- Metrics: Links to all my content on metrics and probabilistic forecasting have been collected under Mike's Hard Metrics.
- Ensuring we're building the right thing: Slicing stories and epics. Understanding the context of what we're building. Knowing how to prioritize that work.
- Improvement: Continuous improvement in general. Understanding the metaphor of "lowering the water level".
- Flow: Understanding the cost of interruptions, and the kinds of waste that gets in the way of flow.
- Meetings: The common problems with meetings. Improving the standup / daily coordination meeting and your retrospectives.
- Work in progress (WIP): Setting initial WIP limits. What to do when we're overwhelmed with WIP
Everyone should be able to update the board
Back in the 1990’s, version control wasn’t very common and I recall working with one of the first teams I’d been on, that was using it. The company had chosen to only buy a single license for one person on the team, which meant that any time we wanted to check something into version control, we would email our changes to this one guy and he would do the merge and then email back a copy of the latest code.
Priorities
Out of the box, Jira offers up five different priorities for any given ticket, which implies five different classes of service. Since the option is there, many teams will use all of them at different times.
Speeding up the daily coordination meeting (AKA standup, daily scrum)
When I first engage with a team, I’m focused on ensuring that we have an effective daily meeting, and I’m less concerned about how long it takes. Are we talking about all the things that we should be talking about? Are are actively collaborating on the work?
Meeting punctuality
A 2018 study on meeting lateness shows that meeting lateness is negatively related to both meeting satisfaction and effectiveness.
Supporting the new hires
I’m seeing more posts saying that new hires need to be in the office because they ramp up faster, than if they’re remote. There’s a fundamental presupposition in these statements that once we’ve hired these people, we’re immediately going to throw them to the wolves and have them work all by themselves.
The facilitators role
If you’re facilitating the daily coordination meeting (standup, daily scrum, whatever you want to call it), and you’re doing all the talking, then you’re doing it wrong.
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.
Jira Metrics 2.12
I’ve released JiraMetrics 2.12, with a number of bug fixes, and a new chart that I’ll describe below.