“To lead is to be all in, transparent and accessible, calm in the face of upset and even crisis, and always mindful that you are a steward of something bigger than yourself.”

That’s not easy. To whom much is given much is required. That’s the part that easily trips us up.

The “Absolutes” are building blocks that must be present regardless of your leadership style or approach. Here are the 12 Absolutes with Burnison’s thoughts on each:

1. Lead. Anchor yourself in Humility. Leadership is an all-in proposition. Never react; instead ask yourself: is this about me or about we? If it’s the former, forget it and rise above.
2. Purpose. The why. Purpose must have a long shadow, extending its influence over others.
3. Strategy. Strategy starts with the results of today. Strategy, rooted in values and purpose, gives encouragement through times of ambiguity and uncertainty. Strategy without purpose and values is a short-term plan that is directed toward shallow goals.
4. People. When you.re the leader, it’s never about you, but it starts with you. The leader can’t be the star player, scoring all the points. (Although many try to do just that.) Set high expectations for your team members, and help them to see what they can achieve.
5. Measure. Don’t rely on what you believe to be true. Measure and monitor so you know if it’s true. Validate your
6. data. Walk around. Talk to people. Listen. Look into their eyes and see for yourself whether the strategy is really working.
7. Empower. The leader’s job is not to empower people, but rather to help them to empower themselves. It’s the difference between ordering people to do something and inspiring them to see what they can do.
8. Reward. Employees work harder for leaders who demonstrate respect for their work. Authentic, purposeful praise is a power skill of the successful leader—everywhere.
9. Anticipate. As a leader, you must always have your focus on the horizon. Your first task is to hone your view of the present that you perceive around you and your organization. Grounded in this reality, you are able to raise your sights toward the horizon and beyond.
10. Navigate. Anticipation and navigation are complementary skills. It involves making decisions in real time that allow you to adjust, react, and outmaneuver the competition—always on the lookout for the unexpected.
11. Communicate. Communication is where leadership lives and breathes. That means more listening than talking. It’s not merely telling people what you think and what you know. It is a process in which you seek first to understand what others think.
12. Listen. Listen, learn, and then lead—in that order.
13. Learn. Knowledge is what you know. Wisdom is acknowledging what you don’t know. Surround yourself with a handful of people who will be your corrective lens, making sure that you focus and learn. Equally important, your inner circle should be made up of confidants who provide grounding and perspective, seeing you as a person rather than a function.

Burnison reminds us that leadership is about people:

“To lead,” he writes, “is to make an emotional connection on a very real and human level in every interaction.”

 

Source: http://www.leadershipnow.com/leadingblog/2012/05/the_twelve_absolutes_of_leader.html

Source: Blessing White

However, human beings are imperfect, if you simply take a single figure for your Velocity your release planning is likely to be in-accurate. Using, for example, the three, five or seven averages from the Velocity Report will produce far more accurate results.

Then you can evaluate your release plan using the following system.

PBI’s in Zone (A) you’re almost guaranteed to get.

PBI’s in Zone (B) you’re very likely to get.

PBI’s in Zone (C) you’ll conceivably get, but it’s not likely.

PBI’s in Zone (D) you’re guaranteed not to get.

Here are eight rules for creating the right conditions for a culture that reflects your creed:

1. Hire the right people

Hire for passion and commitment first, experience second, and credentials third. There is no shortage of impressive CVs out there, but you should try to find people who are interested in the same things you are. You don’t want to be simply a stepping stone on an employee’s journey toward his or her own (very different) passion. Asking the right questions is key: What do you love about your chosen career? What inspires you? What courses in school did you dread? You want to get a sense of what the potential employee believes.

2. Communicate

Once you have the right people, you need to sit down regularly with them and discuss what is going well and what isn’t. It’s critical to take note of your victories, but it’s just as important to analyze your losses. A fertile culture is one that recognizes when things don’t work and adjusts to rectify the problem. As well, people need to feel safe and trusted, to understand that they can speak freely without fear of repercussion.
The art of communication tends to put the stress on talking, but listening is equally important. Great cultures grow around people who listen, not just to each other or to their clients and stakeholders. It’s also important to listen to what’s happening outside your walls. What is the market saying? What is the zeitgeist? What developments, trends, and calamities are going on?

3. Tend to the weeds

A culture of passion capital can be compromised by the wrong people. One of the most destructive corporate weeds is the whiner. Whiners aren’t necessarily public with their complaints. They don’t stand up in meetings and articulate everything they think is wrong with the company. Instead, they move through the organization, speaking privately, sowing doubt, strangling passion. Sometimes this is simply the nature of the beast: they whined at their last job and will whine at the next. Sometimes these people simply aren’t a good fit. Your passion isn’t theirs. Constructive criticism is healthy, but relentless complaining is toxic. Identify these people and replace them.

4. Work hard, play hard

To obtain passion capital requires a work ethic. It’s easy to do what you love. In the global economy we can measure who has a superior work ethic, who is leading in productivity. Not many industries these days thrive on a forty-hour work week. A culture where everyone understands that long hours are sometimes required will work if this sacrifice is recognized and rewarded.

5. Be ambitious

“Make no little plans: they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” These words were uttered by Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect whose vision recreated the city after the great fire of 1871. The result of his ambition is an extraordinary American city that still has the magic to stir men’s blood. Ambition is sometimes seen as a negative these days, but without it we would stagnate. You need a culture that supports big steps and powerful beliefs. You can see these qualities in cities that have transformed themselves. Cities are the most visible examples of successful and failed cultures. Bilbao and Barcelona did so and became the envy of the world and prime tourist destinations. Pittsburgh reinvented itself when the steel industry withered. But Detroit wasn’t able to do the same when the auto industry took a dive.

6. Celebrate differences

When choosing students for a program, most universities consider more than just marks. If you had a dozen straight-A students who were from the same socio-economic background and the same geographical area, you might not get much in the way of interesting debate or interaction. Great cultures are built on a diversity of background, experience, and interests. These differences generate energy, which is critical to any enterprise.

7. Create the space

Years ago, scientists working in laboratories were often in underground bunkers and rarely saw their colleagues; secrecy was prized. Now innovation is prized. In cutting-edge research and academic buildings, architects try to promote as much interaction as possible. They design spaces where people from different disciplines will come together, whether in workspace or in common leisure space. Their reasoning is simple: it is this interaction that helps breed revolutionary ideas. Creative and engineering chat over coffee. HR and marketing bump into one another in the fitness center. Culture is made in the physical space. Look at your space and ask, “Does it promote interaction and connectivity?”

8. Take the long view

If your culture is dependent on this quarter’s earnings or this month’s sales targets, then it is handicapped by short-term thinking. Passion capitalists take the long view. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in five years. The culture needs to look ahead, not just in months but in years and even decades.
The writer Arthur Koestler said that a writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years’ time. Lasting influence is better than a burst of fame. Keep an eye on the long view.

Source: Excerpted from Passion Capital: The World’s Most Valuable Asset © 2012 by Paul Alofs. Published by Signal, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Imagine you and a friend standing on each side of this object arguing of what it says.

Who’s right?

On the surface, there isn’t much difference between an average task board and a kanban board. Each of these boards has various columns that represent the stages that a card needs to go through before it is considered done. The real difference in a kanban board, is not the board itself. The board is just a visual indicator, the same as any task board, and the intention is still to get the cards to the “DONE”-state – that is, delivered to the customer so that they can use the features from that card.

Kanban is not an inventory control system. Rather, it is a scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.

So, what is the purpose of Kanban? In short it tries to:

1. Visualize the workflow
   Split the work into pieces, write each item on a card and put on the wall.
   Use named columns to illustrate where each item is in the workflow.
2. Limit WIP (Work In Progress) – assign explicit limits to how many items may be in progress at each workflow state.
3. Measure the lead time (average time to complete one item, sometimes referred to as “cycle time”), optimize the process to make lead time as small and predictable as possible.
4. Create flow focus on the throughput based upon the queuing theory.
5. Identify and eliminate bottlenecks - Bottlenecks become clearly visible in real-time. This leads people to collaborate to optimize the whole value chain rather than just their part.
6. Pull system features/tasks are pulled through the system instead of being pushed.

A Simple Kanban

Consider the following three columns in a simple pipeline for software development: Analysis, Development and Testing. When a customer requests a given feature for a software product, they want to pull that feature out of testing so that they can start using it.

Once that feature has been moved out of Testing and the customer is ready to pull the next feature out, there isn’t anything to pull. At this point, the Testing people would then try to pull the next feature out of Development.

And the same pull happens from Analysis to Development.

In the end, we have created a pipeline for how our development process works. The work that is done flows through that pipeline based on how often the customer wants to pull features out. As one feature exits the pipeline, another feature can be added into the pipeline.

The key to all of this is, again, pulling the features through the system.

A more complete Kanban

To create a more complete kanban board, we need more than just a three step pipeline. We need to allow for a fully functional team – developers, analysts, testers, technical writers, and others. We also need to allow the different team members to work on different parts of the system, as work is needed. The end goal is to enable the system to flow through the process and to ensure the work is “DONE” before it goes to the customers.

For a more complete and common software development process, let’s use the following columns: Backlog, Next, Analysis, Development, Acceptance, and Prod. We can put together a Kanban board that follows these steps.

Some comments to what is meant with the different columns:

• Next is the things that the product owner wants done next.
• Analysis is about figuring out the acceptance criteria, identify the first tasks, and if the feature is too big divide/break it down to smaller features.
• Development is simply the development of the features.
• Acceptance is when we think that we are done, and here we need to ask stakeholders to verify that the feature is acceptable.
• Prod is when the feature is done and it is in production. Nothing is left to do.

Once we start working with the Kanban board and start pulling features through the system (see above) we will soon realize that we are probably starting off too much work and that we don’t have a good way of even out the workload. Hence, in order to create a flow, we need to have a way to limit the workload. This is done by limiting the amount of items/features in process within each area (column). This is illustrated with a limit number (see the picture below).

Futhermore, in order to be more clear in our communication to the next step in the flow we can divide our areas of Analysis, Development and Acceptance into; Ongoing and Done. When an item/feature is started it’s assign to the “ongoing” state, as when it’s done and ready to go on to the next step in the process it’s assigned as “Done”. This signals to the next step that once they have an empty slot, the item/feature can be pulled.

Now, we could enrich and enhance this Kanban board even more. As you can see in the picture below we can divide and/or break down our items/features into tasks. These tasks can have indicators when they are done or blocked, and even have an indicator on who (which person) is working on this right now. All of this in order to increase the visualization, create a flow, to identify and eliminate bottlenecks etc.

And some comments on the differences between feature and task:

• Features are deliverables. They flow across the board from left to right, and their workflow state is indicated by which column they are in. The WIP (work in progress) limit in each column applies to features, – and not tasks.
• Tasks are part of a feature, the things that needs to be done to implement that feature. They don’t flow across the Kanban board, instead their state is indicated by colored markers. When a feature reaches development-done then all its tasks are thrown away. If defects are found in acceptance test then defect notes are added under acceptanceàongoing.

A more detailed and simple illustration on how a Kanban item/feature can look like is shown in the picture below. This simple example can of course be even more enhanced with even further information, indicators, and flags. However, it’s very important to focus on your own (real) business needs and without making it too complicated and complex. Keep it simple!

Inspiried by: Henrik Kniberg (http://blog.crisp.se/henrikkniberg)

In summary:

As stated previously; The Kanban board isn’t much different from an average task board. The board is just a visual indicator. The real difference in a Kanban board is the underlying understanding and principles of:

• Being a Pull System
• Visualizing the workflow
• Limiting WIP
• Creating Flow
• Continuously identifying and eliminating bottlenecks
• Measuring lead time

Furthermore, one of the basic ideas of Kanban is a way to continuously aim to improve the flow. So there is actually never a state of being “done” with ones Kanban board. There are always things that need improvement, elimination of bottlenecks, tweaks and fine tunings etc.