Thinking Inside the Box – Root Cause Analysis with The Six Boxes
Do you want to improve business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team? OK, who doesn’t? Poor productivity problems, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are unfortunately still commonplace. And what is at the root of most problems? James Waletzky says the answer is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. So how do we go about fixing the problems? First, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not always obvious. In this hands-on tutorial, James focuses on a methodology called Human Performance Improvement (HPI)—with a framework called the Six Boxes—to find root causes of human performance issues. And then we need to think outside the proverbial box to identify solutions. Join James to examine multiple case studies from agile software development to determine the real underlying problems with these teams and explore creative ways to solve them. Then we tackle your specific issues. Leave with a very simple tool to help identify and fix some of your team's issues, and get a head start on one of your team's challenges.
James Waletzky is a partner at Crosslake Technologies, where he performs technical due diligence on software companies, optimizes software engineering systems, and enables development team improvements in time-to-market, productivity, and overall quality. He has more than twenty years of experience in the software industry, including eleven years working on or with agile teams. Previously, James held development leadership roles at Microsoft, including Xbox where he helped ship Kinect, Windows Phone, Content Management Server, and Engineering Excellence. In his spare time, James hikes with his family, writes, develops games, and plays a multitude of sports. He recently contributed to the book Agile Project Management with Kanban.