Helping IT teams and their managers deliver great software solutions
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The Stinging Foot Spray Experiment: How data helps in emotional situations
“It stings too much!” cried my young daughter after the first spray of the medicine. As a result of a muddy weekend camping at a music festival she had developed Athletes Foot for the first time. The only child-suitable treatment available at the chemist was a foot spray. I had a dilemma; to help her…
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How to study the flow of work with kanban cards
Physical kanban walls, with index cards, present powerful and easy ways to collect data and encourage the team experiment with improvements to our process. I’ve come across a simple technique of writing a ‘column tally chart’ on the bottom of each index card as it crosses a kanban board to help study and manage the…
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How Kanban visualisations and conversations enable process improvement
After deciding to adopt a new process a key challenge is to actually start doing it. This is the story of how a team I’m working with decided to carry out code reviews as part of our process, and how our kanban board helped us. The kanban board helped us visualise this new step in our…
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Conversations for double-loop mindset changes with Kanban
You can watch the video of my talkfrom the Lean Software Systems Consortium (LSSC12) conference in Boston earlier this month. Visualising work is a key part of the Kanban Method. In many situations it can lead to people realising there are problems or opportunities for improvement, which can be successfully accomplished by simply changing behaviour…
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Stuck in an overlong Agile stand up? Try the two hands rule
When working with Agile teams the daily stand up meeting provides a heart beat to the day and an opportunity for team members to share information. Stand up meetings work best when they are short and balance the inputs across all the people in the team. A common problem is stand ups that start running too…
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Overcoming three mental blocks to listening in difficult conversations
If you listen to most conversations you’ll hear remarkably few questions. When a conversation becomes difficult then we drop all questions; we spend most of our time telling others how we see the world. Here are three mental blocks that stop us from listening and ways to overcome them. Block #1: “If I listen and…
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The Art of Handling Elephants in the Room
When we spot and elephant in the room, or an undiscussable topic that isn’t being addressed, it is tempting to tackle it head on. However, just naming the elephant or telling people that they’re not discussing an undiscussable topic is rarely a productive approach. Having spotted an elephant in the room it is tempting to shout…
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5 signs your conversation is about to turn toxic
Difficult conversations are often unplanned and sneak up on us. Spotting the signs that your conversation is about to turn toxic gives you a chance to stop your automatic reactions so you can change course, even in the heat of the moment. Here are five sure-fire ways of spotting that a conversation is turning toxic. Build your…
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Management Improvement Carnival #140
I’m hosting this edition of Jon Hunter’s Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival. It’s been published three times a month since 2006. Here’s my round-up of interesting management-related posts from the last month with a focus on the psychology of change and software development philosophies. Change Artist Challenge #7: Being Fully Absent by Gerald Weinberg For…
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Effective decision making: avoid confusing discussions with decisions
A key to effective decision-making is to avoid confusing discussions with decisions. Discussions are important for ensuring that the widest range of information is available to make a decision, but treating a discussion as a decision is likely to lead to confusion, frustration and ineffective actions. Open discussions are important, but they’re not the same…