Doc Norton (OnBelay)
Cultivating Creativity

Software products are necessarily emergent – we not only don’t know what we precisely need to build but the need shifts as we attempt to figure it out.

Emergent contexts are complex and complexity is best managed by diverse groups of experienced individuals working together. They need to work together to interpret the outcomes of their efforts and decide what to try next. They need to leverage their collective knowledge - the amalgamation of all their perspectives - in order to make well-informed decisions.

Cultivating Creativity
Doc Norton (OnBelay)
Velocity Anti-Patterns - Introduction

If you’ve been on an agile team that uses velocity as a key metric, you’ve probably experienced or at least witnessed some pretty strange behavior.

I asked a group of agile coaches and practitioners via Twitter and LinkedIn about dysfunctions they’ve seen on teams related to the use of velocity. I received plenty of responses that inspired head shaking and hand wringing. I pulled out the most commonly identified issues related to velocity and metrics and share them here.

You can find more on the topic of velocity and metrics for agile teams in the book, "Escape Velocity".

 

Velocity Anti-Patterns - Introduction
Doc Norton
Doc Norton (OnBelay)
Autonomy, Connection, Excellence, Diversity

The Autonomy, Connection, Excellence, and Diversity (#CultureACED) framework is foremost in our minds and directs the work that we do. Our customers have and will become familiar with these ideas. Not just the words, but the actual tools and techniques we've successfully used in a number of organizations.

Autonomy, Connection, Excellence, Diversity

Teams

Cultivating Creativity

Cultivating Creativity

Software products are necessarily emergent – we not only don’t know what we precisely need to build but the need shifts as we attempt to figure it out.

Emergent contexts are complex and complexity is best managed by diverse groups of experienced individuals working together. They need to work together to interpret the outcomes of their efforts and decide what to try next. They need to leverage their collective knowledge - the amalgamation of all their perspectives - in order to make well-informed decisions.

The Experiment Canvas

In the past few years, we at OnBelay have had the honor of working with companies on creating better engineering cultures and in that time have matured to a more structured approach.

One key tool we use today is the Experiment Canvas. My partner, Diane Zajac, and I co-developed the canvas. It is based heavily on our experience with A3s. It is still a work in progress, but I want to share with you where we are to date. Please feel free to use it and give us feedback.

Collaboration Contracts

Collaboration Contracts are a way of identifying who is involved in a decision and what level of decision-making authority each participant has. This isn't a delegation model where some individual is empowered and imparts unto others some fraction of their authority for a limited period of time. This is a collaboration model where all participants are equally empowered, but find consensus on all topics to be a suboptimal approach.

A Lightweight Incident Response Framework

A Lightweight Incident Response Framework

Sometimes, there is an edge case we didn’t anticipate that causes issues in production.

And sometimes, there is a common use case we didn’t test sufficiently cover that causes issues in production.

And sometimes, production goes down. For reasons yet unknown.

For some of us, there is a production support team that handles these things. They might call us, if they need us, but they handle this stuff. For the rest of us, we need to handle the incident ourselves.

The following is a very simple framework for responding to incidents.

Tuckman Was Wrong!

Tuckman's Theory of Group Development was first published by Bruce Tuckman in 1965. In Tuckman's original explanation, groups and teams go through four stages as they become a cohesive, high-performing unit; Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.

While a commonly accepted model of how teams form, science tells us that Tuckman's Theory is wrong. The stages he defines are not really stages at all, do not happen in a specific sequence, and are not all experienced by all teams. Our top argument for why teams need to be kept stable has been invalidated.

Autonomy, Connection, Excellence, Diversity

Autonomy, Connection, Excellence, Diversity

The Autonomy, Connection, Excellence, and Diversity (#CultureACED) framework is foremost in our minds and directs the work that we do. Our customers have and will become familiar with these ideas. Not just the words, but the actual tools and techniques we've successfully used in a number of organizations.

How can we help?