Integrity Inspired Solutions

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Integrity Inspired Solutions

Integrity’s mission is to improve the lives of every individual who comes into contact with the software development process.

That includes both the people who want the software and the people who build it.

07/05/2024

If you want your software team to be efficient, you have to lose the instinct to start projects right away.

When someone hands your team an important new project, it can be easy to want to jump on it right away. After all, it's important, right?

But the problem is that everything claims to be important, including the project and tasks your team is currently working on. And when you pull people off of current projects to start new ones, all you're doing is slowing everything down and making everyone unhappy.

It might seem like telling a stakeholder that you got started right away on their project will make them happier, but they won't be happy when their project takes longer because your team was spread too thin.

Remember: We don't get points for starting work—we get points for finishing work.

Listen to this full episode at the link in the comments, or find Agile Bites on your favorite podcast platform.

07/04/2024

Wishing you all a safe and happy 4th of July from all of us at Integrity Inspired Solutions! 🇺🇸

07/01/2024

In our previous episode, we talked about the importance of visualizing your current work-in-progress to uncover bottlenecks, enhance decision-making, and provide clarity on your team's workload. Now, let's tackle what often comes next: realizing you have too much work in progress.

Why does this happen so often to development teams, and what can we do about it? In this episode, we're diving into strategies to manage and prevent this overload. We’ll cover setting WIP limits, staying responsive, and juggling organizational demands effectively.

Tune in to hear how to avoid overcommitting, the perks of prioritizing and finishing tasks before jumping into new ones, and how to use Lean principles to keep your workflow sustainable.

Listen to this episode at the link in the comments, or look for Agile Bites on your favorite podcast platform.

06/27/2024

Is your development team slowed down by the number of items they currently have in progress?

It's hard to identify what all is in progress when the work is invisible. That's why I highly recommend finding a visualization for your team's WIP.

I've worked with many organizations to map out their workflows and WIP, and jaws drop every time when the visualizations reveal how much work is currently in progress.

And that's the thing about WIP—the more work items you have in progress, the slower each individual item becomes. That's why visualizing it can be a powerful part of speeding up your team.

Listen to this full episode at the link in the comments, or find Agile Bites on your favorite podcast platform.

06/25/2024

When the kind of work we do is invisible (like software development), it can be a challenge to keep track of what work is going on at any given time. That's where visualization can be a great tool for understanding your team's work in progress.

Building on last episode's discussion on creating workflow visualizations, in this episode, host Phil Ledgerwood explores the importance of visualizing work in progress to uncover current projects in flight and find hidden bottlenecks and inefficiencies. He discusses the pros and cons of common WIP visualizations (lists, Kanban boards, etc.) so that you can decide on a visualization that fits your unique workflow, even if it means thinking outside the box.

Episode link in the comments, or search for Agile Bites on your favorite podcast platform.

06/20/2024

If you're a dev team manager who doesn't want to make uninformed recommendations to your team, visualization could get you where you want to go.

Visualizing your team's workflow does two powerful things:

✅ It turns the abstract journey from “request” to “deliverable” into a tangible process, aligning your team around a clear and shared understanding.

✅ The information-gathering process to build your visual workflow is a great non-threatening way to get information and spark productive conversations

Have you tried visualizing your team's workflow? What insights did you gain from it?

Link to this full episode of Agile Bites is at the link in the comments, or find Agile Bites on your favorite podcast platform.

06/17/2024

A lot of what we do in software development is invisible. If someone is typing furiously on their keyboard, you don't know if they're about to finish that new feature or if they're complaining to their state representative.

One of the things that tends to be invisible is the actual process of getting something from “request” to “deliverable.”

Everybody kind of knows what that process is, but they typically only know their piece of it, and they probably haven't thought critically about it in years.

Creating a visualization of this process can:

✅ Spotlight potential weak points
✅ Improve communication
✅ Reveal the complexities of your team's workflow
✅ Uncover hidden opportunities for optimization

In this episode, I'm sharing practical tips for mapping out your processes, understanding team dynamics, and setting the stage for continuous improvement.

Listen now at the link in the comments, or find Agile Bites on your favorite podcast platform.

06/13/2024

You've got big changes you want to make on your first day leading a tech team? Hold on a moment before diving in with solutions and recommendations.

When stepping into a new role, it's important to understand the reality on the ground. Many driven and ambitious managers rush in with big plans, eager to mold the operation to the image they have in their heads. They want to add value, and that's the way they plan to do it.

But here's the catch—you need context to be effective.

👉 Understand the facts and reasons behind the current situation
👉 Gather intelligence to know what you're dealing with
👉 Recognize what the teams are currently doing and experiencing

Before implementing your vision, take a step back, do some reconnaissance, and truly understand the environment you're stepping into. You're laying the groundwork for your improvements to be actual improvements.

Link to this full episode in the comments, or find Agile Bites on your favorite podcast platform.

06/10/2024

When managing a new team, it's tempting to come in guns blazing with new ideas and changes. Not only can this cause resistance, however, but you might be heading the wrong direction to begin with.

Start with Fact-Finding and Reason-Finding before Recommendation-Making. In other words, one of your first moves should be to ask a lot of questions—"why" being one of the most prominent of them.

This sets you up for success with your team because:

✅ You may discover there are good reasons for their current practices that are not immediately apparent to you
✅ It lays the foundation for future discussions, focusing on the reasons behind the practices rather than the practices themselves—making the conversation ego-agnostic.

In this episode, learn how to create a safe environment to gear up your operations for change and set you and your team up for future success.

Episode link in the comments, or find Agile Bites on your favorite podcast platform.

06/03/2024

Many of us who were thrown into management positions over development teams had to learn on the job. And when that happens, it can be easy to fall into the role of what you THINK a manager should do—be the rule enforcer and hold the team accountable.

But as a dev team manager, your primary role should be to enable your team to deliver value effectively and efficiently.

In other words, get out of your team's way and empower them to do their best work. How does this actually play out, though?

In this episode, I'm sharing the lessons I've learned and things I wish I had understood when I first started managing dev teams. Whether you're a new manager or a seasoned veteran, this episode provides practical tips for keeping you and your team on the same side working towards a common goal.

Episode link in the comments below, or find Agile Bites on your favorite podcast platform.

05/30/2024

If you want to increase your development team's speed, there's one crucial truth you need to grapple with:

The more tasks you have in progress, the slower each individual task becomes.

(There's math to back this up—check out my past episode on Little's Law).

We want to be optimizing for FINISHING things—not starting them. Starting something before finishing your last thing just slows down progress on both items.

Listen to this full episode at the link in the comments or find Agile Bites on your favorite podcast platform.

05/27/2024

If you're a CTO, manager, or team lead looking to develop software faster, this episode is for you!

If someone has told you that you shouldn't -want- to shorten time to delivery, this episode is also for you. Because they're wrong.

Wanting speed isn't a bad thing—assuming you are building the right thing (which is the main problem Agile addresses).

As teams do grow in their agility, they do tend to become faster for all kinds of reasons—but it's not directly because of Agile. Speed isn't the goal of Agile. Making sure the right software comes out the door is.

But there are definitely process improvements you can make that can also increase your speed of delivery, and you should want that.

In our most click-baity titled episode yet, I talk about the actual things that are influencing your rate of delivery and how to deal with them.

Full episode link in the comments, or find Agile Bites on your favorite platform.

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7820 Metcalf
Overland Park, KS
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http://integrityinspired.com/

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