Category: Organisational Learning
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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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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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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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Good question: how to unblock stuck conversations
When discussions become stuck in a ‘death-spiral’ of point-counterpoint views it’s useful to have some techniques to unblock the discussion. One great technique is to shift the focus from telling people about your views and start asking questions to understand theirs. I was in a bid planning meeting at a large consultancy when the discussion…
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Ineffective pushback to a pushy manager?
How do you deal with a manager who believes that a software development team needs to go faster and should be pushed? I want to review some of the responses to my earlier blog and test the idea that they would create a productive conversation that would lead to effective outcomes. How does our advice…
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How can I push the software development team to go faster?
A common challenge I’ve heard from Development Managers or Product Owners is “how do I push my software development team to go faster?” Here are ideas on how to approach this topic and have more productive conversations. Understand your own mind Start by clarifying your own mind, particularly your intention and motive for trying to get…
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Removing the bubbles: solving bottlenecks in software product development
A challenge with software product development is visualising the work so that you can spot where there are delays in the process of converting ideas from “concept to cash”. This post shows how a cumulative flow diagram helped identify a pattern of queues over time. Removing these queues had many benefits such as fewer errors,…