Risk Management

Yesterday I went on a guided hike to teach people how to safely hike through bear country. Specifically grizzy bear country. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any bears, but we did learn an amazing amount about them, and saw some spectacular glaciers and alpine terrain.

Gaming metrics

When I suggest that people will game whatever metrics we put in place, I’m often met with shocked indignation. We would never game the numbers! And yet we do.

OKR’s for Quality

The topic of OKR’s for quality have come up in multiple different contexts, across multiple clients, recently so perhaps it’s worth exploring.

Prioritization

There two different times that we need to prioritize work and we should be using completely different approaches to that prioritization, for each stage.

Wait states

The metrics covered in our Flow Metrics Basics class show how to measure different aspects of flow, but those metrics don’t in themselves, show how to improve the flow. We’ll look at one way to improve now.

Playing the long game

If I was planning to disband my team this week and I only cared about what they could deliver in a couple of days then I’d be focused on making sure that everyone was doing that piece of work that they were most skilled at.

Building the right thing

When I’m working with a development team, I’ll often start by having them walk me through what business need they’re solving for. I’m less interested in the code or the architecture until I’ve first understood what problem we’re trying to solve.

No single right answer

All too often we focus on a single problem and make statements as if solving this one thing will solve everything. While that one thing might certainly make things better, it’s never the only answer. Everything we do is within the context of a complex adaptive system and changing any one thing will have ripple effects everywhere else in the system.

Driving to the airport

Imagine we wanted to estimate how long it would take to drive to the airport. You might see that it’s 50km to the airport and that your car can drive at 100km/hour. Therefore it will take 30 minutes, right?