Mindfulness

Tom Poppendieck emailed me, he is reading Managing the Unexpected by Weick & Sutcliffe. It is a book that focuses Mindfulness. Guess I'll order it.

In our project, the developers are Mindful as they look for "Bad smells" in the code. When things start to feel bad, we look for ways to improve what is going on. Our retrospectives provide opportunities for the team to improve as a whole.

How is the business side of our project Mindful? Currently this seems to be our weakness. But we have seen some positive signs after the arrival of Mary and Tom.

1) They test each month - this confirms development is on track with what the business is saying.
2) With some prompting, we have got all the companies starting to give us real properties.
3) We now have an eight foot long (high visibility) Mindfulness reminder. It is a blown up spreadsheet that one of our users uses to track tests results of before they put a productin accounting upgrade into production. We are using it to track our progress.
4) We are working hard to get our customers to look at an early deployment. It looks like one of them might agree. If we get one...