Yellow Squad Weekly Topics: July 6

Summary:

• gary_poster/benji: Personal feedback loops
• bac/benji/gary_poster: Poorly specified tasks

Intentional duplication of effort: learning and prototyping

When do you want to duplicate effort?  You often want to duplicate learning across a team.  What about prototyping?

Yellow Squad Weekly Tricks: July 6

Summary:

• bac: manage your services together with their supporting infrastructure
• gmb: beware: Launchpad's ec2 command will sometimes silently break if your download cache doesn't have what you need.
• gary_poster/gmb: if you get a weird ec2 result, don't forget about ec2's postmortem option.

Yellow Squad Weekly Project Report: July 6

Summary: We made some good progress, but this week was not as successful as we had hoped.

Yellow Squad Weekly Retrospective Minutes: June 29

Introduction

What is this post?

I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads.  We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies.  Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it.  We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep track of on a wiki.  This post contains the minutes of one of those meetings.

Yellow Squad Weekly Retrospective Minutes: June 22

Introduction

What is this post?

I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads.  We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies.  Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it.  We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep track of on a wiki.  This post contains the minutes of one of those meetings.

Our checklist for running a daily meeting with kanban

The squad I manage is fully distributed, like most of Canonical's employees.  We are all in relatively overlapping timezones--ranging from Italy to the American east coast--but none of us work in the same building, or even the same city.

We also are on the Lean journey.  We're not nearly as far along as others you'll find blogging on the web.  However, maybe we're interesting because of the combination: lean, plus a distributed workforce.

I suspect that working in a distributed team increases the importance of good practices.  When they are not followed, the pain is more intense.  For example, I think that writing everything down is important for running a business well; but it is essential, or more obviously essential, for a fully distributed team.

Another good practice like this is a daily meeting.  We've done this for many years now, and it is essential to our coordination.  We combine it with an online kanban board, which is central to our daily workflow and coordination.

We've also recently combined it with another good idea, checklists, and that's what I want to share right now.