Currently I am attending a BestBrains course with Mary and Tom Poppendieck on Lean Software Development (see more here).

On the course there are people from companies in UK, Germany and Denmark, it is an interesting combination of different views and experience.
Even though I read the two books from Poppendeick many years ago, it has been an inspiring day with many stories and cases from companies around the world.

We did two Value Stream Maps based on some real life cases from the participants, and the people presenting the results had a hard time when Mary started to ask a lot of “why”-questions. I am sure they got a lot of valuable things to work with at home.

Some of the take-away I got from the first day:

• Focus on bad news first: That makes the organization focus on constant improvements (Toyota does it).
• Copying Toyota is also copying someone else solutions to their problems and that is not solutions to your own problems. Lean from Toyota and improve it.
• To make real user value, you have to see and understand it from eyes of the customer/users.

Especially the last bullet is so important, and if you want to learn more in this area, I can recommend a BestBrains workshop at Øresund Agile on May 14th: “Capturing Requirements and Agile Planning“ http://oresundagile.org/workshop-7. It might change how you define your systems to be built in the future...

By Mads Troels Hansen

As I'm beginning to feel a little stuck writing this blog-entry, I get a strong desire to check the news and see what happened in the world since I last checked 30 minutes ago. And I think I also need a fresh cup of coffee. I can imagine myself go down into the kitchen, boil water and add instant coffee to the mug, pour hot water over and add a little milk - heavenly! But instead of following my desires, I take a  look at the small ticking tomato-shaped timer in front of me, and I notice that I still have 15 minutes left to go. I put a mark on a piece of paper on my table, and turn my attention back to my blog-entry with a desire to keep going for the next fifteen minutes. I know very well that the desire to get a cup of coffee or check the news, are just a few of my procrastionation demons. They have haunted me for most of my life, but I now have found the ultimate weapon in the form of a small red tomato-shaped timer.

It was more accident than anything else, that led me to attend Staffan Nöteberg's talk about the pomodoro technique at this years agile conference in Toronto. This accident changed my life, and after that also the lives of my colleagues. Much would have been different had I known it 25 years ago.

The technique was invented by an, at that time, young italian student Francesco Cirillo, who was not too pleased with his own ability to study concentrated. As an experiment he borrowed his mothers kitchen timer, and tried to stay focused for 25 minutes. He did not succed immediately, but gradually developed the technicue to deal with internal and external interruptions. He developed a set of simple artefacts and  planning and improvement tools. As the technique matured, it was shaped to be used by others than just individuals. Also pair-workers and teams can have great benefit of the technique.

Curious? Check the links or attend my presentation in Copenhagen on Thursday  March 5th at 5pm - read more and register here.



By Bent Jensen

I'm reading Dr. W. Edwards Deming's main work Out of the Crisis for the first time and thought I would share some of Dr. Demings wise words with you. I didn't really expect it but Dr. Deming actually has something to say about software development.

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of reading his other main work The New Economics and was amazed by the insights of Dr. Deming and how little people in general and management in particular have understood what he actually said. Granted, his overall style could easily be termed idiosyncratic and collage-like but stunningly concise formulations are spread all over.

This is what Dr. Deming said about the "supposition that it is only necessary to meet specifications" when it comes to software development:

"A programmer has a similar problem. She learns, after she finishes the job, that she programmed very well the specifications as delivered to her, but that they were deficient. If she had only known the purpose of the program, she could have done it right for the purpose, even though the specifications were deficient."

That's it! Did I mention that Dr. Deming wrote this in 1984, long before anyone talked about Agile software development?

By Thomas Blomseth

Reading the danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten today, I felt like writing a blog entry in a category we rarely touch on this blog. That is, commenting on political issues in Denmark. I was quite surprised reading that a recent study showed that infants born in Denmark in the year 2008, would during their entire life end up costing society more than they contribute. Naturally a problem, especially considering that Denmark already has one of the highest income taxes in the world (up to around 62% depending on your total income).

According to the article politicians are faced with only 3 options, to overcome this lack of balance between national income and expenses.

1. Increase taxes       
2. Make people work longer
3. Cut budgets

Now, I would agree if the assumption of time spent working, directly affected the tax incomes at a fixed ratio. That certainly isn't the case. Let's try and shift the problem. Imagine if companies were able to become more profitable, they would then pay more taxes, hopefully to the benefit of the nation. All without picking any of the options above.

So what options do companies have at becoming more profitable?

1. Increase prices on products and services
2. Lower average employee salary
3. Layoffs

Not surprisingly it looks a lot like the list in the top. Also, it has the same built-in assumptions.

It seems like a common misunderstanding that there is a direct link between time spent and value created. Does people that work longer create more value? Maybe, but not necessarily. It obviously depends on what they spend their time on.

None of the options listed above are particular popular, as they all have negative impact somewhere. But as I see it there is at least one more option, which is far more interesting. I am surprised that it is really so hard to see, that we jump to conclusions on time and value being part of a fixed equation.

The Fourth Option: Do more with less.

Sounds impossible? It's not. You see, working is not a goal - if it was, we could all just be digging holes in the ground and once done, we could fill them again. Value creation is the goal and work just happens to be a necessity in the process of creating value. By focusing on maximizing work, we are not necessarily maximizing the value created. Have you ever considered that much of the work we do today could be as value-adding as digging holes in the ground? And if that is the case, we have a potentially of increasing value creation, without working longer hours.

It makes you wonder, if doing work is not the goal why do we spend so much time talking about lowering unemployment rates? Unemployment is cleary related only to whether people work or not? I personally wonder why this nation have something called The Ministry of Employment? It should be changed into The Ministry of Value Creation.

I think it's about time we change focus from working hard, to thinking hard. I bet we could work towards unleashing the abundant source of human creativity, and surely we can find ways to add more value to our customers, our society and ourselves without working longer hours.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

By Sune Gynthersen