Steve Neiderhauser

How to Make Impediments Visible

Have you ever presented an impediment that was costing your company tens of thousands of dollars and senior management just yawned.

I’ve had that happen to me plenty of times. 

This Scrum Inc article explains four steps to framing impediments so leadership listens.

I always suggest finding ways to attach dollars to the impediment and make the cost visible. Perhaps in a bar chart or graph. Consider the opportunity cost. How many customers would we lose, or would we miss a market opportunity?

Systems Thinking and The Iceberg Model

I recently learned about a systems thinking model called, The Iceberg.

The model has four levels of thinking:

1. The event Level
2. The pattern level
3. The structure level
4. The mental model level

Details about the levels of thinking and an exercise are here.

And this Medium article explains the six concepts of systems thinking.

Book Review for Get A Grip

In March, I attended an excellent agile leadership workshop taught by Braintrust Consulting. They gave each student five books, including the book Get A Grip by Gino Wickman.

As part of a Rock exercise, I decided to read Get A Grip, a book that teaches executives how to get everything they want out of their entrepreneurial business.

Braintrust Consulting uses the Entrepreneurial Operation System (EOS) described in Get A Grip for running their business. Then their teams use agile techniques like iterations and Kanban boards to get work done.

When I thought about this strategy it makes sense because the EOS is a lightweight approach that gives structure and tools to the executive group. My experience has typically been that agile teams are disciplined and have structure for their meetings while executives tend to bounce from one topic to the next without getting much done.

So to give executives an effective meeting structure the EOS introduced the Level 10 Meeting. One of the key benefits of this meeting is that it saves time because the meeting is timeboxed to 90 minutes. Agenda items include: Segue, Scorecard, Rock Review... More details about the Level 10 Meeting can be found here.

In addition to the Level 10 Meeting, the book introduces various tools including Rocks and the People Analyzer.

What's a rock? Rocks are the 3 - 7 most important things that need to get done in the next 90 days. We all know it’s easy to get distracted, so a rock is a metaphor for keeping the sand out of your life and focusing on a key project. For example, my rock was to read Get a Grip and report back to my class. The image of a rock helped me focus on reading the book.

The People Analyzer? A tool that helps you determine if people fit in your culture. You hear companies talk about culture all the time, yet how many companies hold people accountable for their actions. The People Analyzer helps determine if leaders and employees fit the culture.

For me to develop a deeper understanding of the principles and tools described in the book, I'd have to practice the various tools. On the surface, I believe these tools and the EOS give most executives the structure they need to gain business traction.

Designers - Think Big

In this terrific Ted Talk by Tim Brown, Tim says design thinking is more than selecting the right shade of blue for a button, design thinking includes system thinking and the entire user experience.

Qualities of Fast Teams

Found this research about teams, although I'm not sure who performed the research.

The fastest teams have these qualities.

Dedicated: Everyone is on one and only one team.

Small: Fastest teams average 4.6 people (4 or 5 people).

Stable: Teams stay together for years.

Co-located: Team sits within touching distance all day.

Cross-functional: Each team member trained in 3 or more skills; this contributes to swarming.

Swarming: Team works one user story until it's done.

Protected: Team is not interrupted during sprint.

The conclusion? Launching great scrum teams is a scientific and repeatable process.

Ten Management Objections to Agile

Steve Denning describes why management refuses to buy into Agile.

One argument is that "Agile doesn't fit our organizational culture." Steve states that Agile is more important than your company's culture.

When the culture doesn’t fit Agile, the solution is not to reject Agile. The solution is to change the organizational culture.

The world and marketplace has changed; everything is moving at a faster pace. So the org's culture needs to align with Agile.

In today’s marketplace, they will need to change their culture or they will die. They need to become Agile.

Four Ways to Limit Batch Size

When you want work to flow through your company, you may consider small batches.

This diagram gives four ways to create small batches in Scrum. I've found that it's best to ask developers to simply go with it and run an experiment.

Pull small stories into the sprint and see if it's slow, or does work flow.

Role of Project Management Office in Agile

After you transition to Agile, what's the role of the Project Management Office? Mike Cohn explores the role of the PMO in an Agile environment.

Two processes stand out for me. PMO reduces waste and establishes communities of practice.

Community of Practice - A group of like-minded or like-skilled individuals.

These professionals are motivated to improve their craft.

I prefer to rename the PMO as the Agile Center of Excellence. And this name has the added benefit of a catchy abbreviation -- ACE.

When I've built an Agile Center of Excellence, here's some of the capabilities we ace.

Concise Writing

How you ever received an email from a business associate that rambled on and on? An email that really only needed to be a couple sentences instead of a couple pages of clouded thinking.

You built a word cloud and still couldn't figure it out...

The ability to write with clarity is a powerful skill that should be coveted by business people and screenwriters.

Fact! Taking a screenwriting class is a great way to develop your writing skills. Here's an exercise from one of my screenwriting classes.

Write a 3-Act outline of a TV drama using only one sentence for each act.

Covert Affairs (season 4 final episode)

Act I

CIA consultant Henry Wilcox holds Annie Walker hostage.

Act II

Auggie works to free Annie, while a rogue CIA team storms the building and tries to kill her.

Act III

After escaping a torture session, Annie hunts down and kills Henry Wilcox.

Now if you can summarize a 40 minute action-filled TV show in three sentences, wouldn't you also have the skill to write a clear, concise business email? Of course you would.

Strange Attractor Pattern

Glenda Eoyang gave an excellent webinar on systems thinking and Attractor Patterns.

Here's her conditions for the Strange Attractor Pattern.