Bloggtoons

In the strip “we have always done it this way” I wrote about how hard it can sometimes be to see that you need to change, perhaps defending yourself with old routines and customs. But it can be just as hard for someone who already realises that a change is needed. It takes strength and will to change yourself and your ingrained patterns; it is the old ghosts of habit that come and control you, and you let them. Which habit are you working on right now? I am trying to get better at giving positive feedback; I want it to come automatically, as part of my conversation with a person.

Transparency: when is it important, and when is it wrong to be transparent? How do you be transparent in the right way? It is not always easy to know which information is the right information to be transparent about. In my strip below we meet one of the first situations where you have a chance to be transparent: recruitment. What do you think a good recruitment process looks like? In the strip I have chosen to include the employees in the first panel, to show that it is not only the manager who has the opportunity and the responsibility in a recruitment.

Let’s add more resources to a project and presto, it goes faster. Or does it? Brooks’s law, which says “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law), makes it pretty clear. And it still holds, almost 50 years later. Why? Because adding new teams comes at a big cost: you have to train these new people or teams. And if you also bring in freelance consultants and/or individual employees who form a new team, that team has to go through a number of phases before it becomes effective: it has to form, storm and mature. All of that takes time, and during that time neither the new team nor the teams around it are fully effective.

Thank you Jimmy, Mattias and Daniel for an interesting discussion on the subject, which contributed to this and some future strips on related topics.

Have you ever been in a team and had a really good discussion about how you are going to work together? It feels so good! SO good that you decide to write it down and document it, on Confluence or some similar service, but when you open your team page you notice that it is already damn well there! How do you keep your improvement initiatives alive? I have some ideas if you want to know more…