Archives February 2023

Cherry to client: you do it like this

why not do it like this? (Cross functional team)

It’s wonderful to watch her work, and to watch the minds blown.

Behind the scenes of a webinar in our Hanoi apartment.
Cherry is talking to an audience of parents at Alpha School about our parenting books.
(The amazing flowers were a gift from a business client. They all love her.)

Amid much debate over the usefulness of Scrum, it’s useful to ask where can Scrum *not* be used?  If it’s hard to define what something is good for, it may be easier to define what it isn’t.

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When we look at Cynefin, it’s tempting to suggest that in Clear or Complicated work, we can optimise for efficiency, with a simple linear model.

We must remember that Cynefin is situational, and the situation can change at any moment.
Optimising for efficiency not agility is a mistake in a VUCA world.

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I’m way behind on translating some of Cherry’s best gems posted on Facebook, but here’s one I felt compelled to share:

Goodhart’s Law: When a measurement becomes a goal , it immediately is no longer a good measurement.

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There is nothing we enjoy more than being back in Vietnam: the people, the food, the sights, and most of all our Teal tribe community.

We are here for six weeks, working with two wonderful new clients and some existing ones too.

And, as always, having a good time doing it.

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Just notes at present: work in progress:

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This.

“assessing people amounts to quantifying a relationship between unknown, usually unknowable things.”

Stop. Measuring. Humans.

Information has no value until it is acted upon.

Visualisation is great, if you do something with it. Information has no value until it is acted upon. That is beyond the scope of this book, except to say that this concept is expressed in many different ways that all essentially mean the same thing:

In praise of boring

Boring is good, for living, working, and running a company.

Project management was the worst thing that ever happened to IT

when I wrote this back in 2017 it was for the IT context, but it is still fresh and it applies for any fungible product,  not just software

Get controls out of the way

Controls are essential to protect the organisation’s assets. But achieving velocity through quality requires that all “necessary non-value work” get out of the way of value work. Minimise controls: just enough to control risk, ensure compliance, and monitor performance, with the least possible impact on value work. Experiment with less or lighter control.

A reflection from our client, Amber

In November 2022, one of the Amber team, Maria Nhật Tân, shared on the Facebook Agile Managers Club group:

Ten years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a series of articles that I still consider some of my best stuff on IT Service Management.  Since the original publisher is defunct, I thought I’d resurface them here.

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