I’ve got a question: Where do you keep your risks? If you’re doing a project of any significance you have risks, right? That just comes with the territory. Anything that is significantly challenging or meaningful has very likely got some risk associated with it. And let’s also clarify that we’re asking about agile teams. Because we all know that traditional waterfall teams would have some sort of risk register. Risk is just built-in to the waterfall model, so we don’t need to

Simon Wardley does a marvelous job of highlighting some of the essential requirements for understanding and defining strategy. There are five key elements that he describes in his book: Purpose – why are we trying to do something Landscape – the map of the business domain Climate – the weather Doctrine – the rules of the game Leadership – decisions we make The underlying premise is that you can’t have meaningful strategy without a map. All of these elements support that conte

Recently I’ve been reading Simon Wardley’s book on strategy mapping. I’m finding it to be some of the best writing on strategy that I’ve ever come across, so I really recommend it if you have the inclination to learn more about strategy. Simon is a very vocal critic of the typical tools that we consultants use to ‘do strategy’ with. In particular, he is especially critical of the use of 2×2 diagrams and SWOT analysis. His central observation is that strategy as we do it today

I stumbled across Pawel Brodzinski’s blog on Software Project management. In “Why Kaizen Boards (Typically) Don’t Work” he talks about the importance of having the right culture that will support using and taking full advantage of the tools (Agile, Lean or otherwise) that people try to introduce to organizations. He notes that when the culture doesn’t permit experimentation without permission, introducing any kind of continuous improvement effort is almost always doomed to fa

I was inspired recently by a twitter post from Elizabeth Hendricks where she said she was working on an impediments game. I thought that was an absolutely wonderful idea, so I wanted to take a swing at it myself. Once I finally managed to summon the courage to try I sat down and put together a preliminary set of rules. Here is my first attempt (first iteration): Overall the game is organized as a straightforward racetrack, first-to-finish objective. Gameplay is in rounds, whe

I was watching a presentation on risk today and I saw a symmetry between risks and impediments that I had never realized before. With both, the hard part is awareness. Once you’ve discovered a risk or impediment, half the battle is over. Seeing risks before they become impediments is hard. The discovery step is the part where I tend to fall down. How many times has someone pointed out a risk or impediment and you find yourself palm slapping your face in embarrassment because

I was talking to a group the other day about impediments. We were debating the temporal relationship between risks and impediments. We arrived at the following conclusion: Risks are potential threats to our projects that lie in the future. Once they manifest themselves in the present, we call them impediments. And once impediments are resolved and we move on, they become lessons. I’m intentionally not referring to them as “lessons learned” because I’m not sure we always learn

I’ve been spending some time researching impediments and risk management – two topics that I believe are intimately related. I wanted to take a brief moment to share some of the great resources that I have found along the way: Agile Risk Board | Agile UX Leading Agile: Agile Risk Management – Logistical Risk LeadingAnswers: Leadership and Agile Project Management Blog: Creating Risk Profile Graphs Agile Issue Management for Projects and Programmes | ! | Agile101 – Agile Proje

I’ve had this idea bouncing around in my head for a while that I haven’t quite been able to articulate. Let me see if I can use an image to explain it…let’s pretend that your project is a river. It moves, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, working its way downhill toward some sort of goal. Along the way, the river encounters obstructions in it’s path. Some are large obstructions, perhaps a beaver dam, others are relatively small obstructions like a boulder. The river may be

I’m reading Ellen MacArthur’s book, “Taking on the World”. She is arguably one of the greatest sailors around. It’s her story of her life leading up to and including her amazing race in the Vendee Globe. Before she ever got to the Vendee, she spent years working on other people’s boats. She would prep them, repair them, and otherwise set them up for the big races. She had to know the systems of these amazing race machines inside and out. These were largely solo racers that sh

This post on agile risk management from Mike Cohn absolutely blew me away. This is brilliant! The risk burndown chart is so obvious, so clear, that it takes my breath away. Could there be an impediment burndown too? I’m going to go hyperventilate into a little brown bag now… #burndown #Impediments #MikeCohn #risk

In this wonderful blog post, You Are The Impediment, Mike Cottmeyer argues that there are three different levels of impediment management required of a good scrum master/team leader: The Tracker The Remover The Anticipator He characterizes this as a sort of competence hierarchy for agile managers: Tracking being the minimum one could do, Anticipating being the desirable thing to do. I strongly agree. I see it this way: Tracking = History Removing = Managing/Problem Solving An

I heard someone say that the best project managers were the ones who were capable of “seeing around corners” on a project. These were the project managers who were checking to see if there was an oncoming truck before trying to cross the road. At the time, the ability to “see around corners” was treated like some sort of sixth sense. It was as though certain people had an innate capability to detect issues that would threaten to derail a project that the rest of us didn’t hav

I witnessed an interesting pattern today while running Boris Gloger’s “The Ball Game” exercise with a team. The basic idea is to iterate a team activity, stopping to make improvements each iteration. The idea is to practice and measure the impact of continuous improvement on team performance of a task. In general, the team did as you might expect: the first iteration things were pretty rough and their performance wasn’t very good. In subsequent iterations, their performance c

I’ve been thinking a lot about impediments lately. OK, maybe obsessing is a better word. I know it’s the word my wife would use. Note to self: do not refer to the kids as impediments…in public. I was on a trip recently that involved a really long drive from Seattle down to Northern California. That’s rougthly 12 hours of quality time behind the wheel. It gives a guy a lot of time to think. Somewhere around the time that I hit the Columbia Gorge, I started to obsess about what