This February 28 to March 1, Flowmotion´s Laura Waite will be leading a course at a gorgeous, lakeside cottage near Toronto, Canada, where you can relax in a hot tub and stretch out in front of a crackling fire at the end of each day. It promises to be a fine way to learn in a pampered environment removed from your day-to-day working demands.

Part Lean and Agile training course, part active coaching workshop, this in-depth Lean and Agile course will deliver real, tangible and important results for your working life by introducing theory, ingraining practical application and co-creating an action plan that’s tailor-made to inspire a real difference in your workplace.

Laura will be returning to her Canadian roots at the cottage, which is located in the Muskoka region known as “Toronto’s playground”. Trenanthia Cottage boasts more than 3,000 square feet of working and break-out space, including two relaxing lounges with wood-burning fireplaces, on-site massages and the aforementioned hot tub. The natural surrounds offer hiking, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, snow tubing, birding and ice-fishing.

Due to its hands-on nature, the course is open to anyone, from any role in any organisation, as well as to people who work alone as independents or entrepreneurs.

Past training participants have said, “Laura is very engaging, great listening skills, and extremely knowledgeable” and described her training as, “[t]houghtful, provoking and enjoyable – very good presentation of a subject that you clearly have a passion for!”

The course will run from Monday 28 February to Friday 1 March, 2013 for just £1,750 GBP (€2,150 EUR, $2,795 CAD, $2,795 USD). Course fees include all taxes and fees, as well as accommodation, home-cooked meals prepared in the cottage itself and transportation to and from downtown Toronto or Toronto Pearson International Airport.

Find out more about what you can achieve at our Lean and Agile training course, as well as about its gorgeous cottage setting, here – we look forward to seeing you there!

The post The Full Package: Inspirational Lean & Agile Training in a Beautiful Lakeside Cottage appeared first on Flowmotion.

“What are you doing?”, asked the man. “They’re all up and down the beach. You’ll never make any difference.” The wise woman looked at him, perplexed. She picked up another starfish and threw it into the water.

“Made a difference to that one,” she said, walking away from him. He watched as she continued to pick them up, one starfish at a time, and throw them into the waves.

This story has stayed with me over the years. As small as it may be, any improvement we undertake, any difference we strive to make in this world, adds up when it’s a goal shared by all of us. So, as this new year begins, we resolve to make a difference, no matter how big or small. What’s your New Year’s resolution?

The post Saving One Thing at a Time appeared first on Flowmotion.

To deliver faster, use a big, visible team dashboard

1. Find a shared space, like a wall somewhere, that everyone can see and access

A dashboard on a wall used by an an 80-person team

2. Create a simple dashboard

3. Try it out by adding tasks for the next week or two

4. Use it frequently so it reflects the current situation

A few examples of team dashboards

A dashboard on a wall showing Not Started, In Progress, Done

An electronic team dashboard – for teams that are not in the same location – using Symphonical

A dashboard on a whiteboard for a team in the same location

A dashboard for a team of 40 people in one location,
with 10 more team members located elsewhere
(a webcam was used to share the contents)

Give it a Try

Why Does it Work?

The post Using a Visible Team Dashboard to Accelerate Delivery appeared first on Flowmotion.

Although this experience is commonplace, there is a better way – so we thought we’d share some simple, really effective ways to tackle this near-universal team problem and try to bring some of the joy back into your working life.

Or Browse the Tips at Your Leisure…

The post Using a Visible Team Dashboard to Accelerate Delivery appeared first on Flowmotion.

Our mission is to make your working life – and your personal life, for that matter – more engaging, productive and collaborative. Arranged into monthly themes, we’ve covered topics including embracing feedback, helping your team improve how well it works together and exploding your personal productivity.

Through our new Tuesday Tip Archive, all of our tips can be accessed at any time. Arranged into monthly themes, each tip is a bitesize guide to making a small, easy improvement that will have immediate benefits; one step at a time, our tips can help you tackle the many challenges we all face in our working lives!

We’ll be adding new tips and new monthly themes in the new year. Meanwhile, perhaps you’d like to give one or more of them a try through our Tuesday Tip Archive?

The post Introducing our Flowmotion Tuesday Tips Archive! appeared first on Flowmotion.

And so, as our gift to you all this year, we will make sure the peripheral elements of Father Christmas’s operation help him reach each one of your stockings, despite their otherwise inherent lack of Flow. You’re welcome*

Make One Gift at a Time (For One Child at a Time)

Well, we can certainly understand your panic, Elves – we did a quick head count, and it seems there’s quite a few children out there needing your services. We don’t have an exact number because we lost count somewhere around Belgium, but we certainly got the idea. Here’s our suggestion: if you don’t have time to make every gift on every list, how about first aiming to ensure you make just the one, most important, gift on each child’s list? (Then, if you find you have time, you can start making the second, most important, gift on each child’s list – and then the third, and so on.) What a great way to make sure every child feels special!

Now that we have the second part of your concern covered (making sure every child gets a gift), let’s look at your first concern: your shop floor is currently covered in manes and tails!

We think we can make things easier for you, because right now you’re encountering the same challenge many organisations face when putting together a product to satisfy their customers. We’ve taken a look around your workshop and we can see the problem straight away: you’re batching things!

“So what?”, you ask? Well, working like this can lead to pile-ups and quality issues. You currently have specialist stations for your gifts: you have an elf making all the seats for your rocking horses, an elf making all the rockers themselves, one elf each making manes and tails and an assembly team at the end putting all the pieces together to make a large batch of rocking horses.

There are several problems with this way of working and the first is that you can only go as fast as your slowest elf. If making rockers is much more time-consuming than the other tasks, there’s not a lot of point being speedy with the manes and tails because everything’s still going to pile up at the rocker station. Which means, of course, that your chances of making a gift for every child rest entirely on that poor elf and his rockers.

We know it seemed like your specialist stations were the most efficient way of doing things but, now that time is of the essence, you’ll see a lot more problems start to crop up that you hadn’t noticed before, which have the potential to cripple your operation. Including the age-old problem that you’re creating inventory (rocking horses) without actually even knowing it’s the most important gift on each child’s list. What happens when you’ve created a large batch of rocking horses, only to find out that most children were asking for an iPad?

This is where One Piece Flow comes in: it will help you make sure each child gets the gift at the top of their list. We recommend you adjust to a One Piece Flow style of working and coordinate to make one gift at a time – the most important gift! We’ll give you a quick and easy guide to get you started:

See? Told you it was an easy guide. Also, by doing it this way, you’ll pick up on quality problems right away – if the tea cups wobble straight off their saucers, you’ll know about it as soon as the first one is made, which is much less disastrous than finding out about it at the assembly table when you’ve already made a million of each specialist piece.

Now you’re all set so that each gift finished is another happy child on Christmas morning! Good luck Elves, we hope you make it much further than Belgium.

Let It Glow, Let It Glow, Let It Glow (That’s the Secret to High Performing Teams)

Before we begin, Reindeers, may we just say that we’re honoured to know you are readers of our blog. We’re big fans of your work.

We understand your frustration, but we think you might be looking at this from the wrong angle: when working as a team, it’s important to embrace diversity. Variety is the spice of life, after all, even when it comes to noses. Collecting and embracing diverse characteristics is actually the secret behind high performing teams, because teams that respect and leverage those differences are stronger and more creative.

Can you think of any circumstances in which his bright, bright shiny nose could be beneficial to the whole team? How about on the night before Christmas when, all through the house, not a creature will be stirring, not even a mouse? It gets pretty dark at that time of year, from what we’ve heard (although we have no idea what happens on Christmas Eve because, obviously, we’re a-bed early to give you plenty of time to find our stockings).

Maybe it would make sense to have your bright-nosed colleague at the head of the sleigh team, lighting the way for the rest of you through the driving snow and clouds? We think you’ll come to love that glowing nose and shout out about it with glee. You never know… it might even go down in history.

The Whole World Needs a Santa (But Santa Needs His Breakfast)

We can empathise with your husband, Mrs. Claus; he has a very complex job to do. Getting to every household in one night is quite the task and we’ve asked for a My Little Pony this year, so we’d really like him to finish his rounds. On the other hand, we’d hate for your Christmas to be anything less than merry.

We have a tip that will make his journey more efficient. You see, many of us, especially if we’re not so good with the time-keeping, are easily distracted from the task at hand. It must be an extra challenge for Santa with so many mince pies and brandy glasses turning his head along the way.

It goes without saying that Santa has good intentions to get the task done in a timely manner but, every time something grabs his attention, he’s lost precious time for gift distribution before he even realises he’s been distracted. The key is to work out a plan and write it down – perhaps you could help him do that?

Once you have a plan locked down, Santa can focus on one thing at a time: taking the first task on the list and concentrating on taking it to completion. Then he can move on to the next task, and then the next, and so on.

When we’re working at our desks, we have the luxury of writing each task on a small piece of paper and then sticking it to the wall near our work area. That might be a bit difficult on a sleigh in high winds in the middle of the night, but you could always get him a tablet or smartphone with Symphonical installed as an early Christmas gift? It comes in handy for us when we’re working remotely, but it might have even more benefits for Santa: no bits of paper to disappear over the side of the sleigh.

If he’s still having a hard time staying focused, we suggest working with him to estimate how long each task should take and then set a timer for each one. All these little elements will help keep his mind focused on completing the task.

So… now we’ve helped make sure Santa gets back in time, is there any chance we could come for candy cane breakfast too? We’ve been ever so good this year.

*Disclaimer: Of course, we don’t really think Christmas is about discipline and strict organisation – where would be the fun in that? We do think it’s interesting that Lean and Agile can even be applied to the path of Santa’s sleigh, though…!

The post We’re Dreaming of an Agile Christmas appeared first on Flowmotion.

As our sack is still full of desperate pleas to banish Christmas disorganisation, our gift to you once again this Yule is to help make your festivities as efficient as possible. Who needs gadgets and chocolate in their stocking when you can have productivity instead? If you wanted an Xbox, you’d be penning these letters to Santa, right? Right.

Ban Grandma from the brandy (by introducing Shared Goals)

Ah yes, the question of how to make sure one boozed-up relative doesn’t ruin the party. We seem to get some variation on this question every year and, while we’re big fans of the mulled wine, we can understand how hard it is on the placemats if Grandma’s doing a river dance along the dinner table.

Truly, the answer to this question is simple and straightforward; the key is to take a page right out of Team Building 101. You see, most teams gel best when met with two key conditions:

We suggest coming up with a challenging goal for which everyone’s participation is required to succeed – you might even want to manufacture a mini-crisis. You have a week or so left until Christmas, plenty of time to train the dog to rip through wrapping paper. If you set him loose on the gift pile on Christmas morning, you’ll need everyone’s help to re-wrap them so that nobody sees what Santa brought them ahead of time. And look! You just happen to have several fresh rolls of wrapping paper in the cupboard…

If she heads towards the booze cabinet once you’re done, you might need to create a second challenge – but that’s ok, because nothing brings people together and takes their minds off the brandy bottle more than a crisis. We promise not to tell anyone that you were behind the whole thing. Wink wink

Keep your Christmas tree colour-coordinated (with the creativity of the kids)

As a parent, you already know how creative your children can be. We completely understand the desire for a beautiful tree – frankly, any bauble outside the approved colour charts is banned from Flowmotion headquarters at this time of year. Those things sneak onto the branches in the night, we’re sure of it.

Nevertheless, this is an ideal opportunity to capitalise on that creativity while also getting what you want out of the whole deal: an organised, efficient Christmas tree. We like you, Herbert.

You may have heard artists say they often produce their best work when facing great limitations. You could tap into your little ones’ inner artists by making a game of decorating the tree, bound by the limitation that all the tinsel they use is complementary to your Christmas palette. They, as well as you, may be surprised at what brilliance they come up with. Be sure to be clear about your limitations, and the game as a whole!

Why not try sharing the following with everyone before embarking on the fun:

When you’re finished, check that the family have answered yes to all of the Acceptance Criteria. And if not, now’s your chance to re-arrange everything without offending anyone!

If, instead, the outcome leaves you strangely compelled to stare at the tree until your eyes swim with happy tears… well, don’t worry, it’s only temporary. You’ll be rid of needles all over the carpet and back to a colour-matched living room by January!

Pick a theme for New Year’s Eve (by establishing a Value Currency)

You’re clearly already familiar with the process of prioritisation – it’s how you got down to the three options you’re left with. (Pssst, one of your final choices is ‘Under the Sea’, right? One of them is always ‘Under the Sea’.)

But it seems you’ve hit a familiar stumbling block: you’re not quite sure what to do to push through to the single best choice. In our experience, it requires a great deal of vigilance, although we’ll let you in on a little secret: it doesn’t really matter which option you choose, because you’ll all be so inebriated by midnight that the decor will be a distant memory.

Just kidding! We wouldn’t want to leave to chance the opportunity to set the tone for your coming year. It deserves a certain amount of gravitas. What we suggest you do is establish a Value Currency. In other words: what unit of measurement can you use to decide what’s most valuable to you on New Year’s Eve?

At Flowmotion headquarters, it’s ‘maximum kissing opportunities’, but that may not be the priority for you. Perhaps you’d rather have a costume you can dance in without crashing into the punch bowl, or a theme that inspires the most creative cocktails or the best music playlist.

Maybe you want to have the most original party in town and be talked about for years to come? We managed that a few years ago with our Birds of the World theme, but mostly because Grandma’s tail feathers caught fire on a cake candle. That’s why we banned the brandy.

Once you’ve established your value currency, you can ask everyone who’ll be attending to rate the three options on a scale of 1-10, where 1 suggests that this option will be least likely to provide the value we’re looking for and 10 suggests it is most likely. Take the average and use that to make your choice.

We hope you have a joyous celebration with your friends and family and that 2013 brings you everything you want – in priority sequence, naturally!

*Disclaimer: Of course, we don’t really think Christmas is all about discipline and strict organisation – where would be the fun in that? We do think it’s interesting that Lean and Agile can even be applied to party themes and Grandma’s tipples, though…!

The post It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like an Agile Christmas appeared first on Flowmotion.

It’s a dilemma we’ve seen a lot of organisational transformations face. A pilot programme is, by nature, small and contained, which hides many of the challenges inherent in transforming the organisation as a whole. Resources must be stretched much further, the full spectrum of roles and responsibilities must be included and not everyone will be immediately willing to change.

“People often assume that it’s the techniques and practices that [make Agile projects a] success, but they’re missing the point. It’s the outcome that matters.”

Even the jump from a small team to a full department is large enough to invite these dilemmas and, at first glance, it can seem dishearteningly difficult to achieve the organisational transformation we’re after. Part of our responsibility as organisational transformation coaches is to ease that path and help people understand why these problems suddenly appear – and why they’re actually a positive part of the change!

In the article, we explain why the crux of the matter is to change the way people think, not just the way they work, and why the problems that surface during a transition are not, as we’ve seen organisations assume, caused by Agile but a result of its powerful ability to root out existing issues.

“It’s a misconception that agile is an undisciplined way of working. In fact, it’s extraordinarily disciplined because so much stuff gets exposed and there are so many opportunities to recognize issues.”

SD Times has kindly given us permission to reproduce the article here; you can read the whole thing by clicking on the image above or find the online version on the SD Times website. It includes some great thoughts from Lean / Agile experts in a range of fields and we hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed contributing to it!

The post Scaling Agile Isn’t Such A Stretch: Our Perspective in SD Times Article appeared first on Flowmotion.

This is the traditional time for reflection, to ready ourselves for the brand new year to come. Ahead of your New Year Resolutions, why not take some time to look back at how far you’ve come already and decide where you’d like to go next?

If you missed some of this year’s tips, worry not: they’ll be waiting for you whenever you’re ready. Perhaps you’d like to give one a go, as a last hurrah for 2012?

The post Time for Reflection – Tuesday Tips are Taking a Break appeared first on Flowmotion.

To keep the team improvements coming, celebrate every one!

Keeping measurements simple gathers efficient feedback

Speaking of measurements, we strongly advocate keeping them simple. Hand-written, photocopied sheets of paper can often be the most efficient way to gather measurable feedback, especially if it needs to be anonymous (which, in many cases, people prefer). If you’re not able to have everyone in the same room when you want to gather feedback, look for the simplest solution you can find - and keep the number of questions to an amount you can count on one hand, preferably without using your thumb

Making team improvements visible boosts the group’s morale

As the group continues to make improvements, especially if we’re measuring them, it can be a real boost for the team to make a big chart in a highly visible location that shows the improvements being made. A constant reminder of how well things are going can be such a mood-enhancer!

The post Why Celebrating Your Achievements Leads to Powerful Team Improvements appeared first on Flowmotion.