Category: Lean
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Fix me
If your team is broken: Pull the ANDON cord Check you have a definition of good and bad At regular intervals check where you are
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Show your work
If you have no demo sessions and the work you are “delivering” is getting stuck somewhere in the pipeline before landing with end users, what value is it that you are creating? I suggest you stop right now and fix the delivery mechanism first, before you create more WIP with no way of validating the…
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Everything can be a skateboard
Paraphrasing my favourite quote formThe Best Exotic Marigold Hotel : “Everything can be built from skateboard to a car. And if you haven’t found the skateboard yet, you’ve simply not looked at all the options.”
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Focus
Starting big Why do companies keep creating hundreds of products? The mission and strategy are wrong? Too greedy? I think they simply don’t appreciate the level of focus and direction that is required to really do things well. If I look at the companies I would consider great they all have one thing in common –…
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Let’s get hurt
I was recently told by someone reviewing my proposed approach to “crawl, walk, run”. I told them I’m only interested in flying 🙂 That would have been all fine if it didn’t occur to me today that sometimes you need to crawl first. What’s the rule then? Is there a rule? Who makes the rules?…
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Simplicity
Simplicity – the art of maximising the work not done – is essential. There is a lot of great quotes about simple and simplicity but I am going to focus on this agile principles statement. Why this one? Because that is probably the quote people think of and consider least often in their search for…
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For the rebelion!
What does it mean to have good governance within an organisation? I was told today that I am just creating chaos and should stop this madness of bringing in new ideas and technologies to the organisation … I seem to recall that innovation and making things better were the main points in the speech from…
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Not good enough
I am currently having an unfortunate opportunity to watch yet another Phoenix project explode. Every person I spoke to on that project feels bad about what they are setting out to do and how they are going about it. Yet, the work starts on Monday as they are already behind schedule. How is that even…
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Don’t take shortcuts
Everyone likes quick-wins and getting there quickly. The problem with the shortcut I took recently is that it ended up not being one at all. I used a code generator to prove a point. Tempted by the initial success and quick return I then ploughed on and tried to turn this dummy application into something worth keeping forgetting…
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The Oracle
For a long time I was expecting the C people in the companies I worked for to be better, to encourage change more, to be more progressive in their thinking about managements. That changed today when I read Management 3.0 and got to the part where Jurgen says “[…] CEO of an organisation needs to…
I help teams and stuff 