The Quick Brown Fox

Today I registered the URL curvingbridge.com. Curving Bridge is the current evolutionary point of several things that happened in my life last year. The first of those was that I went through a period of prolonged, intense anxiety, unlike anything I have previously experienced. I'm happy to say that treatment has been successful, and I am more or less back to my old self, but it was a shaky passage. I realized in the midst of it that I felt trapped and stifled, without direction. The second thing that happened was that I started a meditation practice. I use the Simple Habit app, which provides a wide range of guided meditation offerings. Going through one series, I was challenged to identify the principles that I consider the most important, and what the best version of my life might look like. I've never been inclined to the idea of a "happy place," but I was surprised by the strength and clarity of the image that formed. Finally, I spent most of the past year ...

Monday - A lot of context switching:  Met with departing team member to continue transitioning one of her tasks. I have Opinions.  Stand-ups. Reviewed the documentation set with a new member of the training group. Met with Kanban team to finish the initial redesign of their board; at the end of this second hour we had a set of columns they've agreed to try for a couple of weeks, had an initial pass at what their stickies will look like, and had a conversation about WIP limits and the tradeoffs inherent in that system. Apparently someone in their environment thinks that WIP should be one??? Also psychological safety is pretty high within the group but nonexistent in their department as a whole, so that's interesting. Phone interview with a Scrum Master candidate. Tuesday - We put the new board to work. As expected, some things moved around a bit. We had a new team member join as well, who hadn't been part of the shaping process, so it was interesting to observe thei...

Monday - See my Getting Started with Kanban post. Also attended a backlog grooming session with a different product team than usual, and discussed the upcoming "re-teaming" (what an awkward word) with our coach.  Tuesday - Having finally put the aux cable back in my car this morning, listened to Meta-Cast #123. As I have no experience with Techwell conferences, I don't have an opinion on this episode.Tried an experiment with the kanban team; since I was unable to attend their standup today, I handed over the board in progress from our Monday meeting, and encouraged them to see how well it worked in reality, and whether it could be added to. As it happened, most of the team failed to make it to the standup. We'll keep working on it. Wednesday - It snowed a whole two inches and no one came to work??? Quiet as a cemetery here. I read.  Thursday - Getting some more tasks for Agile New England's conference.   Friday -  I can't say it's been a highly pr...

It finally happened! We got some pizzas and my team in a room with a clean whiteboard and got to work. I followed the model laid out in Kanban in Action and had them first write down the things they're working on - that took five minutes and generated a staggering number of stickies (some of the team took it to mean "what kind of tasks do you do" rather than specific examples of work items, but I think it's still useful to see the breadth of their work). Then we started walking through the workflow. This varied a lot depending on the team member. Everyone got time at the whiteboard. Once we had gone around the room and agreed that those were the steps, I encouraged them to start turning that brain dump into a flow. We got partway into that exercise before people had to leave for another commitment. Everyone remained engaged through the exercise, and has at least tentatively committed to continuing. I think I did okay with guiding the discussion and letting them fig...

Things are getting back to normal, or whatever passes for it, this week. Creating an Environment of Teamwork - question your assumptions!  Festivus - A Technique for Achieving Leadership Alignment 10 Ways to Be More Mindful at Work -  Exactly the kind of information I'm looking for to support my "year of practice".   5 TED Talks on How to Ask Better Questions Please, Try - More excellent advice, even if Medium persists in asking me to sign up for something.

Monday - Frustration is the word of the day - it's going to be another week before my team can find one hour when we are all free at the same time to discuss starting over with their work visualization. I did some work for the Mob Programming conference program, and wrote up a cheat sheet for myself to use when we finally get to have this meeting.  Tuesday - After a week of mutual insistence from me and the team manager that we need to catch up on my kanban group, I put something on their calendar. All I wanted was five minutes to provide an update. Reviewed our metrics gathering process with a member of the team who is leaving for another opportunity.  Wednesday - Learned more about my kanban group's challenges - new things surface in pretty much every standup, and I think our visualization session is going to be really interesting.   Thursday -  More work on kanban, more transition prep. We apparently spend an ungodly amount of time on a metrics PPT ever...

I stayed off Twitter for almost the entire holiday season, and have been leery of diving back into that particular soup, so there's not a lot to post this (short) week. The Long, Hard, Stupid Way - SO much of this resonated with me! Via the Hurry Slowly newsletter.  This NYT article about the importance of having a purpose in life makes a perfect bridge into the new year for me. Safety Boosters and Killers - Useful list of common safety issues, could be used to begin a conversation about your local context. 

Monday - Did laundry, cleaned, tidied up from the holidays. Tuesday - Sprint planning. We're down by one team, so I thought it would take less time than usual; instead, we ended up using the full time-box to discuss some ancillary team matters. Spent much of the day reading Kanban in Action to prep for Wednesday's meeting.  Wednesday - More Kanban in Action . This is a great introductory book on the system, well worth the money. Was hoping to get started with the team on reworking their board, but had to reschedule. This is a common pattern, and makes getting traction on any issue frustrating. Thursday - Snow day! Burrowed into my blankets with Kanban in Action until I had to change tasks or lose my mind. Listened to Meta-Cast 116, also on kanban, and 117 (again), on having fun.   Friday - Poor road conditions meant anyone with a long commute worked from home. The whole week has that suspended feeling, when it's difficult to get any traction. I have reached the lat...