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Category: Communication

Saying No doesn’t make you an arse

Saying No doesn’t make you an arse

“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say “no” to almost everything.” ~Warren Buffett Do you ever feel like you’re overwhelmingly overloaded at your job? If you said “yes,” you’re not alone. Having too much work to do — and not enough time to do it — is a way too common scenario. Sometimes burnout cultures play a role in chronically overburdening people. But often, the problem is not our boss, our co-worker,…

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Three Learnings from DOES18 Vegas

Three Learnings from DOES18 Vegas

It’s my 5th year speaking at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. I’m inspired more than ever after last weeks event in Las Vegas. We learned how a couple of IT leaders collaborate with business leaders in Legal and Product to address obstacles preventing IT from taking advantage of open source and fixing technical debt. We learned from repeat experience reports on what’s working and what’s not working inside large enterprises. And Lean Coffee rocked again with over 100 participants discussing everything…

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Keeping Players Fit & Safe

Keeping Players Fit & Safe

While writing an article on performance for work, I stumbled across a study titled, What’s in a game? A systems approach to enhancing performance analysis in football. It covers the physiological, technical, and tactical components of football to determine key performance indicators that predict successful performance. The study acknowledges that football is a complex sociotechnical system – where humans interact with technical aspects of an organization within a constantly changing environment. Like when football (soccer) players wear GPS vests to track distance, speed, deceleration, etc……

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One Page Please

One Page Please

Ever find yourself in a situation where the why behind architectural design decisions are forgotten? “This was dumb – why did we do this?” And then the search begins – where, when, why, who contributed? If you are lucky, it’s easy to find and read meeting outcomes — tl;dr begone. Imagine the ability to find decisions made – along with why/when/who, from six months ago. Bliss! A concise one page meeting recap with essential nuggets at the top helps. Here’s the…

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Why Invisible Decisions Destroy Organizations

Why Invisible Decisions Destroy Organizations

I helped a good friend move furniture last weekend  — a common request when you own a truck. She told me about a project at her new job (Marketing Data Analyst at a 23-billion dollar company). In April 2016, in an attempt to prevent a PR disaster, the executive team mandated a project (my friends project) to identify customer accounts still using an old version of a product. No longer supported, the product is still used by 50% of the customer base. Yikes! If…

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Kanban Speak – A glossary of Lean and Kanban Terms

Kanban Speak – A glossary of Lean and Kanban Terms

While working on a paper for an audience new to lean, kanban and flow, I created a glossary of terms (listed alphabetically) for people to reference.    Term Definition A3 The context, goals, analysis and proposed countermeasures of a problem made visible on a single sheet of A3 sized paper (11 x 17in. Constraint A bottleneck in the system. Something preventing forward movement. Cycle Time The elapsed time it takes to complete a request from the time the work began…

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Don’t Break Down Silos

Don’t Break Down Silos

Each September, I spend time investing in my own education. This year, Steve Holt suggested I register for the Cynefin practitioner foundation class from Cognitive Edge. The class sparked many aha moments for me, among which, the notion that short stories from multiple sources are much more relevant and powerful than studies reported by experts in their field. However, the biggest eye opener for me was when instructor Michael Chevedave said, “Don’t break down silos.”  What?!?! Here I had been talking and writing about breaking down…

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Grawlixes, Slurm and the Dead Zone

Grawlixes, Slurm and the Dead Zone

Last week’s Kanban for Devops training class in Portland produced some notably creative ideas towards visualization. Grawlixes, Slurm and the Dead Zone are three ideas worth spreading. Capturing interrupts using grawlixes (series of typographical symbols representing profanity in comic strips) shows work impacts in an amusing manner. Here’s how it works. Each time work is interrupted, add one grawlix to the ticket on the board. The longer the grawlix series on the ticket, the longer the lead time and (presumably)…

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