Earlier this week, we looked at the gaps between active steps: the time when an item is ‘in progress’ but nobody is working on it.
To make those gaps visible, follow one item through its journey.
Start small.
Choose a recently completed piece of work and reconstruct what happened from the moment it started to the moment it finished.
Continue reading The hidden life of agile work: follow one item through its waitingAn item can spend days ‘in progress’ while nobody is actively working on it.
Someone has started it. Everyone involved is busy. Yet the item is waiting for an answer, a review or its turn in somebody else’s queue.
If we want to understand why delivery takes so long, we need to notice the gaps between the work.
Continue reading The hidden life of agile work: most delays happen while nobody is working on the itemFailure is not usually something organisations want to talk about.
We prefer words like delivery, progress, efficiency and success. Those are good things. But in Agile work, some of the most important learning comes from small failures that happen early enough to do something about them.
The key is not to avoid failure completely.
The key is to make failure safe enough, small enough and visible enough that the team can learn from it.
Continue reading What teams taught me by failing safelyAgile is often described as a way to deliver work faster.
That is not wrong, but it is incomplete.
At its best, Agile is not simply a delivery framework. It is a learning system. It helps teams discover what is true, what is valuable, what is possible and what needs to change.
Continue reading Agile as a learning system, not a delivery frameworkScrum teams are often surrounded by numbers.
Velocity, throughput, cycle time, burndown charts and delivery forecasts can all be useful for a while.
But there comes a point in some conversations when the numbers stop helping.
They are still being discussed. They are still being reported. But they are no longer bringing the team closer to reality.
That is the moment I start listening differently.
Continue reading What I listen for in a Scrum team when numbers stop helping
