Weeknote 19 - Short and sweet

So I only worked for 3 days this week and one of those was an ‘awayday’ with the rest of the agile folks at my current contract. The rest of the week was spent with my family in Aberdeenshire :)

Visual Facilitation

So one of the things I did this week was a bit of a taster session in bikablo which Chris Downey and Robb Lockwood, who were trained by Andy and Marcus de Vale of Workvisible. Bikablo is a basic set of tools for visual facilitation - making things visual helps people who learn in different ways, as well as giving you some nice graphics to get your point across and align people towards a common understanding. I loved how simple it is and I’m considering signing up for one of the workvisible courses later this year.

Why limit your WIP?

I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about finishing. One of the most powerful tools that we have to keep us focusing on finishing instead of starting is Work in Progress (WIP) limits. By limiting your WIP you force yourself to finish things before starting new tasks. The number of teams I work with and people I speak to who don’t use or don’t enforce WIP limits is quite amazing. These limits are there to focus you - focus your efforts and time on one thing at a time, finish it, and move on to the next thing. Otherwise you may end up with lots of things started, but not a lot finished - and therefore not a lot of value delivered.

That’s about it for this week, next week is the final week before Christmas and there is lots to do!