Inspiration to improve

This TED talk was really inspiring (and fun) for me. The fact that a simple picture can give so much extra understanding and meaning is something that I very much can relate to. What I have noticed is that a picture needs some explanation, to help the audience find the path in the picture. It is clearly visible in the performance of Christoph Niemann that it is the combination of the two that really makes the magic. I hope you like the TED talk as much as I did, also below is a small video on how I create Vige.

TED Talk - You are fluent in this language (and don’t even know it)

Prioritization, so much fun

“We really need to do this!” “This is super important!” “Why haven't this been completed yet?” The life of a team in an organization is not always a walk in the park. In a complex world several things need to be solved at the same time and the value is often not possible to predict beforehand. The person with the immediate need will of course know, but from his/her perspective only and that will not help the team.

So, what to do?

You need intensive communication between team and stakeholders in order to get a shared view, acceptance and understanding on priority.

Easy right?

Well, maybe not so easy. Communication is central in agile but even if you put your full energy into this it will still only work up to a point, sometimes even the best communication turns into a too high cost for the team. If you spend all time discussing prioritization and doing refinement in order to understand the cost of multiple competing needs the team will have too little time to realize the value and then this is waste. At this point the team will probably start to talk about kanban. They feel that everything is in a stand stil and want to get things done, let’s get a flow going. This could be a good enough, you will start to get things flowing through and yes a lot of the things will be the "loudest”-requirements but some of the actual value deliveries will slip through.

But if you really want to fix the problem you must deal with something much harder, dependencies.. If the team is not able to realize value more or less by themselves and instead has high dependencies to other teams, managers or architects, processes you name it you will start to build a prioritization chaos.

Let's fix that later

It is hard sometimes, hard to resist the urge to postpone finishing or fixing things because other seems more pressing at the time. The decision might seem to be the only thing you could do, but remember that you always impose a risk when doing so. Especially if you leave the issue unattended for a long time, the cost will sneak up upon you.

Picture yourself in your own home.

You are preparing a dinner for you family and friends but you get an important phone call but you are still able to also finish the dinner but now you do not have time to clean up. You spend a great dinner together and everyone is happy. Time to hit the sack, but wait the kitchen is a complete mess, “Nah I'll do it tomorrow.”

Next morning, good night sleep, time for some nice breakfast, “Maybe I'll make some scones.” You walk into the kitchen “Yuk what a mess!, I just want some breakfast!”

You decides to make a small breakfast for yourself and the family, you manage to find some clean cutleries and what you need, no problems. But time goes you other important things keeps to get in the way and the kitchen starts to get worse and worse. You notice that you are having difficulties to find the things you need and when you do you need to do minor fixes, such as washing the kitchen knife before you can attend the thing you actually was planning to do. The whole place starts to smell and it is far from inspiring to innovate and create new tasty meals, you take shortcuts.

This is what happens to code if you do not take care of the small things that is needed. The code gets hard to navigate in, it is harder to see what should go where. New ideas gets lost in the murk of bad code. In the State of DevOps report of 2019 they have investigated how technical debt affects productivity and as a consequence software delivery and operational performance and it is visible that technical debt has a significant impact.

So make sure to keep your kitchen clean and well maintained.

The art of concentration or the path to multifailing

Right now when writing this text my kids wants to get my attention, “what is the color of the Pokemon Feraligatr, dad?”, “can I see again please?”, “What are you doing, dad?”, “I want to print another color paper” of course I want to help them, they are the most important part of my life. But somewhere from whithin my brain I hear “I have a tried to get this cartoon ready since February 2019, get it done god damn it!” And then it struck me, this cartoon is about me, but I suspect Im not alone on this? At work Im also always eager to get involved, interested in most things and always trying to help when I can and I love it, but it has a cost. Too little time for self reflection or actually having time to finish things. It is a fine balance between multitasking and multifailing. So now I have decided, this week I will work from home one day to make sure that I have time to think or at least give myself time to finish a couple of things.