Achieving Decentralized Control Cheat Sheet

A ‘cheat sheet’ for Chapter 9: Achieving Decentralized Control from The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald Reinertsen. You can download the PDF here.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Cheat Sheet

A ‘cheat sheet’ for Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard P. Rumelt. You can download the PDF here.

Chaos vs. Time in Test First and Test Later Projects

This chart, from Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests by Freeman and Pryce, shows ‘chaos’ vs time for two distinct project delivery methods (those which test early and those which test later).

“Some Days Are Better Than Others”

This anecdote comes from Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J Wheeler.

Systems Thinking for Management

For anyone in a position of management or team leadership, the discipline of systems thinking offers some important and useful mental models.

Facilitating Dialogue Cheat Sheet

A short ‘cheat sheet’ for a couple of frameworks I find helpful for facilitating difficult discussions and keeping participants ‘in dialogue’. It summarises Kantor’s ‘Four Player’ model and Bohm’s ‘On Dialogue’. You can download the PDF here.

Humble Inquiry Cheat Sheet

I created a ‘cheat sheet’ for Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help by Edgar Schein. You can download the PDF here.

Lean Thinking: Principles and Processes according to The Toyota Way

Reference slides I put together for talking about ‘lean thinking’. The emphasis is on creating a culture of continuous learning and improvement in order to be successful when transitioning to a lean methodology.

Schedule Projects To Minimise The Cost Of Delay

Plenty of Agile teams treat their backlogs as either a first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue, or perhaps a priority queue ordered by the expected revenue of each individual project. It turns out that neither approach is based on sound economics.

Healthy Conflict, and the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

A couple of decks to support discussions around Kantor’s ‘Four Player’ model, and Lencioni’s ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’. These conceptual models can be helpful tools when coaching self-organising teams, to facilitate healthy conflict and robust decision making.

Self-Directed Work Teams

Some slides for talking about self-directed work teams (SDWTs), also sometimes known as high performance teams (HPTs). They provide an overview of some of the ideas Kimball Fisher discusses in his book Leading Self-Directed Work Teams, and how they can be applied in the Agile world.