For the final blog review of the 2011 Management Improvement Blog Carnival I have chosen to review NOOP.NL, a blog about Agile software development and management by Dutch author (among other things) Jurgen Appelo. Being a software developer myself, this blog caught my eye. For those unfamiliar with Agile development, it is a method of software development that focuses on small, short iterations (called Sprints).
The first post that I want to share is actually not about Agile specifically – The Feedback Door is a clever method of getting feedback after a presentation or course. You put sticky notes on or near the door and ask people to stick their feedback directly on the door. Since the attendees need to pass through the door to leave, it’s difficult to ignore! Jorgen combines the feedback door idea with a “Happiness Index” (expanded on in this post) as a simple way to get quantitative feedback as well. It’s called, naturally, the Happiness Door.
Many of the posts in the blog are of a more philosophical bent (such as The Purpose of a Business is NOT Customer Value, and It takes Complexity to Handle Complexity). However, 21 Concrete Practices for Agile Managers stands out as a great collection of practical suggestions for Agile practitioners.
Finally, I liked this short and to the point post about the necessity of measures. It’s true that you can’t improve something without measuring some aspect of it. However as a commenter pointed out, you have to be careful what you measure. If you emphasize the wrong metric as a manager you may be encouraging the wrong behavior. A classic example in software is using lines of code (LOC) as a metric. This rewards sloppy and verbose coding and penalizes concise and elegant solutions to problems.