When I give my talk “Thank God it’s Open Friday!” people always tell me how much they liked hearing about our failures on the way to a solution that works well for us.
It’s surprising to me, because our previous trials with a slack day are only loosely related to the very successful end result. It’s the part of the talk for which I always doubt whether it’s interesting to anyone. That part only exists, because I created the talk for Agile 2015 in the “Experience Report” track. If I had created a “normal” talk I would have only presented our shiny solution. Much like other people tend to present their shiny solution and rarely the way they took to get there.
That’s how we end up showing each other our pretty sides, once we have figured it all out and we hide the hard work and multiple failures it took to get there.
That can be quite intimidating for people who just start working in a better / different way. Like everyone else just flipped a switch and they are the only one’s struggling.
Well, you’re not. sipgate is a fantastic place to work. It has been for about 2 or 3 years. But we started down the agile road in 2010. Now 2016 is nearly upon us. That leaves 3 years that were less than stellar. Some times during these 3 years downright sucked. And I want to tell you of the suckage and the working solutions that we surfaced with. Heck, I might even tell you of the things we still haven’t figured out. It’s not like we don’t have problems anymore…
So, “Long Way to Lean” is gonna be a series here in the blog. It’s loosely based on my talk of the same name.
If you’re interested in specific aspects, let me know in the comments 🙂