I have an idea that keeps haunting me now and then. To take a break from my current role (a leader of 60+ engineering unit) & go for a temporal (1 month?) contract assignment as an individual contributor - front-line software engineer. What has inspired such an idea? No, it's not about any kind of burn-out. Or because I'm fed up with my current work environment/role - quite the opposite. Have you heard about the idea of management by walking around (MBWA)? It has originated in Toyota's Kaizen culture - when Taiichi Ono has found out that to bring…
All posts in Kaizen
This blog post is about: what's wrong with Scrum-ish retrospectives, what's the better alternative, why questioning yourself is nothing about self-doubt or slowing down the decision-making, is it necessary to abandon "retros" and why awareness leads to clarity (and what does it really mean).Scrum was a great idea, invented by brilliant people, with great intentions in mind. No doubt about that. A shame it didn't work out ... One of its brightest spots was emphasizing the role of retrospecting over what went well & what could use some improvement - it has even got a dedicated ceremony: some even tend…
This blog post is all about: Kaizen as an attitude (and not a buzzword!), role of everyday flexibility, reducing inertia by dissecting the problems, habit of continuous introspection and in the end - why you should always look for exponential effects (both positive & negative) - as these are the only ones that do really matter.I don't know about you, but I had (in my so-called engineering career) few enlightenment moments that have redefined me professionally - shaken my work paradigm in a way that I've completely revamped my approach - to work in general and to some particular…
Smart, agile thought-leaders say: the best architectures and designs come from the self-organizing teams don’t build the the ivory tower - it’s the people who do “the ground work” that know best what are the day-to-day problems that impact and impair their work motivated individuals are the key - build the teams and projects around them and … you know, they are obviously right. But … sometimes it just doesn’t work that way - some people NEED to be driven: and they are not the minority. I’ve made an experiment.…