A couple of years ago I ranted about the way that people have created a religion around Deming and take his statements as absolute facts. In particular the statement Deming made about the importance of the system versus the people irked … Continue reading →
If you think about it there are only two fundamental approaches to solving a problem. Either you plan how to solve it first and then try to follow this plan or you just jump in and start solving the problem … Continue reading →
David Andersen used his Meetup talk i Oslo last week to describe a start-up’s journey from Scrum to a more Kanban based way of doing things. I seldom work with start-ups, but David’s talk resonated with my experiences in contexts … Continue reading →
A lot of people seem to like John Seddon’s concept of failure demand. Me too. But Seddon mostly talks about service delivery in areas such as call centers and housing repairs. I tend to work with software development organizations. When … Continue reading →
When I come across a great thinker that opens my eyes to new ideas I always try to look for errors in their reasoning. The obvious reason to do this is as a safeguard against being carried away by new … Continue reading →
If you take a picture while on vacation, is that picture yours? You are probably thinking: “What a stupid question. Of course it is mine!” But what if a stranger had asked you to take a picture of her with … Continue reading →
The practice of “5 whys” is a popular lean approach to root cause analysis. It can be overly simplistic in some situations but few people would question the virtue of trying to figure out the real causes of a problem … Continue reading →
The 10 year anniversary of the agile manifesto has just passed. As part of some kind of distributed retrospective, there has been a lot of discussion about what will happen with agile now. I think that agile will be dead … Continue reading →
Atul Gawande has written a fascinating book called The Checklist Manifesto. The core message in this book is that many professions have advanced to an unprecedented level of sophistication and complexity. The main obstacle in getting optimal results is increasingly … Continue reading →
The agile perspective When the agile manifesto was published a decade ago I welcomed it. I had been building applications for a decade pretty much according to the principles in the manifesto. During this period I had watched in horror … Continue reading →