Tag Archives: Change Management

Visit at Cluj Napoca

Posted by on 2011/10/30 No comments

My old friend Victor invited me to Cluj Napoca, Romania to talk about software development in practice. There were three talks in the morning at his company evoline and a fourth talk late afternoon at the local meetup group.

We started the day with an introduction to Kanban, because the audience knew about Agile, but Kanban was something new, and additionally we needed it for the maintenance-related presentation:

After a short break we continued with a longer talk about maintenance and how to use Agile, Lean, Kanban and leadership techniques in order to stabilise a maintenance situation:

The last presentation was about how to use Agile techniques without saying Agile:

My talk at the meetup became a bit longer than I expected, but we had – at least I felt like that – a great discussion how the software development process evolved at Digital Natives – my current company – and, uniquely, we talked about what we were doing right and where we failed:

I promised a list of books worth reading. So here are they in a recommended reading order:

  1. Taiichi Ohno – Toyota Production System
  2. Henrik Kniberg – Lean from the Trenches
  3. Daniel H. Pink – Drive
  4. 37 signals – Rework
  5. David J. Anderson – Kanban

Even though it was a long journey and an even longer day, I enjoyed it very much. The audiences were great, and I got some very usable feedback on the style and content of the presentation (I’d like to specially thank Dragos, Cătălin and Victor for the detailed and more personal feedback), so I can improve my future talks. My next talk will be at my former employer Ericsson, and I’m going to talk about leadership and measurements.

Thank you folks for the possibility, it was my pleasure!

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Customer Diversity

Posted by on 2011/08/23 No comments

Last year at xp2010 Scott E. Page talked about the benefits of diversity inside an organisation. According to Scott, diversity improves the performance and decision making process of an organisation.

Today late afternoon I attended a startup meetup event where Patrick Vlaskovits talked a bit about the diversity among customers. Based on his experience startup companies should define themselves a specific market segment – their customers – which they can serve properly and are really passionate about.

Imagine that a company works with a variety of customers. Different people want different things – sorry for the cliché – and there is no way that a startup company can deliver a feature or a set of features which satisfies all of them. This eventually will cause dissatisfaction among the customers, and they’ll leave the company. Fewer customers means less revenue or no revenue at all, and the company shuts down.

Startups aren’t necessary small companies, actually, their size does not matter that much, but their passion really does. People start companies because they have a good idea, they see something in it, and finally but not least they are passionate about it. If the “not-the-target” customer wants a feature which the company is not interested in at all, it is pretty sure that there won’t be any passion in working on that feature. Without passion the product will lose its edge, and the real (target) customers may leave.

It seems that a company can really benefit from the diversity among team members, but on the other hand, it causes trouble if we are talking about customers. Read more »

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Physical and Electronic Boards

Posted by on 2011/07/13 No comments

Several weeks ago, I went to a team leader event with @csapoz and Krisz, where – besides other interesting topics – we talked about the usage of physical and electronic Kanban and Scrum boards. At that time I thought that electronic boards were evil – kill communication and collaboration -, but I decided to give a try to their suggestion: use the physical board for tracking and collaboration, and use the electronic board for administration.

It turned out that the idea is excellent, and my early fears were groundless. My colleagues are hardly using the electronic tool, and every important decision and discussion is done in front of the physical board.

As an electronic tool, we are using redmine in order to

  • store our user stories, feature requests and defects
  • record queued, started, finished dates for our cumulative flow diagram (CFD)
  • record estimated and spent times for improving our planning, and for our Product Owner

Our post-its on the Kanban board have the following information:

  • redmine issue number and a short slogan
  • queued, started, finished dates for tracking ageing items
  • number of times an issue had to be moved back

We have been working with both systems for almost two months now, and there isn’t any administrative overhead, and actually it is easier to generate charts from the database of redmine than from post-its.

Usually, electronic tools come with fancy AJAX based boards, and it is really tempting to use them, but actually, they aren’t that advanced at the moment – lack of flexibility for example -, and they kill the collaboration.

I know that I could set up the tool so that I get yet another annoying email about a change, but when I see somebody moving a post-it on the physical board, I know that something has changed, I can go there and talk about it. No electronic tool can replace this experience.

What do you think? If you are using electronic tools, how are you using them?

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Kanban on Organisational Level

Posted by on 2011/05/16 No comments

A couple of days ago, I talked to the head of an organisation, who was having a hard time to get an overview of the current work of her organisation, and struggling to have enough manpower in order to deliver products in time. This is a common problem, I had talked to other leaders who had the same issue, and in fact I was in a similar situation before myself. As a solution, we introduced Kanban on the organisation level.

The Problems

Before jumping into the middle, let’s have a look at the problems which triggered this introduction in my case:

  • Missing overview of the ongoing work items
  • Not enough manpower to deliver

Why is it hard to get an overview? It is a very good question indeed. Usually the head of an organisation – later on in this article I’m going to refer to her as leader -, has to deal with several things during the day, and it is very easy to lose track of the recent events, which may change on hourly or daily basis. Usually she only gets back into the picture when something turns south, but usually by then it is already too late.

In a healthy organisation, everybody is working on something, but for how long, when will it be finished, how much effort has been spent on it? These are also very good questions, and usually one has to dig quite deep in the organisation to find the answers. These answers are crucial for acquiring new work items into the organisation. Unfortunately, they are very often incorrect, and takes time to get them, so leaders take new work items based on inaccurate data, and then the organisation becomes overburden.

I truly believe that using a Kanban system can help solve such problems. Let’s see how.

Read more »

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Weekly – CW15

Posted by on 2011/04/17 No comments

While I spent most of my time with learning more about Ruby on Rails and RSpec this week, I found the following links worth sharing. So here is my collection for calendar week 15, 2011:

  • I found an old article about the eXtreme Programming Simplicity Rules. In nutshell:
    • pass all tests
    • expresses every idea that we need to express but nothing more
    • do not duplicate code or configuration
    • have short methods, classes and modules
  • Roy Osherove talked about influence change at companies in an interview recorded at QCon London 2011. I checked his website and found his old post about the topic. The six forces that influences behaviour are something every team leader or change manager should be aware of, otherwise all the efforts put into the change will evaporate. The mentioned forces are:
    • personal motivation
    • personal ability
    • social motivation
    • social ability
    • structural motivation
    • structural ability
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