Category Archives: Work stuff

Prime Directive

Wanted to make sure I had the retrospective Prime Direction within reach for a session today…

Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone does the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

(as taken from Ben Linder’s website which has some pretty cool stuff on Agile and even more awesome stuff specifically on doing good retrospective’s)

…of in het Nederlands:

Ongeacht wat we ontdekken, moeten we begrijpen en er op vertrouwen dat iedereen het uiterste heeft gedaan om zijn of haar werk te doen, binnen de grenzen van de kennis van het moment, zijn of haar vaardigheden en capaciteiten, de beschikbare middelen en de situatie zoals die was.

SAFe from a LeSS perspective

I ran into this nice informative post called “SAFe impressions from a LeSS Practitioner” on the “Fail fast, move on” blog (good reads, even tho or even more because I don’t always agree) . This specific post resonates with me because I know several people who are slowly putting a nuance in their original dislike of SAFe… the writer of this post not only states honestly what he likes and dislikes about SAFe (him coming from LeSS) but he also states why… he raises some good points…

It’s a theme for me the coming weeks also since:

  • I’ll be teaching my third “Leading SAFe” class in October/November. Always a lot of good discussions there on the pro’s and cons of SAFe.
  • I’m off to enjoy a “Certified LeSS practitioner; principles to practice” in October (by Graig Larman) and so looking forward to that! Maybe I should write a “LeSS from an SAFe perspective” blog afterwards 🙂
  • together with a colleague of mine we’ll most likely/hopefully be doing our fun and tongue-in-cheek “LeSS vs SAFe Battle” presentation at least two more times somewhere this year (we submitted it for Samenwerking Noord’s Agile Congres)

Lots of fun stuff happening! Lots of learning going on…

Get an earful!

Recently I’ve been driving up and down to Nieuwegein a lot more then I did before. That’s about 200 km and although I love listening to music I also found the trip got more and more boring and seemed to last longer each time I had to drive it. Now I’m not one to worry about wasted time that could have spent otherwise on drives like this – I actually embrace the traveltime as relaxing. What did worry me was that especially the second half of the trip I had trouble keeping focus on driving and sometimes even staying awake… (yeah I know.. it’s an age thing).

The solution was as simple as eye… euh ear-opening (for me at least): Podcasts! podcasts

Some of you might go “duh..” by now but for me podcast were something I heard about but never gave much thought to before. Now let me tell you: Podcasts are awesome on long drives!

So far I found 3 differrent ones that I like a lot and listen to regularly now:

  • Agile for Humans: great podcast on anything Agile and Agile coaching. “for Humans” so mostly staying away from tools and technical stuff 🙂 Great host and usually excellent guests.
  • The Infinite Monky Cage: fun scientific podcast where 2 great hosts and funny briljant guests discus  a different scientific topic each episode in an excellent mix of making fun of stuff and learning about it at the same time.
  • NOS op 3 tech podcast: Dutch podcast from national radio where a host and varying panel discuss new gadgets, events and tech news. Nothing deep – but quick and fun weekly update for people who want to be nerdy but really aren’t.

Every now and then I throw some other podcast in the mix (I added SPaM cast today in preparation for my trip monday) but the above ones already deserved the “approved by Mike” certificate 🙂

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F16? Oja… OODA

f16Iedere keer als ik (iets over) een F16 hoor, zoals bijvoorbeeld die knal hier gisteren in de provincie denk ik aan Agile… “kunst, jij denk altijd aan Agile!” – inderdaad – dat is (helaas) ook waar maar er ligt sinds ongeveer een jaar ergens in mijn grijze masse een associatie tussen de F16, de architect van de F16: John Boyd en zijn bijdrage aan de Agility; de OODA loop (Observation, Orientation, Decision en Action).

Daar gaat die JSF voor mij niks aan veranderen vermoed ik

Henrik Kniberg on his MVP picture…

A post mostly for myself… so I can find this again later – but such a good read I felt it deserved to be shared in a better way then just a link way down below…

Click the picture to read Henrik’s reasoning and explanation behind it – it’s a great read!

Making-sense-of-MVP-

 

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