ingvald
Yesterday I attended TDC.
It was fun to see so many from the software development community in Trondheim turn out all at once.
I also had a short talk about better ways to work, focusing on delays and feedback – especially how it’s more central to knowledge work than we think.
Here’s the slides if you’re curious (PDF):
201210 TDC Better ways to work
Update: I added a few slides for a talk at the office – see extended version (pdf) if you like, containing a few more links/ reading tips.
What is an operations review (ops review)?
To do an ops review is to take a look at your team or organization:
Why should you do ops reviews?
Lean Coffee is a meeting format where you don’t finalize the agenda before the meeting starts.
It can take place in a café, but also in a meeting room, living room, or almost anywhere.
The topic is often Lean, Kanban, agility in business and product development (like software development), but the format lends itself to any topic.
An example of established groups meeting for lean coffee is Lean Coffee Oslo.
These groups are people meeting on their own time to learn, but this format has big potential benefits in business context as well.
A few quotes from LWS on Lean Coffee:
Essentially, a Lean Coffee is a group of people working together to learn … in an informal setting. It’s like a mini-unconference where the participants decide on the schedule.
….
Step 1: Everybody writes down topics they’d like to discuss on stickies ….
Step 2: Each topic is briefly described …
Step 3: … votes …
Step 4: … stickies with the most votes at the top
Step 5: Each of these stickies are discussed
Step 6: If enough time … do another stickie
A few quotes from @ourfounder and @sprezzatura on why democratize meetings:
Agendas are so 20th Century.
….
When you set an agenda, you control the conversation. …. When you control the agenda, you control the lessons learned. Since we enter a meeting with only our assumptions to guide us, agendas follow our assumptions. Our assumptions are based on what we already know. But what about the things we don’t know? Quite often, it’s the conversations we don’t plan on that give us the most insight. Why not instead run our meetings to learn or to discover?
….
Conventional wisdom suggests that businesses hold far too many meetings attendees deem a waste of their time. …. To combat this, some call for meetings with rigid agendas.
….
the discussion of a stated topic is a conversation. In fact, the entire reason we are calling the meeting is to have a conversation.
….
If we want to learn from our meetings, we need to allow the conversation to be set by the very professionals we invited to the meeting in the first place. …. Allowing the group to have a say in setting the agenda gives them buy-in for the importance of the topics.
….
as the person who called the meeting, you can now direct the overall topic and even seed a few of the initial sticky notes. You can even set a few “must discuss” stickies at the top of the board and prioritize them the highest.
Notes:
Read more:
I just got involved with a mobile project, and let my inner devop out for a moment… So, here’s how I got Jenkins to build, sign, and deploy an Android app for testing.
Our setup:
The gist of the Jenkins job is:
/opt/android-sdk/tools/android create project -n [name of resulting app file] -t [Android target] -p [name of temporary directory where project is copied and ant files generated] -k [package] -a [default app class]
sdk.dir=/opt/android-sdk target=[Android target]key.store=path-to-keystore key.alias=[alias] key.store.password=[pw] key.alias.password=[pw2]
And on my phone:I got useful info from an article on jenkins-ci.org: Getting started: Building Android apps with Hudson. My needs were a bit simpler, so you’ll see a bit more details there than here.
A few problems I had:
This project is a side project with low activity compared to a day job, so right now this job is a one-click deploy job (one click plus downloading and installing on the phone…) However, I think we’ll set up nightly polling, so there’s an updated app available every morning for testers, and they can see by the timestamp if there were any updates the previous day.
David Joyce and Dr Peter Middleton have studied the application of (what I call) Lean-Kanban in BBC.
From the abstract:
The evidence shows that over the 12-month period, lead time to deliver software improved by 37%, consistency of delivery rose by 47%, and defects reported by customers fell 24%.
The significance of this work is showing that the use of lean methods including visual management, team-based problem solving, smaller batch sizes, and statistical process control can improve software development.
….The faster delivery with a focus on creating the highest value to the customer also reduced both technical and market risks.
There’s more info on David’s blog, and you can also read the case study itself prior to publication from there.
Update: The case study was published in 2012.
First and foremost:
Focus on work items, not people.
Then:
Finishing is more important than starting.
Practical tip: start to the right/ at the end of your board, and identify impediments to finishing tasks as you go upstream on the board.
Only two questions are really necessary in the actual standup if the team’s real process is reflected on the board:
The team will be asked if the board accurately reflects what is being worked upon. The team will be asked if there is anything that is slowing down or stopping throughput. After these two questions are answered by the team, the stand-up is over.
(Karl Scotland via @dpjoyce.)
Update: a few more reading tips.
The goal is to enable you to be more agile, i.e., to improve your ability to change and adjust.
Here’s what I think:
Mainline and CI
Merging: merge down, copy up – always accept stabilizing changes, never impose destabilizing changes.
Inspiration:
Martin Fowler: articles on continuous integration
Henrik Kniberg: Agile version control with multiple teams
I’m moving my blog from Movable Type to WordPress.
For a few days it might be a bit unstable here…
Kanban Core Concepts
Basic Kanban is a lightweight framework for change management.
Starting with the core concepts on top of your present process should meet little resistance, at least when coupled with focus on improving quality.
Btw, I talked at a lokal meetup earlier this year (slides here), mostly on the core concepts – why they work and how to start.
A few Kanban Practices
There’s more, but this illustrates the relation between the core concepts and a set of recommended practices.
You’re likely to start with a simple version of some practices, f.ex. the work types (CoS) critical items, work with deadlines, bugs. More practices can be utilized as your organization matures, and more sofisticated use of practices, like setting different target lead times for different CoS, f.ex. 50% of bugs should be fixed within a week.
Update after “conversation” with @pawelbrodzinski:
Buy-in from management and whole organization is preferable, but team buy-in is enough and necessary, in my opinion.
I think it’s important to just get started, improving step by step, and team buy-in and the Core Concepts are enough to do that.
Last week I looked at my overgrown todo list, or rather several lists, and preparation for a demo at work was coming up, and I have a long trip to prepare for… So I simply had to create a personal kanban on the cupboard behind me: 
Collaboration on the demo preparation led to tasks on the board, and I took the most important and urgent tasks from my todo lists onto the board. I used a form of priority filter, with a generic todo column to the left, then a “soon”/today column, then the usual doing and done columns. It worked really well to let tasks float up and to the right in the todo columns, kind of like bubbles. I got an immediate impression of relative urgency (more to the right) and relative importance (upwards), making it very easy to decide what the next task should be when I finished a task.