Essential Links in October 2023

It has been a lovely October. We went to the Spiel in Essen (one of the favorite moments of my year). And we reported from there. But now the days get shorter and it's pretty dark & cold outside. We are arriving in the dark season. What better than a few links to some inspiring articles to help you through November? Here you go.

Agile Software Development

• Throughput is a flow metric that can point you to flaws or unexpected effects in your work. Unfortunately, it is often misused to measure productivity or effectivity of a team or organization - but this is wrong. If done right it may point you to inconsistencies and helps you to remove obstacles or impediments that you did not even see. To improve your throughput, right-sizing your work, as Johanna Rothman says, helps greatly.
• Agile Software Development gathers around building products your customers need. To do so, you have to understand your customer, you even need to become obsessed with the customer - his needs, wishes, pain points and what he considers valuable. Jeff Gothelf summarizes a few anti-pattern that may show you, that your organization may not yet be obsessed with your customers.

Tools

• You may know the Atlassian Team Playbook, Untools, Liberating Structures and the Retromat. Now say hello to Meta's Think Kit. It's a set of tools and videos that will help you through your day.
• I have been personally using scrum for me, in my family, in the sports team that I used to manage ... but eduscrum takes it to a totally different level.

You know, you messed up when ...

• Post-Mortems are tools of your daily work to get a deep understanding, how a situation was created. And it's a great way to get the info across to customers and stakeholders. Here are examples of Post-Mortems that tell stories of things that have gone horribly wrong.

Organizational culture

• Peter Kruse über Kultur als organisch-wachsende Ausbildung von Wertemustern (Deutsch, Diskurs anregen geht, mehr nicht)
• If you are building up a team, the exercise around Manual Of Me is a helpful one

Large Language Models

• Henrik Kniberg wrote a game with the help of AI. In this YouTube video he tells his story.

Take care, and embrace the darker season - be kind and lookout for each other!