Last month I was conducting a series of Boardwalks with a large company in Australia. The people in the company had an amazing array of kanban and other visual controls guiding their software development. Most important to me, they had achieved a culture not of continuous improvement, but of deep curiosity and introspection. They were looking for any way to get their organization to communicate better internally and work more effectively. They were paying attention.

It was beautiful.

What stuck out in particular was one group of skilled coders and managers.  I’d be happy to have any of them on one of my teams. They had a board that showed all their sprints, the story points for each sprint, and the user stories completed.

It looked like this.

Sprint board. Story points hide actual completion.

Them: We have a problem, and we can’t figure out how to solve it.

Me: What is your problem?

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