Sunday, March 30, 2008

An Open Source Digital Kanban Board for TFS

I’m sure more than a few of my readers will be interested in this. Martin Hinshelwood has started a project to deliver an open source Kanban UI for Team Foundation Server, similar to the one that Darren Davis created at Corbis. I’d like to give Martin every encouragement with this effort. Why not leave him an encouraging comment?...

Related Posts: Digital Whiteboard Experiment, Return of the Sticky Buddy, Do you have your Sticky Buddy? Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, David+Anderson

A Very Personal Hedgehog Revisited

It’s more than 4 years since I posted one of the most popular entries at AgileManagement.Net, Personal Hedgehog Concept. I was challenged by a reader comment to give my own take on the Personal Hedgehog idea and how I was working on it. I’ve given a full reply over at our new corporate blog at Modus Cooperandi. It’s appropriate because it is indeed the formation of Modus Cooperandi that represents the realization of my own Personal Hedgehog Concept.

I’ll be posting at the Modus Cooperandi blog on a regular basis, so you might like to add it to your RSS reader. Technorati tag: Management+Science, Jim+Collins, Modus+Cooperandi

A Failure Tolerant Culture Leads to Success

The Great Britain cycling team has just won an unprecedented 9 gold medals at the World Track Championships, held this year in Manchester, England. While home advantage might count for something, this article on BBC News is telling. Director of Performance, David Brailsford is clearly a leader who understand the importance of the W. Edwards Deming principle of first you drive out fear (point 8 of his 14 Points of Management). Brailsford puts his failure tolerant attitude at the top of his importance list when it comes to the secret of the team’s success.

“You cobble them all [athletes and staff] together, give them a good environment, you push them, make them not scared to fail,” said Brailsford.

“And you say ‘Let’s end up all over the track having tried to win rather than play safe and get a silver or bronze’. You remove that fear from the athletes and off we go.”

Time and again, I find it difficult to find better management and leadership advice than Deming. I find that creating a failure tolerant, fear free, innovative culture is the key to creating continuous improvement and ultimately achieving world class performance. It’s remarkable how well this advice holds up across so many walks of life: manufacturing; sports; and knowledge workers professions. Technorati tag: Management+Science