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There's a lot here and if you're not sure where to start, here are some popular starting points. From these, you'll find crosslinks to even more topics. Enjoy!

• 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. Retrospectives are covered in my popular video course Retrospective Magic.
• Work in progress (WIP): Setting initial WIP limits. What to do when we're overwhelmed with WIP

For other kinds of content, see my other blogs at Unconscious Agile and Agile Technical Excellence.

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.

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?

WIP by Parent

One of the charts built into JiraMetrics is WIP by Parent, as shown below. What this shows is the total work in progress (WIP) on each given day. The WIP is then grouped by colour according to the parent (Epic in this case) that the original ticket belonged to.

Jira’s Start Standup Button

For a while now, I’ve been noticing a “start standup” button at the top of Jira boards and I’ve been wondering what it did. Today I pushed that button in the hope that it would do something to help make the standup more effective, and now I wish I hadn’t.