There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. ~Peter F. Drucker #quote #lazyday (Taken with Instagram at Ytterbystrand)
PMI-ACP Books to read
Listening to Rally Software Webinar about the new Agile certification PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner). Mike Griffiths recommend to read the following books to take the exam. Either you are taking the exam or not, it is a great list of books to read to become an Agile champion.
Agile Estimating and Planning, M. Cohn
Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products, J. Highsmith
Agile Project Management with Scrum, K. Schwaber
Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, E. Derbu & D. Larsen
Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game, A. Cockburn
Becoming Agile: …in an Imperfect World, G. Smith &A. Sidky
Coaching Agile Teams, L. Adkins
Lean-Agile Spftware Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility, A. Shalloway
The Software Project Manager´s Bridge to Agility, M. Sliger & S. Broderick
The Art of Agile Development, J. Shore & S.Warden
User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development, M. Cohn
Check out Henrik Knibergs blog and slides about Agile@Home. I learned alot from this and it is a brilliant way of using Lean and Agile principles in your home. The value stream and WIP limits for cleaning dishes are very interesting.
How Agile are you?
Take this short test to see how agile you are. Share your result with your co-workers and friends.
This is a BETA in flash and will not show on iPhone! Please provide feedback to me on Twitter @mhollstrand.Discuss on Twitter #howagileareyou
Doing lean correctly means you do much less work - not more work on top of what you are currently doing!
—Quote from Stephen Perry who wrote this on twitter @LeanVoices
Done is better then perfect
“Done is better then perfect ” is a saying at Facebook. This is brilliant as long as you know what Done means. If you ask a developer Done probably means code checked in and the state is “works for me”. If you ask the product owner Done probably means shippable to customer or already shipped, what a developer usually calls “Done Done”.
Make sure your organisation have the same definition of Done and deliver in a constant pace. The definition of done is your products quality level that must pass in order to ship.
This is how a definition of done can look like in software development teams:
- Code produced (all ‘to do’ items in code completed)
- Code commented, checked in and run against current version in source control
- Peer reviewed (or produced with pair programming) and meeting development standards
- Builds without errors
- Unit tests written and passing
- Deployed to system test environment and passed system tests
- Passed UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and signed off as meeting requirements
- Any build/deployment/configuration changes implemented/documented/communicated
- Relevant documentation/diagrams produced and/or updated
- Remaining hours for task set to zero and task closed
Make sure you create a definition of done with your quality standards. Is documentation not gonna happen, then remove it. Does your product run on high traffic, add performance tests and so on.
What is Done in your teams? Does anyone use definitions of Done for other work then development? product owners, business developers, managers, marketing…?
The Toyota Way - 14 management principles
It is time to dust down these 14 principles from Jeffrey Likers book “The Toyota Way” again. They are just a great principle baseline for managing your enterprise, and specially if you are in the process of transferring to Agile or are and Agile enterprise already.
- Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.
- Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface.
- Use “pull” systems to avoid overproduction.
- Level out the workload (heijunka). (Work like the tortoise, not the hare.)
- Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time.
- Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment.
- Use visual control so no problems are hidden.
- Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes,
- Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.
- Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy.
- Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.
- Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation (genchi genbutsu).
- Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly (nemawashi).
- Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (kaizen).
