I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some of things that keep me busy when I’m not doing my day job. Podcasts Note to Self - I recently started listening to this one and find it very engaging. The topics are around how technology fits into our lives. I find Manoush Zomorodi entertaining and informative. Design Matters - This one isn’t really about design as much as it’s about how people got to where they are. MORE
100 
I had an interesting experience recently. I was working with a team as they went thru their sprint planning. They had figured out their capacity based on yesterday's weather and their average amount of interrupt. The product owner suggested the sprint goal and they started picking stories based on the goal. They reached the point where one more story met the sprint goal, but put them over their estimated capacity. MORE
Anyone that's been around Agile for a while has probably heard of the Design the Box exercise. The idea is to help the team define and understand the product vision. I'm getting near the end of a project. We've had some challenges in terms of making the right decisions on scope. This has manifested itself in completing user stories only to have the business team say "I know that's what I asked for, but I don't think it's right." We didn't do a Design the Box at the start of the project. MORE
This is part 2 of a 12 part series on the Principles of Agile Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Another challenge for people new to agile is this idea about welcoming change late in the project. It's not that they don't expect changes, it's the approach taken to deal with it. Usually there is a Byzantine approach that involves change review boards, change request forms and impact assessments. MORE
I am speaking this week at the Projects to the Point (P2P) conference in Cairo, Egypt. The focus of the conference is the book "How Successful Organizations Implement Change" and the speakers (myself included) each wrote one of the chapters of the book by the same title. We have an interesting approach for implementing change where I'm working, a technique call Nemawashi. It's a Japanese term that literally translates to "digging around the roots" but the meaning is much more than that. MORE
There's another idea from Tim Brown's Change by Design I thought was worth writing about. It's the idea of divergence and convergence. Early in a design project (or any project), we want to collect lots of ideas. This is divergence.creating lots of possible choices. Linus Pauling , winner of 2 Nobel prizes, stated "To have a good ide, you must first have lots of ideas." If you're writing user stories, don't try to limit story creation. MORE
I came across another interesting idea in Change By Design. It was presented as Toyota's ideas around training and had 4 principles: There is no substitute for direct observation Proposed changes should always be structured as experiments Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible Managers should coach, not fix This idea of experimenting caught my attention. MORE
130 
Empathy is an important attribute in Design Thinking. In order to solve our customer's problems, we really need to understand them. We need to walk in their shoes. But there's a limit to how far we can take this. We can spend hours talking to an astronaut, but we will never truly understand what it's like to walk in space. Agile has this idea of the Product Owner, but you don't see much written in agile about empathy. MORE
I'm currently reading the book Design the Life You Love by Ayse Birsel. The book takes a look at Design Thinking and applying it to your own life. It is based on the success that the author has had as a product designer. MORE
One of the things we talk about at work is eliminating group think and an approach to do this is using red teaming. For those not familiar with the term, red team comes from the military and originally stood for a team that represented the opposition. It has since expanded to include any team that might challenge the status quo.aka, group think. So how does this apply to the agile world? Even agile teams can get stuck in group think. A great example is during story estimating. MORE
When I was young, I had a riding lawn mower. We had a big yard out in the suburbs and the riding mower made the job quicker. Today I live closer to downtown in a house with a smaller yard. I’m currently using an old fashion reel mower…no motor, just foot power to make it work. MORE
When I first learned Scrum , the idea was to have 30-day (4 week) iterations with a demo at the end of each iteration. Today I see teams that have iterations from 1 to 4 weeks, or in the case of Kanban, no iterations at all. So the question is, how often should there be a demo? I’m a believer of getting sign off on a user story once it's done. This usually comes from the person who wrote it, who may be a proxy to the product owner. MORE
I heard the term "Ready Ready" being used at work last week. I've heard of "Done Done" but this was a new one on me. I remember the first time I heard the concept of done done. When a developer finishes coding, the story is done but not done done. There are a number of other steps that have to be completed before it is really done, that is done done. The team should come up with the definition of done at the start of a project. MORE
By LibertyGroup25 (Own work) Henry Ford pioneered many of the ideas that are now commonplace in business, including ideas used in Design Thinking. He has been quoted as saying "If you ask people what they want, it would be a faster horse." This hits on the design thinking principle of divergence. MORE
I'm at the Orlando airport, departing from this year's PMI North America Global Congress. I've attended at least part of every North America congress since 1999, and even a few of the ones in Europe. While I did enjoy it, this year's was definitely not among my favorites. I missed the first day's activities due to a personal commitment. I heard mixed/negative reviews of the opening keynote, Drew and Jonathan Scott, HGTV's Property Brothers. MORE
I've been reading the book Change by Design by Tim Brown. It's part of my overall interest in design in general. I have found a number of interesting ideas in the book so far, and I'm not even half way through it. One concept had to do with constraints. Anyone that has worked much on projects know that constraints are a big part of it. He talks about three aspects of constraint; feasibility, desirability, and viability. MORE
Over the past weekend I went ice climbing with my son. He is a pretty serious climber and I've picked it up because of him, but neither of us have ever ice climbed before. We went to a place near Cedar Falls Iowa that ices down a grain silo. MORE
The topic of design has been crossing my path lately. I see a lot of overlap with Agile principles. One of the principles I came across is called Gall’s law. It states that "all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked.” It was introduced by John Gall in his book Systematics in 1975. This is very similar to the Agile principle of simplicity. It can be seen in the practice of Test Driven Development. MORE
I’ve come across a number of articles lately that have talked about the importance of a good morning routine (like this one ), so I have been trying to practice some of these techniques. One practice is to start the day with meditation, not checking any electronic devices. I'll admit, sometimes when I'm working from home I'll turn on the TV while making my morning coffee before heading up to the office, but I don't start responding to email first thing in the morning. MORE
116 I’m currently working with a client that is adopting agile, which really means there are people around that have done agile, but it’s not widespread nor is anyone on my particular project experienced with agile. As is common in these situations, I’ve gone through at different points to try to help them develop their agile mindset. My developers are well-versed in agile, but the client is acting as the product owner, so their understanding of agile is important to project success. MORE
I’m on my way to Colorado for a weekend of outdoor adventures, climbing and mountain biking. As I was looking over the route for the climb (Kelso’s Ridge up Torrey’s Peak and a possible double with Gray’s Peak) I remembered an article I recently read on applying the principles of lean climbing to business ( here ). I’ve done a couple 14ers before, so this will be my third and maybe fourth, all with my son. We plan on being lean on this climb. Enough water and food, but not much more. MORE
I recently had the opportunity to hear Tom Peters speak and I have to say that even at the age of 71, he still has a lot of energy and passion. He began the talk with his experience coming out of college with an engineering degree. He found the math and science classes did little to prepare him for the real world, the people part of the equation, or the “all important last 99%” of being successful. MORE
The PMI Conference was held this past weekend in Chicago. They've changed the format a bit and even changed the name to reflect the changes. When I first started attending almost 20 years ago, it was the PMI Symposium, then Global Congress and now the PMI Conference. They had 3 different keynote speakers (though I only saw 2 of them), one each day. MORE
I am still reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow , and I came across an interesting quote People can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. He used the example of stock traders, who think they are successful in picking stocks even though evidence points otherwise. Two out of three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year. MORE
Three of my favorite presentations at Agile2014 were on soft skills; Diana Larsen’s Best Job Ever , Lyssa Adkin’s Facilitating Intense Conversations , and Jean Tabaka/Em Campbell-Pretty’s Creating Agile Tribes Diana Larsen was the keynote presenter on Wednesday. MORE
I have been exploring techniques to help my Scrum teams become more effective and one of the techniques I've been looking at is Crew Resource Management (CRM). CRM came about because of a number of airplane crashes in the 70s that were attributed to human error. More recently, it is cited as one of the reasons there were no causalities in the US Air flight 1549 (Miracle on the Hudson). One component of Crew Resource Management is Situation Awareness. MORE
I’m making my way through the Tim Ferris' book Tools of Titans. It’s well over 600 pages but it has a lot of useful, interesting advice, though I'll admit some of it is a bit out there. He breaks the book up into three areas; Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise. The book is really just a summary of podcasts done over the years with some other advice added in. One piece of advice I appreciated is what he called the canvas strategy. The idea really came from Ryan Holiday. MORE
There's an interesting decision making technique that I came across in the book Decisive. It's called 10/10/10. The technique was developed by Suzy Welch. She has a book by the same name. The idea is to think about how you will feel about a decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. The idea being discussed in Decisive is how to avoid short-term emotion when making a decision. Bad decisions, they say, are made while having strong emotions such as anger or greed. MORE
116 
I recently completed the book Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal , a retired Army General and former commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, operating in Iraq. It's the story of how he transformed that command in order to more effectively execute their mission. The book explores the ideas of complicated and complex. I kept thinking about the Cynefin framework , though McChrystal does not specifically mention it in the book. MORE
I'm working on the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics. As you might guess, the book is about how the brain works, based on years of research. He talks about the mind as two systems, the first being fast and intuitive and the second being more deliberate. One of the ideas he discussing is that of Priming. Priming happens when something such as a set of words impact our thought and actions. MORE
100 
I was flying home from a client visit last week at the airport getting ready to board the plane when the gate agent announced that the flight was gonna be delayed by ten minutes due to some unspecified mechanical issue. Ten minutes later they announcement another ten minute delay. They did this two more times. So what was going on? Did the airlines not want to admit upfront that they had a 40 minute delay so they fed the delays to us ten minutes at a time? MORE
Agile is about delivering value, so it is important to understand the value you are delivering within an iteration or release. However, I seen many teams that focus on how many story points they deliver but not really thinking about the value of those story points. So are there ways to measure value? The answer is, of course there is. One way would be to use the Planning Poker approach, but instead of estimating the effort for each story you can estimate the value of the story. MORE
I ran an exercise at the beginning of a new project last week; Empathy Mapping. This is part of an overall approach of using Design Thinking along with agile development. The idea to empathy mapping is to get to understand your users. MORE
I’m working on a new assignment as part of an agile coaching team leading a transformation at a large organization. One of my fellow coaches is also a former Navy officer. We’ve had a number of conversations about how many of the techniques developed by the military can be applied to make any team a high-performing one. One particular tool is debriefing. I’ll admit, I didn’t do a lot of this in my military career, but the idea is to take time after any activity to review how it went. MORE
Zen Project Management
MAY 18, 2018
I am still reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow , and I came across an interesting quote People can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. He used the example of stock traders, who think they are successful in picking stocks even though evidence points otherwise. Two out of three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.
Zen Project Management
APRIL 15, 2018
I'm working on the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics. As you might guess, the book is about how the brain works, based on years of research. He talks about the mind as two systems, the first being fast and intuitive and the second being more deliberate. One of the ideas he discussing is that of Priming. Priming happens when something such as a set of words impact our thought and actions.
Zen Project Management
MAY 16, 2016
By LibertyGroup25 (Own work) Henry Ford pioneered many of the ideas that are now commonplace in business, including ideas used in Design Thinking. He has been quoted as saying "If you ask people what they want, it would be a faster horse." This hits on the design thinking principle of divergence.
Zen Project Management
MARCH 13, 2018
I recently completed the book Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal , a retired Army General and former commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force, operating in Iraq. It's the story of how he transformed that command in order to more effectively execute their mission. The book explores the ideas of complicated and complex. I kept thinking about the Cynefin framework , though McChrystal does not specifically mention it in the book.
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Zen Project Management
OCTOBER 18, 2017
One of the things we talk about at work is eliminating group think and an approach to do this is using red teaming. For those not familiar with the term, red team comes from the military and originally stood for a team that represented the opposition. It has since expanded to include any team that might challenge the status quo.aka, group think. So how does this apply to the agile world? Even agile teams can get stuck in group think. A great example is during story estimating.
Zen Project Management
DECEMBER 5, 2017
I am speaking this week at the Projects to the Point (P2P) conference in Cairo, Egypt. The focus of the conference is the book "How Successful Organizations Implement Change" and the speakers (myself included) each wrote one of the chapters of the book by the same title. We have an interesting approach for implementing change where I'm working, a technique call Nemawashi. It's a Japanese term that literally translates to "digging around the roots" but the meaning is much more than that.
Zen Project Management
OCTOBER 11, 2016
Agile is about delivering value, so it is important to understand the value you are delivering within an iteration or release. However, I seen many teams that focus on how many story points they deliver but not really thinking about the value of those story points. So are there ways to measure value? The answer is, of course there is. One way would be to use the Planning Poker approach, but instead of estimating the effort for each story you can estimate the value of the story.
Zen Project Management
MARCH 30, 2017
I started something new in February, a bullet journal. I've played with different tools to help me keep organized and remember stuff, and this is my latest.
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Zen Project Management
NOVEMBER 9, 2017
The PMI Conference was held this past weekend in Chicago. They've changed the format a bit and even changed the name to reflect the changes. When I first started attending almost 20 years ago, it was the PMI Symposium, then Global Congress and now the PMI Conference. They had 3 different keynote speakers (though I only saw 2 of them), one each day.
Zen Project Management
SEPTEMBER 26, 2017
I’m working on a new assignment as part of an agile coaching team leading a transformation at a large organization. One of my fellow coaches is also a former Navy officer. We’ve had a number of conversations about how many of the techniques developed by the military can be applied to make any team a high-performing one. One particular tool is debriefing. I’ll admit, I didn’t do a lot of this in my military career, but the idea is to take time after any activity to review how it went.
Zen Project Management
MAY 22, 2017
I was flying home from a client visit last week at the airport getting ready to board the plane when the gate agent announced that the flight was gonna be delayed by ten minutes due to some unspecified mechanical issue. Ten minutes later they announcement another ten minute delay. They did this two more times. So what was going on? Did the airlines not want to admit upfront that they had a 40 minute delay so they fed the delays to us ten minutes at a time?
Zen Project Management
JULY 8, 2016
I'm currently reading the book Design the Life You Love by Ayse Birsel. The book takes a look at Design Thinking and applying it to your own life. It is based on the success that the author has had as a product designer.
Zen Project Management
FEBRUARY 8, 2017
I’m making my way through the Tim Ferris' book Tools of Titans. It’s well over 600 pages but it has a lot of useful, interesting advice, though I'll admit some of it is a bit out there. He breaks the book up into three areas; Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise. The book is really just a summary of podcasts done over the years with some other advice added in. One piece of advice I appreciated is what he called the canvas strategy. The idea really came from Ryan Holiday.
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Zen Project Management
JUNE 6, 2016
I heard the term "Ready Ready" being used at work last week. I've heard of "Done Done" but this was a new one on me. I remember the first time I heard the concept of done done. When a developer finishes coding, the story is done but not done done. There are a number of other steps that have to be completed before it is really done, that is done done. The team should come up with the definition of done at the start of a project.
Zen Project Management
FEBRUARY 5, 2016
I came across another interesting idea in Change By Design. It was presented as Toyota's ideas around training and had 4 principles: There is no substitute for direct observation Proposed changes should always be structured as experiments Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible Managers should coach, not fix This idea of experimenting caught my attention.
Zen Project Management
DECEMBER 15, 2015
The topic of design has been crossing my path lately. I see a lot of overlap with Agile principles. One of the principles I came across is called Gall’s law. It states that "all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked.” It was introduced by John Gall in his book Systematics in 1975. This is very similar to the Agile principle of simplicity. It can be seen in the practice of Test Driven Development.
Zen Project Management
OCTOBER 6, 2015
I conducted a user story mapping session with my client last week and it proved to be a very effective way to help them see the big picture. The idea came from Jeff Patton. You can find more about it here.
Speaker: Daniel O'Sullivan, Product Designer, nCino and Jeff Hudock, Senior Product Manager, nCino
We’ve all seen the increasing industry trend of artificial intelligence and big data analytics. In a world of information overload, it's more important than ever to have a dashboard that provides data that's not only interesting but actually relevant and timely. Dashboards assist decision makers facilitate new ideas and business opportunities, increase customer approval rates, and analyze current business process. All of these activities play a vital role in providing the superior experience your customers demand.
Zen Project Management
APRIL 20, 2015
When I was young, I had a riding lawn mower. We had a big yard out in the suburbs and the riding mower made the job quicker. Today I live closer to downtown in a house with a smaller yard. I’m currently using an old fashion reel mower…no motor, just foot power to make it work.
Zen Project Management
JANUARY 12, 2016
There's another idea from Tim Brown's Change by Design I thought was worth writing about. It's the idea of divergence and convergence. Early in a design project (or any project), we want to collect lots of ideas. This is divergence.creating lots of possible choices. Linus Pauling , winner of 2 Nobel prizes, stated "To have a good ide, you must first have lots of ideas." If you're writing user stories, don't try to limit story creation.
Zen Project Management
MAY 31, 2016
Empathy is an important attribute in Design Thinking. In order to solve our customer's problems, we really need to understand them. We need to walk in their shoes. But there's a limit to how far we can take this. We can spend hours talking to an astronaut, but we will never truly understand what it's like to walk in space. Agile has this idea of the Product Owner, but you don't see much written in agile about empathy.
Zen Project Management
JUNE 9, 2015
I’ve come across a number of articles lately that have talked about the importance of a good morning routine (like this one ), so I have been trying to practice some of these techniques. One practice is to start the day with meditation, not checking any electronic devices. I'll admit, sometimes when I'm working from home I'll turn on the TV while making my morning coffee before heading up to the office, but I don't start responding to email first thing in the morning.
Speaker: Tristan Kromer, Lean Agile Coach, Kromatic
Some teams struggle to constantly optimize conversion rates without understanding the financial impact of those conversion rates. Sometimes that 0.1% increase isn't worth the engineering time we're spending! Early stage startups in particular may not need a four year business plan, but they need to start building out a model which will show how they can someday be profitable. At the very least, they need to be able to see the impact of a change in retention rates to their user growth.
Zen Project Management
MARCH 31, 2016
I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some of things that keep me busy when I’m not doing my day job. Podcasts Note to Self - I recently started listening to this one and find it very engaging. The topics are around how technology fits into our lives. I find Manoush Zomorodi entertaining and informative. Design Matters - This one isn’t really about design as much as it’s about how people got to where they are.
Zen Project Management
AUGUST 1, 2014
Three of my favorite presentations at Agile2014 were on soft skills; Diana Larsen’s Best Job Ever , Lyssa Adkin’s Facilitating Intense Conversations , and Jean Tabaka/Em Campbell-Pretty’s Creating Agile Tribes Diana Larsen was the keynote presenter on Wednesday.
Zen Project Management
FEBRUARY 23, 2016
Anyone that's been around Agile for a while has probably heard of the Design the Box exercise. The idea is to help the team define and understand the product vision. I'm getting near the end of a project. We've had some challenges in terms of making the right decisions on scope. This has manifested itself in completing user stories only to have the business team say "I know that's what I asked for, but I don't think it's right." We didn't do a Design the Box at the start of the project.
Zen Project Management
OCTOBER 27, 2014
I recently had the opportunity to hear Tom Peters speak and I have to say that even at the age of 71, he still has a lot of energy and passion. He began the talk with his experience coming out of college with an engineering degree. He found the math and science classes did little to prepare him for the real world, the people part of the equation, or the “all important last 99%” of being successful.
Speaker: Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant, Rothman Consulting Group
Before agile approaches took the world by storm, we used Gantt charts and defects to measure project and program progress. We had trouble measuring product progress until just before release—often too late to change anything. Join Johanna as she discusses how agile approaches change what we measure, and possible measures you might use in projects, programs, and to assess the product as the team(s) build it.
Zen Project Management
JANUARY 6, 2016
I've been reading the book Change by Design by Tim Brown. It's part of my overall interest in design in general. I have found a number of interesting ideas in the book so far, and I'm not even half way through it. One concept had to do with constraints. Anyone that has worked much on projects know that constraints are a big part of it. He talks about three aspects of constraint; feasibility, desirability, and viability.
Zen Project Management
JANUARY 30, 2015
There's an interesting decision making technique that I came across in the book Decisive. It's called 10/10/10. The technique was developed by Suzy Welch. She has a book by the same name. The idea is to think about how you will feel about a decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. The idea being discussed in Decisive is how to avoid short-term emotion when making a decision. Bad decisions, they say, are made while having strong emotions such as anger or greed.
Zen Project Management
OCTOBER 13, 2015
I'm at the Orlando airport, departing from this year's PMI North America Global Congress. I've attended at least part of every North America congress since 1999, and even a few of the ones in Europe. While I did enjoy it, this year's was definitely not among my favorites. I missed the first day's activities due to a personal commitment. I heard mixed/negative reviews of the opening keynote, Drew and Jonathan Scott, HGTV's Property Brothers.
Zen Project Management
JANUARY 6, 2014
Over the past weekend I went ice climbing with my son. He is a pretty serious climber and I've picked it up because of him, but neither of us have ever ice climbed before. We went to a place near Cedar Falls Iowa that ices down a grain silo.
Speaker: Cait Porte, SVP Product and Customer Experience, Zmags
Gathering support for a product feature or enhancement is a critical skill for Product Managers. Talking to customers, working with key stakeholders in the business and convincing development that a feature is necessary can be a daunting task. Join Product Management expert Cait Porte as she covers how to sell your ideas internally by leveraging data to drive decision making.
Zen Project Management
JUNE 3, 2014
This is part 2 of a 12 part series on the Principles of Agile Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Another challenge for people new to agile is this idea about welcoming change late in the project. It's not that they don't expect changes, it's the approach taken to deal with it. Usually there is a Byzantine approach that involves change review boards, change request forms and impact assessments.
Zen Project Management
AUGUST 24, 2015
I’m currently working with a client that is adopting agile, which really means there are people around that have done agile, but it’s not widespread nor is anyone on my particular project experienced with agile. As is common in these situations, I’ve gone through at different points to try to help them develop their agile mindset. My developers are well-versed in agile, but the client is acting as the product owner, so their understanding of agile is important to project success.
Zen Project Management
JULY 23, 2015
I’m on my way to Colorado for a weekend of outdoor adventures, climbing and mountain biking. As I was looking over the route for the climb (Kelso’s Ridge up Torrey’s Peak and a possible double with Gray’s Peak) I remembered an article I recently read on applying the principles of lean climbing to business ( here ). I’ve done a couple 14ers before, so this will be my third and maybe fourth, all with my son. We plan on being lean on this climb. Enough water and food, but not much more.
Zen Project Management
APRIL 30, 2015
When I first learned Scrum , the idea was to have 30-day (4 week) iterations with a demo at the end of each iteration. Today I see teams that have iterations from 1 to 4 weeks, or in the case of Kanban, no iterations at all. So the question is, how often should there be a demo? I’m a believer of getting sign off on a user story once it's done. This usually comes from the person who wrote it, who may be a proxy to the product owner.
Speaker: Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant, Rothman Consulting Group
You’ve seen team metrics like velocity. Velocity is not an accurate measure of a team's progress towards "done." So what should you use instead? Join Johanna as she discusses the measures that are actually useful in understanding what your team does, where the work is, and how long the work really takes - and in addition, we’ll examine what it takes to explain the team’s progress to others in terms of the product backlog burnup chart, ways to talk about what’s done and not yet released, and how to show others working product.
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