Author Archives: kb2bkb

Types of Work

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Following on from the earlier post about decisions, what would we do differently if we realised that we have been mixing together the concepts of creation work and information flow work?

Doing WorkCreation Work

This is the way we usually think about work – doing things, fixing things, reporting completion rates and then measuring the amount of value delivered. As we perform this work, reports get generated, decisions get made and dependencies managed.

Info Flow WorkInformation Flow Work

Information is required to support decision making and also for the purposes of monitoring. We tend not to focus on this type of work. There may be an advantage to specifically calling it out.

  • Groups that gather data to flow up to decision-makers – if there is clarity about what decisions are being made and what information is required in order to make them, then these groups could be more effective
  • Groups that help disparate teams to work together – what decisions do the teams need to make or what types of data do the teams need to monitor for dependency, risk and issue management?

Perhaps our work structures would look more like the picture below.

Two Systems of WorkCreation and Information Flow Work Intertwined

Roles and teams specifically created as either primarily creation work or information flow work and then structured so that they intertwine. This could free up capacity in the creation work roles as they would not need to do so much reporting. It could also allow the information flow roles to better describe the value that they provide to the organisation in the support of decision-making, communications and monitoring.

 

Lean Kanban United Kingdom 2013

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I enjoyed attending LKUK13 and would like to share some of the snippets that I found interesting. These are from my notes and are my interpretations – any mis-interpretation is entirely my responsibility and I am happy to receive any corrective feedback.

Mike Burrows – Kanban is like Onions!

  • If we organise the work, we make it possible for people to re-roganise around the work
  • Ask if any single improvement can benefit the Customers, team and organisation – the improvement is good if all 3 can benefit from it
  • To help with paying attention to flow, then keep work sized to see movement every day
  • Small acts of leadership – such as the routine from Toyota – leaders can ask
    • What is the process?
    • How can we see it’s working?
    • How is it improving?
  • Agreement from people versus agreement between people

Liz Keogh – Cynefin in Action

  • Frog thinking vs bicycle thinking – we can take a bike apart and put it back together, and it will work again – not a frog
  • We’re discovering how to discover stuff by doing it
  • Deliberate discovery – Risk (newest things) first – tell the story that’s never been told
  • Focus on how we can quickly get feedback

Edward Kay – Mulit-client Kanban

  • The ‘ready’ column makes a good handover point
  • Use ‘Help’ tokens to indicate that you need assistance with a story – either with context or skills – so that you don’t interrupt others and they can select their own time to help you

Torbjörn Gyllebring – #NoMetrics – the ephemeral role of data in decision making

  • Lines of code is the best metric (and everyone hates this) – great for archaeology, but it’s all from the past
  • Ethics – in a position of power, you start to influence people – do no harm
  • Our customers are those whose lives we touch
  • Clarification should be at the centre of any measurement effort
  • Data needs to always be relevant
  • Informational measures are useful – but it depends on how people perceive it
  • ODIM – a good model – Outcomes, then Decision, then Information, then Metrics – use the metric and then discard it
  • Know why you need the data

Yuval Yeret – Kanban – a SANE way towards agile in the enterprise

  • When trying to change culture, engage in marketing – identify and nurture opportunities
  • Start with leaders and managers
  • Need to balance between prescriptive guidance and no guidance
  • After a chance allow time to stabalise and recharge – then provide good reasons to get out of recharge mode

Chris McDermott – The Other Side of Kanban

  • Encourage shared understanding – not managers are dating agents and chaperones
  • Add a ‘ready to celebrate’ column onto the board

Stephen Parry – How to develop Lean leadership and create an adaptive, learning and engaging organisation

  • Reciprocity only works when there is a sincere and genuine feeling – does not work if there is a feeling of manipulation – It can be negative
  • ‘Dont bring me problems, bring me solutions’ is an example of leadership abandonment not empowerment

Chris Young – Models, Maps, Measures and Mystery

  • Asked why customer approval waiting times went up a lot – led to the idea to have customers sit with the developers
  • At one stage the customer started leading the standups
  • Added an extra column to personal kanban board ‘didn’t happen’ next to the ‘done’ column

Jabe Bloom – What is the value of social capital?

  • A value stream is a linear view of the social network
  • Swarms – form temporary teams on high-value problems with volunteers
  • Emergent slack – have 20% of time spent on interruptible tasks (tasks that no-one is waiting on)
  • Social capital is the ability to distribute and leverage trust (reciprocity)
  • In a low social capital environment we use consensus models
  • In a high social capital environment we trust each other to make decsions
  • Authority removes social capital (consumes it)

Jim Benson – Beyond Agile

  • Flow if you can, pull if you must (pull systems are all remedial)
  • No recipe for success – just a recipe for not likely failing
  • Trying to do agile versus delivering value

Zsolt Fabok – I Broke the WIP Limit Twice, and I’m Still on the Team!

  • If you understand small, incremental evolutionary changes and pull, then you can decduce the rest
  • The goal is to have a stable system – easier to improve it

Alexis Nicolas – Management hacking in progress

  • Managers should focus on learning. We can live with problems for 1 or 2 days because we have better risk management
  • Change is viral – not prepared planning – we can design a viral change

Troy Magennis – Cycle Time Analytics – Fast #NoEstimate Forecasting and Decision Making

  • Statistics is more of a logic problem than a maths problem
  • When we forcast, state the level of uncertainty – ask what point would sway the decision
  • Every choice we make changes the outcome – Decision induced uncertainty
  • Diagnostic models allow us to  run ‘what if’ scenarios
  • Estimating what could go wrong is more important
  • We should update our forecast each time we finish a piece of work because we have learnt more

Decisions

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Thank you to Torbjörn Gyllebring and Thom Leggett for the conversations and inspiration to write this post.

It can be useful to step back from our work and study the decisions that we are making. Here are some of the ways to study decisions and how we can start to visualise the information.

Mapping Decisions

Start by writing out the decisions and laying them out in a logical sequence – grouping similar ones together and consequential ones after each other. Draw some arrows between them – it can be helpful if another person is working with you to help clarify which decisions lead to others and their inter-relationships.

Sometimes there are loops such as the ones labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’ where, when we make decsion A, it changes how we should make decsion B which then impacts how we should make decision A. It might be possible that we get false ‘loops’ as well as the real ones when we are not clear about the decisions that we are making.

 Decisions pull info

Once a decision has been identified, we start seeking the information required in order to make the decision. It is as if the decision is ‘pulling’ the information into it, and once there is enough, we can then make the decision. We can visualise this by writing the decision as a question on the top of a card and the information items required as bullet points under the question.

 Decision Cards

Some information items are actually prior decisions, we can use a code to link these cards together and put them up on a wall to show the realtionships. This allows us to have good conversations about both the activities required to gather information and the progress of the decisions that we are making.

 

New Skills

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I have been knitting a pair of socks for myself this last week – on a set of four needles – in the round. It is really easy to do because I can just keep knitting and only need to use purl stitches when I make the heel.

I first tried making socks on a pair of needles (like normal knitting).

2 needlesI was very surprised when it was quite difficult – heels had to be formed at both ends, every second row was purl and the finished sock had a seam underneath the foot.

So I tried with 4 needles and it took a little while to work out how to hold them – but it is much easier.

Knitting in the roundI wonder how many other things I have avoided trying because they look difficult? I could be missing out on gaining some new skills.

Shadows

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The image that I have used at the top of these pages is a photo that I took outside the London Zoo on the pathway between Gloucester Gate and The Broadwalk path. It was in February 2012 the week after CALM Alpha and it was a beautiful day – I think that the temperature reached 16 or 17 degrees Celsius. I felt almost alone – there were not many people around and I took a few photos from the same point such as the one below looking at the zoo.

Exif_JPEG_PICTUREI chose the image for this blog because there are some shadows at the front and not many shadows cast by the trees in the distance due to the scattering of clouds that were in the sky. I find the idea of shadows interesting, it is another way of looking at an object and I wonder if we can use the concept to look at methods and principles or values?

If we start with a principle or value from Agile or Lean – are the methods that we use like the shadows of those principles or values? Or is it the other way around?

Creativity

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We can start with a goal in mind and then follow a process in order to reach that goal. I have been wondering if this approach sometimes stifles our creativity and what other approaches might also be valid.

 What if we started messing around and doing some random stuff?MessOnce we have done this for a while, we could stand back and look at our creation from different angles.

ArtPerhaps it will look like something useful and then we can decide what to do with it. Somewhere between random stuff and processes we can find creativity and innovation.

Comparative Context

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Thank you to Steve Holt for the term ‘comparative context’ and Jay Johnson also for the twitter conversation that got me thinking about the difference between numbers and descriptive words when we are setting goals.

‘I want to stand close enough to an apple tree that I can smell the apples’ – in this case numbers are almost irrelevant because the words ‘close enough’ provide comparative context.

  • The apples must be ripe enough to smell – so it must be the right season
  • I must not have a bad cold – otherwise I will not smell anything
  • If it is raining, we will need cover, such as an umbrella

Imagine trying to describe this using numbers – we would need a lot more than this list.

  • Distance = 10cm
  • Rhino-virus level less than x%
  • Humidity less than 80%

Comparative ContextWhen we set goals, we often use a lot of numbers – perhaps we are trying to provide sufficient context. It is worth considering using descriptive words instead – a few words can provide a huge amount of meaning.

 Jay Johnson has posted his thoughts inspired by the conversation – Near, Far and Full Context

Layers

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I used to wonder why organisational charts were drawn with the executive roles at the top – instead of the other way around to show that the management layers support the operational ones to get work done. This support takes many forms.

  • Control – Watching out for bad things and preventing them
  • Assistance – Watching out for areas that are struggling and helping directly or arranging for help to be provided
  • Decisions – Ensuring that information is flowing to and from teams so that decisions can be made – at whatever level is best for the decision to be made

The management function can also be described as similar to being a conductor – making sure that work is flowing in and out of a team smoothly and the team has the right skills and capacity to do the work.

I have been wondering what it could be like if we did not have management as a function any more.

  • Everyone could be responsible for observing the system of work and making improvements whenever needed – in a continuous way.
  • People could find their own valuable work to do – and just get on with doing it – this includes helping others when they need assistance.

There is a lot of value to be gained from having different views of data and information available. We currently cover this by having management layers – I wonder what we would call this function if we did not have management any more?

 

Grateful

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It is a beautiful Sunday morning and I was reflecting about the way I used to perceive time.

I used to see the weekends as jewels that were very far apart on a string of grey and dull time that included the obligations of work in between. I would despair that the weekends were so short and start to feel stressed from Sunday lunchtime about how little I had achieved in the weekend.

That was a long time ago – now I see things very differently.

Each day is a gift and I am curious to find out what I will learn from every single day. The reason this has changed is because of the joy that I have in learning new things and having the freedom to do this at work as well as privately.

I am grateful to all the people that have helped me to understand new ways of working related to Cynefin, agile, lean and beyond. You know who you are – if we have ever spoken/tweeted around these topics, or if you have written posts, tweets or books that have inspired the people I have spoken to…Thank you.

 

Systems

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What is a system?

One example is a circulatory system – with our heart at the centre.

Another example is a group of people – how they interact, their shared experiences and culture.

So systems can be a grouping and how we look at groupings.

We can learn about systems in at  least two different ways.

  1. We can look at each element in a system in order to understand how it works by adding together the knowledge we gain about each element.
  2. And we can look at the system as a whole and try to understand it as a whole.