A Review of Impact Mapping

I mentioned that I had a great conversation with Gojko Adzic at Lean Agile Scotland. During that discussion, Gojko also described a technique he call Impact Mapping. Since then has published a short book on Impact Mapping which I highly recommend. An Impact Map can be thought of as a structured mind map, with the following levels being used to articulate the …

Understanding Change with Cynefin

I have written a number of posts on systemic thinking, which I believe is at the heart of Kanban Thinking. I’m currently referring to systemic thinking, rather than Systems Thinking, in order to try and avoid any confusion with any particular school of thought, of which Systems Thinking could be one. I have also written an number of posts on Cynefin. This …

The Flow Impact

As I wrote yesterday about some upcoming Rallying adventures, I get to work on some exciting projects. A recent one is the “Agile for Business” book which is being put together in an iterative and incremental manner. Bob Gower, who is spearheading the initiative, wrote a blog post last month about the background to the book. One of my contributions …

Upcoming Rallying Adventures

As a coach with Rally Software, I get to work with an amazing group of people on a variety of projects. I’d like to highlight a few of those which I am particularly looking forward to at the moment. RallyON Europe https://www.rallydev.com/community/rallyon-europe RallyON is an event we have hosted in Boulder for the last few years, as a way of …

From Capability to Potential

At Lean Agile Scotland last weekend I was chatting with Gojko Adzic over dinner, and one of the many topics we covered was whether capability was the right word for one of the three impacts I describe as desirable with Kanban Thinking. Earlier this year I described what I meant by capability, but more recently I’ve realised capability is more …

Feature Injection, Fidelity and Story Mapping

I’ve recently stumbled into a way of describing mid-range planning with a few teams which combines the language of feature injection, fidelity and story-mapping. As it seems to have been a successful way of communicating how to think about the strategic approach to incrementing and iterating through the work, I thought it would be worth writing down. Before I get …

Management Improvement Carnival

I’m honoured to have been asked by John Hunter to host an edition of his Management Improvement Carnival. That means that I get to pick a number of links to posts and articles on relevant topics. Here they are… Agile Fluency One set of posts that caught my eye was on Agile Fluency. The original post by James Shore and …

An Introduction to Waterfall

I was recently joking with some colleagues about what an “Introduction to Waterfall” course might look like. It turned out to be quite a simple proposition, so I quickly threw some slides together which I feel should be shared with the wide community. Download the PowerPoint from slideshare for full effect, and please feel free to add some slide variations of …

Speaking at Lean Agile Scotland

How could I not attend a conference named after me? OK, maybe not named after me, but at least relatively local. How could I not attend a conference being held on my birthday? OK, I could also spend my birthday with my family! I will be at Lean Agile Scotland, however, which is being held September 21-22 in Edinburgh and …

Lean Flow Bag Stuffing Videos

The last few years I’ve helped out with the bag stuffing at the Agile200X conference. It started out as a fun experiment in applying our lean and kanban craft in a different context. It has turned into a tradition, and something we have learned huge amounts from. Last year Christopher Avery took some video and he’s recently published an number …