I like to take stuff and try to express it in as simple language as possible. That’s my way of checking my own understanding of a concept. One concept that comes up often when we talk about lean software development, kanban and agile is that of “flow”. A couple of days ago, I decided to […]
Category Archives: English
Thinking Tools for Conference Reviewers
Recently, I’ve been reviewing session proposals for Agile 2011. It’s a rewarding job, even though I’m not getting paid for it. I was asked to help out, and said yes because I knew I would learn a lot from it. Since this is the first time I’m reviewing sessions like this, I started out by doing some research into what to look for.
Writing: It’s Not Just About Writing
I try to write regularly. I write a lot more than I publish, and that’s OK for now. I’d like to publish more in the future however, so I keep trying to improve my productivity. One thing I’ve found that helps, is to do something that moves a writing project forward, even if it’s not […]
Sketchnoting a Russell Ackoff talk
Listening to Russell Ackoff speaking, I “sketchnoted” this in Brushes on my iPad. I’m a very visual thinker, so this is a way for me to make things stick a little better in my brain, plus it’s very fun and relaxing to do. I don’t worry to much about my handwriting and general drawing skills. […]
New Russell Ackoff Videos
Here’s a set of Rusell Ackoff videos I just discovered. I might go ahead and collect all my Ackoff resources on one page some day, but for now I’ll just serve these new ones up like this. Enjoy.
An Exercise for Defining Done for Scrum Teams
In this post, I’m going to share an exercise you could try for helping a team start their journey towards a clear and shared definition of what it means to done with a feature in a software product. I’m looking at this from the perspective of agile development with Scrum, but my guess is you […]
A Stack Exchange on Scrum
Intrigued by the possibilites of the Stack Exchange platform, I’ve proposed a site for questions & answers on the topic of Scrum. On the Stack Exchange platform users: Post questions and answers Vote answers up or down, depending on how helpful they think the answers are Grow their ability to moderate the site as they engage […]
Use Improvement Stories to Make Your Retrospectives More Effective
<plug>I teach a one-day class on retrospectives. It’s in Swedish only for now, but if that’s not an obstacle, you should read about it on the Citerus web site.</plug> I love to use the user story format when I help teams plan their work. It can sometimes be hard to break user stories down into […]
Ackoff’s 95% (Cannot manage them the same way)
I’m currently cleaning up my trusty old Mac Mini G4. I’ve been cleaning out old stuff I don’t need to save, and a few days ago I installed a cheap 1 gig of memory. That upgrade did not make the machine notably faster. Today, however, I ran a bunch of maintenance tools, which seemed to […]
Feeling Welcome at the AYE Conference
Out of all the conferences out there, the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference is surely one of the most curious. Started in 2000 as a challenge (so he told me) from Jerry Weinberg (“so do you think you can do better”) to his protégés who were complaining about talking-heads conferences (“of course we can”), the AYE […]