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Arkiv med innlegg om smidig utvikling, ledelse, kanban, produktivitet og samarbeid.

11.07.2013

One week in the staging environment

Some things are hard to change. A policy that seems to haunt me is that you must stabilize (or harden) a release candidate for a certain period of time (for instance in the staging environment), before you can deploy it in production.

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12.12.2012

Effective meetings – is it possible?

How does the culture in your organization go along with possibility of achieving effective meetings? A month back I wrote a post at the company blog about this, why it might be difficult, and how to improve it.

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11.07.2012

Agile and congruent leadership

You’re a leader in your organization, and you want to improve efficiency. You think you want an “agile transformation”, because you heard others have been successful with it.

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27.04.2012

Talking with carpenters

We are currently renovating an entire floor at home, and yesterday I tweeted about a Kanban board I put up for my carpenters . This was only meant as a “joke”, of course, but it generated some feedback and therefore, upon request, I share the board with you:

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26.04.2012

One word: Feedback

With all the different management models out there, chances are you’ve come across a model that can help you solve or improve a particular problem. From a bird’s perspective, they might look simple, but to fully grasp how to apply them in your organization, you need a deeper understanding than you can get from only reading a book. You need hands-on experience.

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27.02.2012

How to boost your personal productivity? (English version)

A while ago, I wrote a blog post in Norwegian about how to improve your personal productivity, by combining Personal Kanban and Pomodoro. This blog post was recently published as an article, in English, by ProgramUtvikling in their magazine – The Developer (No 1, 2012) .

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21.02.2012

Exploring WIP limits

A few months back I was involved in a highly developer centric project (very unlike my current project). Non-developers were basically only involved and available upon request, so most of the time the team was not very cross-functional.

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20.12.2011

A simple tip for more efficient standups

A while ago, I was asked for advice on how a team could improve efficiency on standup meetings. The team was growing, and their standups were taking an increasingly amount of time. I didn’t have much time looking into why this happened, so I simply suggested they could try walk the board instead of using the traditional Scrum meeting.

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29.11.2011

Customizing your Kanban board

Lately, I have seen several blog posts and twitter chats emphasizing the importance of customizing your Kanban board. This applies everywhere, no matter if you use a straightforward linear Kanban board, networked Kanban or even your own personal Kanban – you need visualize the flow so that it fits the way you work .

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03.11.2011

Kanban in a non-linear flow

A Kanban board is supposed to represent the current process, the way it is right now. Representing the way we work on a simple, linear, Kanban board, is not always easy. In fact, it’s not always possible. Sometimes, the way we work is more complex than that. Jurgen Appelo described how to deal with more complex systems in his recent post on networked Kanban , and that’s what inspired me to write this post.

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16.10.2011

Using Kanban in retrospectives

I remember reading about the Lean Coffee movement. Inspired by their totally open meeting format, I figured this could be an excellent alternative for our retrospectives. Lean Coffee meetings use Kanban to structure their meetings, they democratize their meetings to learn and discover things about what they don’t know – as well as exploring further what they already know. Sounds like a good fit for retrospectives to me!

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23.09.2011

Estimating software projects

My Twitter stream flooded with estimation related topics yesterday. We’re currently starting up a new project, so the timing was perfect and the topic highly relevant. Here are some recommended blog posts from yesterday on the topic:

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19.09.2011

Kanban and Scrum after 500 tweets

I joined Twitter June 22, 2010, so, needless to say, I was not an early adaptor. Nevertheless, I just passed 500 tweets, and most of my tweets are somehow related to agile development, so did I come across something useful? The answer is yes , and I believe it’s an appropriate time to reflect – focusing on Kanban and Scrum this time.

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08.07.2011

Visualizing project policies in Kanban

When David Anderson visited us last month, he mentioned that we must make sure project policies are explicit by writing them down. Recently, I had a some sort of epiphany that some of these policies could be visualized as well – directly up on the wall.

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07.07.2011

Who’s your safety valve?

I love what I’m doing, I can actually be pretty passionate about things, and if I really believe in something my first instinct would be to let others know how this can make their lives, jobs, projects – you name it – better. But if you ask people I have worked with over the years, I guess they would characterize me as quite calm and diplomatic.

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18.04.2011

Improve team performance – seek inspiration elsewhere

As a teacher, my wife had to step in to avoid a conflict among sixth graders at school. She told me that she would let her students come up with different solutions on how to solve this conflict the following day. I mentioned briefly that she, in this particular case, could use a retrospective technique I have used in several occasions, prioritizing with dots , and let her students vote for the solution they would prefer.

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