Evolving organisations and improving working lives
Evolving organisations and improving working lives
I recently blogged here on Is Estimation Waste and I would like to come back to it. There is a movement in Lean and Agile towards #NoEstimates which has a lot of value, but I still believe that we are risking missing something if we don’t find an alternative method to get the value we get from Estimation (shared …
Technical Debt is a difficult concept for people to understand, and I once came across a wonderful analogy and although I can’t remember who I heard the concept from, I would like to share with you all. I have taken the liberty of embellishing it somewhat. Let us imagine we have identified a user need like this: …
Numbers Game Whenever I’m in a meeting talking about metrics, someone always brings up Velocity. If you’re familiar with Scrum you’ll know that in this context, velocity means the number of story points completed per sprint. If a team completes 4 stories each of which scores 5 story points in one sprint, the velocity of …
I’ve been struggling for a metaphor to help explain the difference between statistical forecasting and estimation, and this one came to me, so lets give it a whirl. Let me express the scenario in some human readable BDD (Gherkin) language Given I am an orange juice shop owner and currently have no oranges when I …
Imagine a motorway between Starttown and Finishcity. When it all flows it takes exactly 3 hours to get from start to finish for a car, a little longer for a lorry, and a little shorter for a motorcycle, so 3 hours ± 15 minutes. It has 3 lanes in each direction for its entire length. …
How a humble bottle of tomato ketchup can teach us about flow, pull and push. Knowledge work tends to be Complex Adaptive work. That means as you try to solve a problem, the solution leads to a change in the problem you are trying to solve. It’s a bit quantum to be honest. You can …