Today was our annual family visit to the pumpkin patch. We go to a local farm that is a sort of pumpkin theme park. In addition to the fields of U-pick pumpkins, they have a petting zoo, pumpkin launchers, halloween themed play structures, hay rides, and a corn maze. It was a beautiful early October afternoon, and the kids roamed through all the usual activities. Finally we got around to the corn maze. Now you should know that as these things go, this corn maze is pretty dece

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” This is a popular saying derived from an old Zen koan. When it comes to working with Agile projects I find this saying very appropriate. People who do Agile transformations typically talk about finding the Way (the road) and often speak with almost religious fervor regarding Agile processes. In fact, Agile is really just one short step away from organized religion. You have daily meetings, attend retrospectives where we examine

There is something about a well designed process that I find mesmerizing. It really doesn’t matter if it’s XP, Scrum, Lean, or Kanban the end result is the same: for some brief period I find myself seeing the patterns of the process everywhere I look. For example, a few months ago I finished reading yet another book on Lean (Poppendieck’s latest or something like that). There I was in the kitchen washing the dishes after dinner and wondering… …why I always did the dishes in s

There is a simple slogan that we can use when trying to approach groups in silos: attend, befriend, and defend. The idea works like this: Attend The first thing that we need to do is make ourselves available to the group as much as we can. We need to show up for the team meetings or events. In lean terms, you might think of it as going to the gemba. You need to be where the action is. This may involve getting yourself invited to meetings, usually the most boring and uninteres

As a project manager, a scrum master, a team lead, or even as an agile coach I’ve wondered from time to time about the true value that I bring to a team. You see, to me it is entirely plausible that a team could work just fine without any of the aforementioned roles being present. In fact, I know that there are many teams that are quite successful without a project manager on the team. That goes for scrum masters too. It has always been a difficult question to face with any i

Splitting large things up into small batches: This one is a beauty. Queue theory tells us that when processing work, lots of small batches are easier to process than a smaller number of large batches. All too often in my writing and in my presentations I tend to unconsciously go into “Large Batch” mode – the document gets larger and larger and I start to lose the tight cohesiveness that you would find in a smaller document. As the presentation or the paper gets larger and lar

“Standardized Work is an agreed upon set of work procedures that establish the best method and sequences for each process. It defines the interaction of people using processes to produce a product. It is centered around human movements, it outlines efficient, safe work methods and helps eliminatemuda/waste.” – cited from The no-nonsense guide to Standard Work It can be as simple as simply documenting the work that is already done. It can also be used as part of a continuous i

Started off the morning kind of groggy – day two is always harder. Had breakfast and an interesting conversation with David Meier (apparently a big name in the Lean world). He worked at the Kentucky Toyota plant for many years and now he is a Lean consultant. He was doing a presentation on implementing Lean in hard times. He was a very nice guy and we seemed to have very complimentary viewpoints. It made digesting the breakfast that much easier… The morning got started with a

Wow, this has been a pretty cool conference so far. I really wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It all started off innocuously enough at breakfast. I grabbed my ration of melon bits and yogurt and proceeded to the nearest table. As I immersed myself in my morning repast (insert gross slurping noises here) I realized that I was sitting at a table with some folks who were old hands at this lean stuff. Everybody knew each other by name, and fortunately they didn’t seem put off by

In a recent article in the New Yorker, There was an interesting study done in a hospital where they started using checklists for a lot of their activities. According to the article, the study demonstrated a dramatic drop in infections caused by routine procedures – down to almost zero. This reminds me very much of the one page processes used by Toyota in the TPS. Maybe we should try this out with software too. I’m not the first one to come up with that stunning revelation – a

There are a few disruptive corporate behaviors that have been bothering me for a while. Forgive me for a moment while I get them off my chest. If you have witnessed these disfunctions, I’d be curious to get your perspective on them. Here are my top 10 ways to destroy an Agile team. Break apart the team when the current project is complete Keep the individual/team compensation plan a secret Don’t openly share financial data with the team Lay people off on a periodic basis Refu