Mapping Psychological Safety

Mapping Psychological Safety

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David Anderson has published a book called The Value Flywheel Effect. It’s about creating adaptive organizations to drive business results and modernize technical practices and cloud adoption. In his talk at DOES22 Vegas, he shared the Serverless adoption story at Liberty Mutual using Wardley Maps.  In one map titled “creating space for innovation”, I was stunned (perhaps shocked) to see “Psychological Safety” sitting on the cusp of the commodity column of the Wardley Map. I thought, “Wait! what? How can…

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Q&A: How to Scale with no Alignment on Value or Culture.

Q&A: How to Scale with no Alignment on Value or Culture.

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It’s time to answer another question that got voted up (in Slido.com) by other attendees after my talk at the Prodacity Conference. “How can we scale in an organization with no alignment on value or culture?” This is quite the question! Many large books could be written on this topic. My initial thought was, “I don’t think you can”. Upon further reflection I think there are tools available to tackle issues related to misalignment on value and culture. Tools that…

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Q&A: How to Convince Management to allow first steps?

Q&A: How to Convince Management to allow first steps?

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Prodacity conference attendees asked me a bunch of great questions at the end of my talk. I didn’t have time to answer all the questions live and decided to answer them in blog posts. One question that got voted up (in Slido.com) by other attendees was: “How to convince management to allow first steps (ex: lower WIP, allocate capacity for quality)?” Convincing others to do things differently means asking them to change the way they work – a difficult task…

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How to Effect Change

How to Effect Change

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The day the Obama’s were at the white house for the unveiling of their portraits, I was four blocks away attending the Prodacity conference. The conference was awesome due to many amazing speakers and a single track focus. First time on an airplane in more than three years, and first time speaking on stage at a live event, filled me with both overwhelm and relief. It felt like I needed to learn how to speak again in person and I…

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Flow Metrics: How to Get Started Measuring your Value Streams

Flow Metrics: How to Get Started Measuring your Value Streams

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In this post, I’ll cover flow metrics — why teams use them, what they are, and my tips for getting started. A balanced set of flow metrics can be a powerful tool for reflecting your reality as a team. It can also be an effective way to communicate your reality to business stakeholders, using language that means something to them. But first, here’s a quick synopsis of how I landed on the structure of this post. At the Agile2019 conference…

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Saying No doesn’t make you an arse

Saying No doesn’t make you an arse

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“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say “no” to almost everything.” ~Warren Buffett Do you ever feel like you’re overwhelmingly overloaded at your job? If you said “yes,” you’re not alone. Having too much work to do — and not enough time to do it — is a way too common scenario. Sometimes burnout cultures play a role in chronically overburdening people. But often, the problem is not our boss, our co-worker,…

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Three Learnings from DOES18 Vegas

Three Learnings from DOES18 Vegas

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It’s my 5th year speaking at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. I’m inspired more than ever after last weeks event in Las Vegas. We learned how a couple of IT leaders collaborate with business leaders in Legal and Product to address obstacles preventing IT from taking advantage of open source and fixing technical debt. We learned from repeat experience reports on what’s working and what’s not working inside large enterprises. And Lean Coffee rocked again with over 100 participants discussing everything…

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Keeping Players Fit & Safe

Keeping Players Fit & Safe

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While writing an article on performance for work, I stumbled across a study titled, What’s in a game? A systems approach to enhancing performance analysis in football. It covers the physiological, technical, and tactical components of football to determine key performance indicators that predict successful performance. The study acknowledges that football is a complex sociotechnical system – where humans interact with technical aspects of an organization within a constantly changing environment. Like when football (soccer) players wear GPS vests to track distance, speed, deceleration, etc……

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Visualizing 5 teams work on one board – take 1

Visualizing 5 teams work on one board – take 1

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I rolled out the new 2-day “Flow 101” workshop last week to 24 folks working at a financial services company near Austin. Notable in a couple of ways: 1) Two VP’s attended and 2) Three attendees from three different teams (the team of three), worked together to design a board to visualize the workflow across five different teams. Usually, if a VP shows up at all, it’s only to introduce me before heading off to their triple booked calendar. That…

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Q&A with Gene Kim

Q&A with Gene Kim

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Recently, Gene Kim and I discussed my new book, Making Work Visible. GK: What is it about visual cues that make them so effective? DD: Images are easily received by the human eye, so the eye is naturally attracted to them. When used for visual cues, images, along with a few well-placed words, are quickly absorbed by the eye, making them easy to understand. We need little education to get the message. The combination of images and writing responds to our need for a nimble,…

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