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Category: Management

Three Learnings from DOES18 Vegas

Three Learnings from DOES18 Vegas

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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

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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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Visualizing 5 teams work on one board – take 1

Visualizing 5 teams work on one board – take 1

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I rolled out the new 2-day “Flow 101” workshop last week to 24 folks working at a financial services company near Austin. Notable in a couple of ways: 1) Two VP’s attended and 2) Three attendees from three different teams (the team of three), worked together to design a board to visualize the workflow across five different teams. Usually, if a VP shows up at all, it’s only to introduce me before heading off to their triple booked calendar. That…

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Lean Agile Scotland: Getting Executive Buy-in for Architecture Changes

Lean Agile Scotland: Getting Executive Buy-in for Architecture Changes

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If someone told me six months ago that my Lean Agile Scotland presentation would include Judy Hopps and Jack Fox stuffed animals, I would have fallen off my chair. Submitting talks to conferences six months in advance sometimes means the particulars of my presentation will deviate from the original abstract. My initial intent was to present LeanKit‘s journey to gain alignment across business and technology teams by looking at work prioritization, team metrics, and communication etiquette. But the talk evolved to how LeanKit’s…

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Why Invisible Decisions Destroy Organizations

Why Invisible Decisions Destroy Organizations

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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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Surprise! Prioritizing Options Results in Discovering Slack Time

Surprise! Prioritizing Options Results in Discovering Slack Time

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We just hired a new person onto our Learning & Development team. The shift from three to four people caused me to have a serious think about improving our methods for prioritization. The expectation of increased workload may have prompted new thoughts. Maybe it was the beginning of a new year with new goals. Other factors may also have entered in—for instance, the broader subject matter requests our team received. And as additional requests flooded in, I realized that we…

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How do Teams Continue to Win during Turmoil?

How do Teams Continue to Win during Turmoil?

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We had a big snow this week.  Twelve inches total, a forty-three year record in our part of Puget Sound country.  We lost power for ten hours – no furnace, no computer, no lights. No problem – I cozied up to an emergency kerosene stove and opened Jim Collins’ new book, Great by Choice, a study of winning behavior when confronted by uncertainty – with comparisons between companies that win and companies that languish. I was especially fascinated by the parallels…

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