Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’m done with airline miles and points. I want money back from my credit card. In 2008 I switched to mainly using the American Express Blue Cash card which has really good returns for no annual fee. We average just around 1.7% back every year on our purchases with that card. But since not everyone takes American Express, we also carry a Visa. In 2004 I signed up for a card which gave me points for Sony products. Since then I’ve gotten two digital cameras, a camcorder, noise canceling headphones, and two under-cabinet radios. We’re still accruing points but I’ve come to realize that I don’t really want anything that Sony makes anymore. Or at least I don’t want to be forced to chose from only their products. So it’s time to switch!

We ended up choose the Amazon Visa card. We get 3% back on Amazon purchases and credits for all other purchases as well. The rewards come in the form of Amazon points which, for as much as we shop there, is effectively like cash. There’s no minimum required number of points to redeem them.

Part of me thinks it’s fun to get these rewards, but a bigger part of me wishes that credit card companies would just charge lower transaction fees and we could skip all these silly rewards. Just charge me less for the original product and I’ll be happy.

About a year or so ago, the pastor of our church (Pastor Weiser), announced that he would be going into semi-retirement this summer. Instead of just retiring like most people his age, he’s taking a half-time job as our missionary in Nigeria. He’ll spend quite a few months out of each year over there helping to train new Nigerian pastors. It’s always been one of his passions and he’s spent a lot of time there over the decades. I’m excited for him, but that leaves us without a Pastor.

I’ve heard a few comments/questions that can generally be summarized to “What happens if you don’t agree with what your new Pastor teaches?” I’m very thankful and happy to say that there is almost no chance that this will happen and I’ll explain why in this post.

Our local church, Calvary Lutheran Church, is part of a bigger group called the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod or WELS for short. The WELS is the central body that oversees all the churches to make sure we all teach exactly the same thing. While the types of church buildings and the styles of the church services might change from one WELS church to another, I can walk into any one of them and know that they are teaching exactly what the Bible says.

So when our Pastor left, we went put out a “call” for a new pastor. I won’t dive into the details of what a call is and why we do it because the WELS website already has a good description of that. I’ll just briefly say that the process is based on the Bible’s teachings and it’s not like a normal job interview. We ended up getting a Pastor who was just graduating from the WELS seminary. This will be his very first congregation.

Getting back to the original question, even though he’s never led a congregation before, I’m confident that he’ll stay true to God’s Word. His schooling included four years at our teacher/pastor training school (Martin Luther College) and then an additional four years at our seminary (Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary.) He’s well-versed in all of the Bible’s theology and he knows the original languages that it was written in (Greek and Hebrew) so that he can always go back to the most original manuscripts when needed.

But hey, everyone is human and we all sin. All of this training and process doesn’t mean that every single pastor is always right on target. Thankfully there are lots of checks and balances in place. First of all, every single person in the church should be actively listening and testing the words that the Pastor preaches. The book of 1 John teaches us to “test the spirits.” We should be comparing everything the Pastor teaches to what the Bible teaches. If they don’t align, we should investigate and question until the issue is resolved. In the worst case, this could be escalated all the way to the synod body which could take action to remove a Pastor from the synod entirely.

This is quite a bit more rigid and strict than many other church bodies, but that is what has kept our group of churches so rock solid on the teachings of the Bible. I’m very thankful that when I move to a new area or go on vacation, I don’t have to search around for a church. I just pull up the WELS directory, find a convenient location and start attending.

I’ve never worked on a team that really used an agile process. Some claimed they did but they only went so far as to use it as an excuse to not plan. This new team follows a variation on Kanban that is being developed by another manager in our org, Brent. It’s spreading pretty quickly and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a book written about it in the future.

I first heard about Kanban when I was an intern at John Deere in 2001. They used it on their factory flow to reduce the amount of money tied up in logistics. Applying it to software is similar: keep your total work in progress as low as possible. I won’t go into all the details here. If you really want to learn more, you can read Brent’s blog. (One of his most popular posts is how he implemented this with his kids for chores.) He has also started a podcast called AB Testing. But anyway, here are a few keys to how the system works:

• Every piece of work done by the team is represented by a ticket on the board.
• No ticket should take longer than two weeks to finish. All tasks should be trimmed down until they fit into this time window.
• All tasks move through these phases: Backlog > Ready > Analyze > Engineer > Code Review > Release > Customer Validation > Done. Backlog is the list of work that the team could do, Ready is a small number of tickets that the manager says should come next and the rest of the phases are a little more self-explanatory. There are specific criteria for exiting each stage and every ticket goes through every stage.
• Lightweight documentation is created in the Analyze phase to give background on the issue, clearly define scope and agree upon what “Done” looks like.
• Each phase has a limit on the number of tickets that can be in the phase at one time. There’s also an overall limit to how many tickets can be in flight in total for the whole team.
• Morning team standup meetings focus around what you need to do to get your ticket into the next phase and who can help you, NOT a status report of what you’ve been doing.
• When you finish a ticket, you don’t pick up a new one until you go through every other ticket and ask if you can help move the ticket along.
• There are special ways to track high priority issues and requests from outside the system.

it seems a little complicated at first, but once you get into it, it’s liberating! Here are some of the things I love about it:

• Coming on to a new team, this really helps you ramp up. Everyone is encouraged to work with someone else on every ticket. Solo tickets are not the norm. That means you can hop in with someone else and start learning about their area.
• You’re encouraged to pick up tickets from all areas that the team owns, not just your comfort zone. It’s a bit inefficient at first, but after a couple months, you have a team full of people that really can fill in for each other.
• At most, you have two tickets on the board at one time. Imagine only having TWO things to work on! You can focus and pound them out instead of constantly task switching.
• There is ALWAYS help available. The whole system focuses on really working as a team and moving the tickets through the system.
• It’s very clear how much work is getting done and how long it’s taking. Inefficiencies or choke points quickly bubble to the top to be addressed.
• This seems to avoid the slow buildup of responsibilities over time that you get as you stay in a group longer and longer. If you’re doing work, it’s on the board. And if it’s visible, it’s less likely to be stuff that builds up. The team will see it and find reduce the cost of those taxes.

This system has made it very enjoyable to ramp up with the new team, see the contributions I’m making, and focus on one or two very specific and well-defined tasks.