Daily Meeting Checklist

Are work boards updated?

– at least regarding your own work
– “No“? let’s take a look

Are there any issues, problems?

– “Yes“? let’s talk about it…

Can you answer “what’s next”?

– (for you)
– at least until next daily meeting
– “No“? let’s take a look…

  • Can you join existing planned, started work?
  • No? Can you help with any bottleneck, problem?
  • No?
    • A bit much work in progress?
      => Do some improvement work
    • Lastly: consider starting new planned work

Remember:

Slack is Unplanned Improvement Work

Full utilization cause delays - http://agileconsulting.blogspot.no/2011/07/explaining-why-limiting-wip-is-so.html
Full utilization is not effective, not efficient, and causes delays

Being busy all the time is bad for you, your team, and your organization.  It is far better to allow for slack, which is not a bad thing, but creates opportunities for improvement without needing to schedule them.

“Recipe” for what to work on next, incorporating slack:

  1. Can you help progress existing planned, started work?
    Work on that.
  2. Can’t do that?
    Find bottleneck and help work to release it.
  3. Can’t do that either?
    Do some (improvement) work which

    • won’t create any work downstream,
    • will improve future throughput, and
    • can be paused as soon as existing kanban related work is available.

A bit more reading related to slack.

#techsafety

At LKNA13 in Chicago this year I listened to @JoshuaKerievsky talk about #techsafety.

He made me think about quite a few aspects of safety and injuries for a programmer. Here’s a few quotes and elements:

  • safety on team (ref own dev competence)
  • «working with CVS is hurting my soul.»
  • safe from uncertain work situation
  • safe to deploy – bugs, crash
  • safe from pressure – politics, policies
  • Emotional Injuries: Schedule Stress, Lost Respect, Fear of Failure, Torn Trust, etc

What’s interesting is his claim that having #techsafety as a primary value would be profitable and produce outstanding results. I think I buy into that, even if he hasn’t had time to prove it yet with his own company, @IndustrialLogic.

A few twitter notes from the session.

Edit: Joshua have written on #techsafety himself:

TDC 2012

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.

 

 

Extracting a Personal Kanban from an Overgrown ToDo List

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.

Want to Try the Pomodoro Technique with Online Tools?

The Pomodoro Technique is a timeboxing method where you can use a timer to help you focus on only one thing for a short period of time, typically 25 minutes.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Il_pomodoro.jpgYou can also do this onscreen and online.  A simple, interesting experiment is the Tomato Timer.  

For me, pomodoro works better if I keep my goal visible, too.  You could do this by using the following web-based tools:

Simple recipe:

  1. Open NowDoThis in a tab in Chrome
  2. Open Online Stopwatch or Tomato Timer in a new tab
  3. click the Frame two pages extension button
  4. set the next to-do item to focus on
  5. set the timer
  6. go!