“You don’t need to fire people and hire new people: you need to create an environment where people can learn” – Jez Humble How would you describe your typical working week? This was mine: taking a deep breath outside the main entrance Monday morning – “Attack!” and then tumbling out  Friday evening. But after almost two years, my colleague and partner in enterprise battle and I agreed, we could be proud of what we had accomplished. Joining this enterprise, I was somewhat enlightened about the urgent, critical, messy situation, but reading the all-lean leadership values I felt confident I ..read more

I have chosen to write about From Push to Pull because I think it’s one of the most important as well as difficult shifts to make in an organisation. You can find signs of a push culture in many areas and on many different levels: that’s why I think it’s critical to start change here. Basically, it’s only about whether you assign tasks to people or let them pick up work when they’re ready. Can’t be that difficult or important, right? Well, I think it defines the workplace. Here are some typical characteristics in different areas. Meetings vs “Slack” Time To start with something very common in ..read more

Managing is improving – Toyota Kata This time of the year, I guess a lot of companies are working on performance development plans. We are. As a base, we have the company’s vision and strategic goals, along with the employee and leadership model. The leadership model reflects the company’s Lean values, something very important to me. So far so good. The Observation First it happened only once, and I didn’t give it too much attention. But then it happened again, and it started to puzzle me: business owners trying to push new products with poor quality live. Since we at that time already had a q ..read more

One of my first observations at my new job was that I had come to a very meeting- and mail-intense workplace. After one day my calendar was fully booked and my inbox flooded. I realised my big plans for fast changes would soon be shattered, since I would be so busy running to important meetings and reading even more important emails. Having coworkers enthusiastically filling each other’s calendars and inboxes creates a destructive Push culture. These basic actions form whether someone else controls your time (Push) or you decide yourself how to make the best of it (Pull). The meeting disease s ..read more

“Individuals high in grit are able to maintain their determination and motivation over long periods despite experiences with failure and adversity. Their passion and commitment towards the long-term objective is the overriding factor that provides the stamina required to “stay the course” amid challenges and set-backs.” Most of my posts have played a part in a long story about a web development program, the people in and around it and a crucial overall transformation. Last week we agreed we are done with the transformation in the sense that we are in a good enough state to switch&nbs ..read more

This post is about learnings and reflections of our mob programming teams from an enterprise perspective. Not so much about the benefits for the team itself, but the impact on the organisation and its processes, the obstacles that may appear, and the ways to navigate around those obstacles. My first post, Risk Management with Mob Programming describes one clear benefit for business that I thought wasn’t highlighted enough compared to its importance. Some of the following characteristics are true for other teams as well. Mob programming just emphasis them. ITIL and ..read more

In April 2010, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull’s dramatic eruption caused an ash cloud that kept the travel industry in its vicious hands for several days. The closure of the european airspace resulted in 100,000 cancelled flights… Seven years later, one morning in March, two meetings take place. Meeting 1: Replanning of Enterprise Project X Project X has been running for more than two years and has reached a serious state. The implementation involves 10+ teams and an external vendor. Not only are the budget, plans and scope dark red from a traditional PMO ..read more

Our web development department needed to be reorganised and we wanted to try a new approach for this: self-organising teams work great, why not gather everyone and try to self-organise the whole department? Our Situation We had four web teams in Stockholm and two teams off-shore. The off-shore business needed to be decreased and this meant taking on the ownership of more software.  We also had a wide mix of technologies and a growing technical debt that seemed hard to deal with. Some products were the result of a group investment and not fit for us. Furthermore, business-cr ..read more

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