Are you productive or just sub optimizing?

I’ve previously posted a number of blog posts where I discuss the dangers of measuring individual productivity. If you believe in The Theory of Constraint, the questioning of this type of measuring becomes natural.

Mendelt Siebanga gives some well put examples of why he also thinks it’s contra productive with measuring individuals but he also discusses how you can increase productivity. A short, well put blog post.

1715

Is not a year (well, it’s of course a year, but I don’t refer to that here) but a loosely coupled network of Swedish women somehow engaged in software development and who have a special interest in agile and lean values and leadership.

Yesterday evening was spent in their wonderful company. I seldom like groups or networks aiming at a physical criteria, but sometimes those can give you special experiences and questions. By keeping this as a quite small group but with very different perspectives, I hope and believe that we can all learn and teach something.

We’ve now formed a LinkedIn group, where we’ll discuss issues between our meetings, which I hope will be once a month.

Thanks, Ulrika Park, for inviting me, and thanks Sara Manding with Valtech as the evening’s sponsor. And thank to 1715 for a wonderful evening.

Learning from failure

We all love happy stories, the success. That is; we love to tell those stories. We like to share when we did everything right and when the success came. But what did you learn more from; the success or the failure? When we look at the scientific method, we can see that a failed testing of a theory says more than a non failure. A success means that the theory has not yet been disproven.

When writing Confessions of a serial product owner, downloadable on my site, I tried including my failures as well and it’s almost spooky to hear the words from Scott Bellware at Öredev 2007. Agile is not a silver bullet. Waterfall is not the solution. Is lean the solution? Probably not, but one step at the time is the only way you can walk. The talk is 50 minutes but really starts from scratch if you’re new to agile and lean. Do take the time and thanks TVAgile for sharing the link: