011.10.22 – 20:38

When I come across a great thinker that opens my eyes to new ideas I always try to look for errors in their reasoning. The obvious reason to do this is as a safeguard against being carried away by new ideas that are intuitively right but actually wrong. A second ...

Posted in agile, english, smidighet | 1 Comment »

Are estimates worthless?

2011.08.15 – 20:35

If you take a picture while on vacation, is that picture yours? You are probably thinking: “What a stupid question. Of course it is mine!” But what if a stranger had asked you to take a picture of her with her camera? Is the picture still yours? There are two lessons ...

Posted in agile, english, smidighet | 1 Comment »

5 whys and 3 because

2011.05.18 – 20:31

The practice of “5 whys” is a popular lean approach to root cause analysis. It can be overly simplistic in some situations but few people would question the virtue of trying to figure out the real causes of a problem as opposed to just treating the symptoms. You can visualize ...

Posted in agile, english, smidighet | Comments Off

The second death of agile

2011.03.07 – 20:27

The 10 year anniversary of the agile manifesto has just passed. As part of some kind of distributed retrospective, there has been a lot of discussion about what will happen with agile now. I think that agile will be dead in ten years – I just hope it will be ...

Posted in agile, english, smidighet | 1 Comment »

Standardized work versus checklists

2011.01.27 – 9:36

Atul Gawande has written a fascinating book called The Checklist Manifesto. The core message in this book is that many professions have advanced to an unprecedented level of sophistication and complexity. The main obstacle in getting optimal results is increasingly the practitioners ability to remember which things to do and ...

Posted in agile, english, smidighet | Comments Off

Three perspectives on better software

2010.12.13 – 20:48

The agile perspective When the agile manifesto was published a decade ago I welcomed it. I had been building applications for a decade pretty much according to the principles in the manifesto. During this period I had watched in horror as RUP quickly became a de-facto standard. It was such a ...

Posted in agile, english, smidighet | Comments Off