Favor automation over documentation is, to a great extent, about reducing friction - reducing the cognitive load and minutia required to get the work done, allowing you to focus on the value being delivered over the means of delivery.
Big problems in small steps
Create simple things in small steps
Simple Things
When I say simple, I don’t necessarily mean easy. And I certainly do not mean crude in form or incomplete. Simple indicates something that does not have superfluous parts or multiple responsibilities, is easy to understand, is as independent from the rest of the solution as possible, and meets a need as is.
Simple may not address all use cases, but it does address some use cases.
Work Together
When I say, “work together”, I mean just that. Do the actual work together.
Every aspect of the product lifecycle is an opportunity for collaboration - Identifying problems to solve, user and market research, design and architecture, formulating experiments, development and testing, deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and gathering user feedback.
Make the work visible
A lot of teams have a backlog of some sort and some form of Kanban board — whether it is Jira, Trello, Monday, Asana, MS Project, or a bunch of post-its on a wall. These are all ways of making the work visible. But they aren’t enough.
There are two key aspects to making the work visible; what is the work and how is the work progressing.
Know the problem you are solving
The Behaviors
Over the past several years, as I’ve been helping teams and organizations improve their ability to deliver software products that are desirable, viable, and feasible, I have been experimenting with a Behavior Framework that has proven to be rather effective. And I’d like to share it with you in hopes that you find it useful and that you provide me feedback on your experiences with it.
Beginning a New Book
My plan is to write a series of blog posts all related to the behaviors framework. Some of them will be about a specific behavior. Some of them will be about tools or techniques that help teams express one or more of the behaviors. Some of them will be my own experiences. And some will be damn near complete fiction.
Parallel Thinking
Increase the value of your stand-ups with different questions.
I’ve recently started working with some teams who have elected to use the classic three questions during their stand-ups - “What did you do yesterday?”, “What will you do today?”, and “Are there any impediments in your way?”
I’ve been talking about and advocating for different stand-up formats for quite some time. I, frankly, think the three questions are too focused on individual activity and lack focus on group progress.
If you like the format of three questions, may I suggest you try some different questions?
A glass house in a hurricane zone
I was recently asked to answer a question on Quora about the challenge of keeping up with change in a software project. The answers were a resounding cacophony of “yes” - change is a real problem in software development.
Inspired by discussions with Jess Kerr and others, I took a different stance. Here it is:
Making a meeting suck less
Status Meetings - they happen every day, to thousands of people. Millions upon millions of corporate dollars are spent every year on them. Countless hours dedicated to attendance. And they suck. They are most often mind-numbing, pointless, disruptive wastes of time.
What if we could make them suck less?