Re: Development

Building a Scrum Wall in 8 Story Cards

2011-12-19T02:36:33Z

(click image to enlarge)

A recent meetup for Agile Ottawa focused on short presentations in the form of lightning talks. We had a number of excellent talks including: five reasons to do agile projects, lining up your units to help you be successful, applying code refactoring to improve your life, the importance of craftsmanship, and how different testing looks in the hardware and software worlds. I am a big proponent of big visible walls, so my lightning talk was a demonstration of how to build your wallboard using a roll of painter's tape, a few stickies, and eight story cards.]]> Using the stories listed below, I built a simplified version of the wallboard depicted in the picture above. Each story introduced a new element to the wall, beginning with a single card and incrementally adding areas and cards to fill out the board. Judging the ensuing discussion, I think the concept and concreteness resonated very well with those in attendance.

Sprint Backlog: To see what we are working on, as a dev team member, I want a wallboard that shows our current user stories. [D, white cards at left]

Story Progress: To understand how close we are to finishing a story, as a dev team member, I want to indicate tasks that are pending, are started, and are complete. [D, yellow stickies]

Work in Progress: So that I can quickly see what stories are in progress, as a dev team member, I want a place on our wallboard to park all the planned stories for this iteration that we haven't started yet. [C]

Bullpen: Because we estimate well and sometimes get lucky in a sprint, as the product owner, I want to indicate what stories can be pulled into the current iteration if time allows. [C, below the green line]

Burndown / Burnup: In order to see our progress on this project, as the product owner, I would like to see a dashboard that shows how we are tracking against expected completion. [E]

Release Backlog: Because I have a reasonable understanding of the scope of our project, as the product owner, I want to make these stories visible to the entire team. [A]

Backlog Grooming: To give some heads up to the content of the next few sprints, as a dev team member, I want my product owner to organize her priorities on our wallboard. [B]

Continuous Improvement: To help us make progress on our identified retrospective items, as a dev team member, I want a region on our wallboard to track our progress on these improvements. [F]

See my original article on Our Big Information Radiator for a discussion on how we evolved the wall to match the picture.

Mea Culpa: Why I Moved On

2011-12-12T18:28:58Z

Image via glowingembers.org

My time at Embotics has sadly come to an end. It was a decision that I wrestled with for a number of months before I could finally arrive at a decision that I was comfortable with. It was a classic example of a wicked problem: no experiments that can be run to help make the decision, no way to know afterwards that the decision is correct, no way to go back for a do-over.]]> What made it really difficult was that I was leaving behind a lot of good friends and a lot of shared pain, learning, and growth. We grew from a group of talented but unproven developers and testers through a journey of retrospection and experimentation. Through a series of agile-inspired changes, we became a high-performance team that could reliably adapt and deliver customer-driven features. This was an opportunity that is surprisingly rare in our industry.

Things that I miss

Working with a team that worked very well as a true team. I'm sure I will quickly find this again in my new position, but there was a great reassurance to know that you could always count on your peers to do what they say they are gong to do and deliver day in, day out.
The dependability of having a solid codebase to build upon. Part of the excitement of a new startup is the ability to create something new, but a parodds me misses the familiarity of working in something that I put 4+ years of effort into.
The personalities of my co-workers. In such a small team, we had an amazing diversity of interests and opinions: a competitive canoeist, a constant traveller with the van to match, tonnes of gardening knowledge, fellow craft beer enthusiasts, a diversity of languages
Feeling guilty for not riding my bike to work. I prided myself in sticking to the daily commute, but when you have one person who booked 8300+ km one year and another who endured dozens of flats and February blizzards, my excuses don't seem to carry much weight.

Things that I learned

The power of an agile mindset. By framing problems and choices as opportunities to learn and grow, you immediately open up a wider range of possibilities than if you just try to find the right answer.
The best way to lead is by jumping in and taking responsibility. Examples provide a means of showing people which direction to go while still making it their choice to follow. More choice == more buy-in == better results.
Fostering openness is a strong tool for continuous improvement. Once you have a safe environment to discuss problems, then you have the ability to address them constructively.
The best way to learn is by doing and by thinking about how to recover from mistakes that are and will be making. Provide as many safety nets as possible so that people aren't exposed when they are truly giving their best efforts to do their job.
Many, many problems that occur in an organization are system problems and their solutions lie in addressing an underlying issue in that system. This is especially true when you create an environment of heightened responsibility, where simple people problems do not occur.

Things that I discovered about myself

I've always thought the reason I change jobs is because I got bored. I think the real reason is that I am looking for opportunities to learn.
I'm still way too quiet. I'd say more about this, but...
I have a relaxed demeanour that is helpful in calming and directing the team. However, I need to balance this with its anchoring effect and how this affects the team's energy levels.
I have key elements that are useful for leadership and management but there are some things I need to work on a lot: confidence in my abilities, allowing myself the room to make mistakes, delegating and trusting those around me to do better than I would

Things that I would have changed

Spend more time with new hires: there are many reasons to do this but the main ones are to A) ensure that people are fully engaged and contributing, and B) increase the team's capacity so I can move on to different problems
Make the dull work more visible: I had a bad habit of shielding the team from a lot of the dull work. While this was a good strategy to keep the team moving forward, it did not provide a lot of personal satisfaction. Looking back, I'm sure the team would have been happy to share the burden of this monkey work.
Raise my yellow flag: I was pretty good at identifying potential issues that needed the attention of senior management except when it can to one person: me.
Be a little more selfish: often putting the team first is the correct plan to build a high performance unit, but there are times that you need to look out for what is best for your own career. These things do not need to be in conflict so I should have look for more opportunities
Spend more time managing: Life is always busy in startups but the thing that should not have slipped is taking care of the people on the team - understanding their motivations, finding out what is bothering them, helping them get to where they want to be
Make time for the little moments: once my career is over, I expect there will have been a lot more little moments than big ones so I should make sure to enjoy the little ones as they are occurring - that game of foosball, spending a could of extra minutes at the end of lunc, getting caught up with people after the weekend and holidays.

So why would I choose to leave this situation? That really was the crux of my decision process. A lot of it comes down to needing to move on to learn something new. My work environment wasn't providing it and it was difficult to find time outside of work hours as I have two little people that I want to spend time with. I'm sure I won't truly understand my decision and whether it was a good one until months down the road.

Book: Enchantment

2011-11-03T16:02:12Z

Enchantment: Art of Getting People to Do What You Want
by Guy Kawasaki

Summary: A number of ideas and techniques to create enchanting products and relationships for the benefit of all involved

Intended Audience: Those in positions of influence who are looking for ways to build deeper relationships
]]> Why You Should Read It: With the availability of low-cost and easy-to-use cloud services for everything from email and source code repositories to customer management and order fulfillment, it becomes increasingly important to differentiate your company and solutions from the numerous others that are emerging. One way to do this is to increase enchantment around your product. This book discusses foundations, techniques, and experiments to achieve this.

My Takeaways

Enchantment is easier to achieve by pulling people along instead of pushing them into it. Show your passion and lead others to share your excitement instead of looking for ways to force others to see your view.
Giving the gift of time or a favour is a simple, effective, and low-cost technique to jumpstart a potential long-term relationship. Even if it doesn't get the results you desire, it is good for your psyche and establishes the right mindset.
People resist enchantment for a variety of valid reasons. There are powerful and ethical techniques to bring views into alignment, including finding brightspots you can agree upon and demonstrating ways that you need the help of others to reach shared goals.

Recommended?: Somewhat enchanting; an interesting but not required read

Book: The Lean Startup

2011-10-15T22:08:31Z

The Lean Startup
by Eric Ries

Summary: A significant contribution of ideas about how to improve capital efficiency in startups and more deeply engage employees and customers to create tighter learning and feedback loops.

Intended Audience: Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs-at-heart. And anyone interested in helping their organization learn faster. And probably you.
]]> Why You Should Read It: This is one of the two books I wished I had when I began with startups years ago (Do More Faster is the other). Eric Ries applies lean manufacturing concepts to startup organizations to demonstrate how many costly and fatal mistakes can be avoided by applying learning models as early as possible.

Critically, you must establish tight feedback loops to test your assumptions and validate learning though Build-Measure-Learn cycles. Once you hypothesize what you need to learn, you must figure out how to measure if you have learned it, and only then can you build the minimum viable product (MVP) that will allow you to measure this. In this initial state of uncertainty during innovation, this is a highly effective way to determine at a minimal cost if you are moving to the right solution to the right problem for actual customers.

The book presents key metrics to determine if you are making progress and points out many measurement errors ("vanity metrics") that companies make that can obscure their real progress and possibly mislead them about their true state. Later chapters describe what to do when your validated learning takes you to dead ends ("pivot", which has now entered the mainstream) and how to scale the organization once you are pointed in the right direction. If you are in an area of innovation, ignore this book at your own risk.

My Takeaways

Startups need to minimize the time it takes to execute the Build-Measure-Learn loop. Reducing this time is a very efficient way to preserve the capital that you need to discover what problem your company is solving and for whom.
The traditional definition of startup runway ("number of months remaining at the current capital burn rate") only tells part of the picture. An alternate and possibly more meaningful interpretation is the number of times you can pivot before running out of money.
Two of the greatest risks to a startup are unvalidated value propositions ("can we get someone to pay for this?") and unvalidated growth propositions ("can we scale this?"). Especially in early stages, significant effort must be placed in generating validated learning about these assumptions.

Recommended?: Absolutely. A very important book to reframe what it means to be a startup.

Book: Blink

2011-09-13T16:58:33Z

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell

Summary: An anecdotal and scientific investigation into whether initial impressions are helpful or hindering. Packed with examples, it includes tips on when to recognize which situation is which.

Intended Audience: Anyone who has every had a gut feeling that they should read this book
]]> Why You Should Read It: This book dives deeply yet accessibly into the nature of gut feelings and demonstrates that these initial feelings are highly accurate in a large number of situations (but not all!). If the impact of your decisions is small or the risk is acceptable, you can save a lot of time and effort by relying on these thin-slicing impressions. However, if the consequences of being wrong are quite high, then initial reactions should form only one tool of many in your decision process. There are some riveting examples of blink impressions in action, of which the most compelling for me was Paul van Riper's contributions to the Millenium Challenge war game exercise.

My Takeaways

The key to successful improv comedy is to always build positively on what is given to you. Negativity shuts doors; positively opens new avenues. There is a team lesson in there.
The numerous facial muscles autonomically reveal our true inner emotions. I think my autonomic response is stronger than average since I can't keep a straight face.
To help understand whether your first impressions are correct, you may need to slow yourself down and avoid situations where you cannot help by automatically act.

Recommended?: Possibly his best book, and I really liked The Tipping Point

Agile 2011: The Rest of My Notes

2011-08-31T15:16:16Z

Image via Wikipedia

I think I was pretty lucky with my choices for sessions this year at Agile 2011 as I was able to take a number of things of interest from almost every one of them. I've summarized talks by Christopher Avery and Stephen Denning in other notes, as well as some additional books for my reading list. This posting includes the remainder of my notes from the conference.
]]>
Keynotes

Why Care About Positive Emotions?

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, University of North Carolina
Description

author of Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life
see YouTube video where she describes aspects of Positivity
talk focused on importance and impact of positive emotions, including:
- increased focus on community
- the ability to see more possiblities and solve harder problems
- physiological effects such as building of new neural pathways
also see Positivity Ratio

Code

co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing, On Patterns and Pattern Languages
editor and contributor to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know; see also 97 Things website
described multiple levels for interpreting code
- systems of words; instructions for a computer
- system of rules and principles; a set of conventions
- a collection of writings
- a expression, representation, and collection of knowledge
lots of great anecdotes about how code and software affects our society, from day-to-day functioning through broader themes such as craftsmanship and manifestos

The Power of an Agile Mindset

co-author of Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas
talk drew heavily from work of Carol Dweck, particularly Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
- Fixed Mindset: people who believe that intelligence and talent are fixed qualities
- Growth or Agile Mindset: people who believe abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work
the most significant takeaway from this talk is the pattern in society that reinforces fixed mindsets in young girls and encourages growth mindsets in young boys (greatly simplified below)
- girls are often praised at a young age for doing good work and for being smart, reinforcing the concept fo intelligence as a fixed attribute
- boys are often more exploratory and unfocused, thereby getting more attention and explanation to help them discover solutions
- instead of praising results, we should explore the paths that arrive at the results and focus on aspects of that journey
the original Malcolm Gladwell article, which is still the most-read article on his site
misc notes:
- this woman is perhaps more attuned to her own mortality than anyone I've ever met
- book: Self-theories

Sessions

Fluency over Proficiency: Accelerating Agile Learning and 'Hunting Fluency'

interesting session about accelerated learning techniques that are used to help preserve dying languages
instead of attempting to understand languages, Willem attempts to gain fluency via games using American Sign Language as an intermediate form
- seeking fluency is faster for spreading the language
- seeking fluency preserves the essence and culture of language; e.g. Irish does not have words for Yes and No so translation would lose this
- fluency allows a group to possess more knowledge collectively very quickly
interesting takeaways
- fluency can be the initial goal when bringing someone into the team; deeper understanding can follow with time
- capability for a large number of things can be broken into 4 levels: novice, intermediate, expert, superior
  - it is only possible to extend yourself one level above your current level; e.g. you cannot answer an expert-level question that is posed by a novice
  - you need to have people at all levels in order to pull people through to higher levels
misc. notes
- define: nested compentency
- define: fluent fool
- lookup: risk-adjusted burndown
- lookup: learning out of order
- read: Proficiencies of Planning blog post by James Shore and Diane Larsen
- when presenting a session again, always have an experiment to try; you already know how to do what you did yesterday
- an excellent blog post about being language hunted at Agile 2011

Applying the Lean Startup Model to the Enterprise

discussed ways to apply lean startup concepts of minimal viable product and rapid learning to the enterprise
lots of overlap with dev-ops movement where agility is extended from engineering into operations so that solutions are deployed and operated more smoothly
- do less
- build quality in
- deliver continuously
- measure value delivered
misc. notes
- book: Release It!
- book: The Principles of Product Development Flow
- book: The Lean Startup

Design Thinking

definitely related to lean startup movement and emphasis learning loops
- once you've implemented a solution, you may need to redesign to handle information you discovered when building
- once you've implemented a solution, you may find that you didn't understand the original problem and need to go back to the customer to learn
discussed three approaches to design, any one of which may be valid in your situation
- military: 'collaboration and dialog incorporating critical thinking and creative thinking to make sense of complexity'
- data-based: discovering what customers want by asking questions and examing data
- ethnography: go to the source and understand how the product will be used: IDEO, OXO
lots of examples of design thinking in organizations, with discussion on ideal team size (150 people per factory at Gore, two pizzas at Amazon)
misc. notes
- book: The Design of Design
- concept: Wicked Problems
- book: What Customers Want
- website: Hipmunk (cool travel planning site)
- book: Specification by Example

Continuous Delivery

discussed concepts on continous delivery and benefits that it provides
- shorter time to feedback
- value delivered faster to customer
- reduced risk of release
- releases tied to business needs, not technical needs
misc. notes
- flickr publishes statistics on their continuous deployment; see bottom of page
- tools for automated deployment: Puppet Chef Puppet v Chef
- use feature toggles to selectively enable and disable features in deployments (similar to our permission model)
- stories include work to monitor whether they are being used
- Facebook Release Management video

Lightning Talks

Leading the Agile Release Train Description Slides
- techniques for co-ordinating large numbers of agile teams
How to Save Your Industry $1.9B Using Agile Methods Description
- applying agile methods to quickly mount a political activism website to block passage of a healthcare bill in Australia
Agile Management: Creating a Culture to Help Your Team Succeed Description Blog
- excellent lightning talk about core cultural principles that she uses to build a happy and productive team
Get to CMMI ML3 Using Agile Development Processes for Large Projects Description Slides
The PO Role - Can You Hear Me Now? Description Slides
- testimonials about how product owners are able to better do their jobs and help build the right products
Making the Most of Testing in a Quality Focused Agile Team Description Slides
- discussed QA at Atlassian where developments build many automated tests; key takeaway: QA = Quality Assistance
5 Key Numbers to Gauge Your Agile Engineering Efforts Slides
1. how long until you see feedback from a test after writing or changing a line of code?
2. how many one-line changes can you commit and push to test in an hour?
3. how many people on your team can explain the details of any particular section of code?
4. what percentage of your team members did you pair with in the last two days?
5. how many manual steps does it take to get a build into production?

Lean Startup: How Development Looks Different When You're Changing the World

very well attended talk on lean startups and how they are agile development at lightspeed
- purpose is to learn as fast as possible in order to arrive at a viable business model and product
- scaling only occurs after ideas have been validated
- something has only been delivered if its value has been verified with the customer
learn -> build -> measure: repeat as fast as possible
customer discovery - > customer validation -> customer creation -> scale company
- cycle at every step along the way to learn
the unit of progress for entrepreneurs is learning
quote of the day on initiating change: "show lean startup ideas to your enterprise and it will frighten them into accepting agile development as a compromise"
misc. notes
- company: Pivotal Labs
- book: Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development (read first)
- book: The Four Steps to Epiphany
- Google Group: Lean Startup Circle
- videos: Evangelizing for the Lean Startup (Eric Ries)

Beyond Planning Poker - The Planning Poker Party

one big takeaway is Affinity Grouping, which is a technique to quickly places stories into groups of similar size and then estimate what each group represents (e.g. all stories in this group are 5 points)

Telling Better Stories Using User Story Mapping

extremely well attended workshop on using story maps to show how stories in a release relate to each other, to determine dependencies, and to determine if everything flows correctly
the excellent blog article explains the core concepts
I was unable to participate fully in this one as I arrived late from an excellent lunch at Pakistani restaurant across the road from the Grand America

Agile 2011: My Reading List

2011-08-27T15:10:04Z

Source unknown

One of the things that I love about attending Agile 2011 is the rapid-fire exposure to new ideas. In particular, I usually get enough book ideas to fill up my reading list for a good part of the next year. This year, I am certain I will not get to all of these.

Here are the books that I made note of this year. ]]>
From The Keynotes

	Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, University of North Carolina Discusses the impacts that genuinely positive attitudes can have on you and those around you
	97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts Kevlin Henney Very entertaining keynote. Recommended by a colleague.
	Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas Linda Rising, Mary Lynn Manns Patterns for driving change in organizations
	Mindset: The New Psychology of Success Carol Dweck, Stanford University How your mindset can limit or expand your possibilities. Lots of lessons for me as I raise my kids.
	Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development Carol Dweck, Stanford University How people see themselves and how this influences and motivates behaviour

From The Sessions

	Teamwork Is an Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility Christopher Avery Should be a good followup to his excellent session. Building a better team starts with oneself.
	Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation Jez Humble, Thoughtworks I don't get much exposure to this because of the nature of our product but I am positive that there are a lot of ideas here that I can still apply
	Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software Michael Nygard Discussion and pointers on releasing software and real world problems that you will encounter. Recommended from a number of sources now.
	The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development Don Reinertsen Recommended by numerous people as a seminal work. I already have Managing the Design Factory in the queue.
	The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Eric Ries Lots of hype around Lean Startup and this book, especially from people who know the area. This is on the top of my pile once it arrives.
	The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative Stephen Denning Loved The Leader's Guide to Radical Management and I expect this one to be just as good
	Lean Thinking: Second Edition, Revised and Updated James P Womack, Lean Enterprise Institute This is referenced a lot, especially in the Poppendieck's work
	The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production James P Womack, Lean Enterprise Institute I should have read this one a long time ago
	Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business Ranjay Gulati, Harvard Business School Studies of companies that are able to respond to changing markets and customer needs
	The Power Of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison Discusses the concept of pulling information through an organization to improve its ability to learn and react
	The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business Umair Haque Looks like an interesting explanation of why old companies are failing and the transformation to new-economy companies
	The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Revised and Expanded Edition): How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World Fred Reichheld The concept is so simple that I should read more about the Net Promoter score and see where it can apply in my work
	Enchantment: Art of Getting People to Do What You Want Guy Kawasaki Influence and persuasion to align others goals with your own. I like the idea of win-win situations that are not manipulative.
	Juice: The Power of Conversation -- The Secret to Releasing Your People's Brilliance and Expanding Your Leadership Influence Brady G. Wilson Recommended both by Stephen Denning in his session and a basis for the session by my friends Declan Whelan and Bryan Beecham.
	The Responsibility Virus: How Control Freaks, Shrinking Violets-And the Rest Of Us-Can Harness the Power Of True Partnership Roger Martin, Rotman School of Business Mentioned by both Christopher Avery and Stephen Denning
	The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist Frederick P. Brooks, University of North Carolina One of the first books mentioned in Mary Poppendieck's talk on Systems Thinking.
	What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services Anthony Ulwick Studies of numerous companies and products to help unlock ways to determine why customers are really looking for
	Specification by Example: How Successful Teams Deliver the Right Software Gojko Adzic I really enjoyed Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing and have been meaning to read this one too
	The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development Brant Cooper Highly recommended in the Lean Startup world and apparently a necessary precursor to reading the next book in the list
	The Four Steps to the Epiphany Steve Blank A seminal work in customer development and building a startup
	Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose Tony Hsieh How corporate culture lead to success at Zappos.com

From Conversations

	The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable Patrick M. Lencioni This series has been recommended by both people at the conference and at work
	Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box Arbinger Institute Leadership is who we are and not what we do. Promises to make me feel a little uncomfortable as it points out the ways that I have justified positions in the past.
	Running Lean Ash Maurya Another highly recommended, boots-to-the-ground book from the Lean Startup community
	Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford University Evidence-based discussion about common management practices and where they fall down

Agile 2011: Stephen Denning on Creating Customer Delight

2011-08-25T15:15:40Z

Image via stevedenning.com

Two sessions that I was really looking forward to at Agile 2011 were Making the Entire Organization Agile and Creating Customer Delight by Stephen Denning. My first exposure to his work was through his 2010 book The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century. In it, he discusses how some companies are changing their structure and purpose to follow agile and Scrum principles in order to create customer delight and success. Coming from an agile environment, this made a lot of sense to me and it was very interesting to see how this scaled outside of engineering and into the entire enterprise.
]]>

the business exists to make money for the shareholders
workers are controlled by managers
the business is run through bureaucracies of rules, plans, and reports
efficiencies are driven though seeking to cut costs
the business is run top-down through command and control structures

These structures are becoming less suited in modern business for many reasons, including:

the increase in highly skilled knowledge workers that have different motivations than making money and climbing the corporate ladder
the availability of information to allow individuals to make informed decisions about what products and services they want to buy
the ability of individuals to share opinions and experiences and significantly influence the decisions of others

Organizations need to respond to these changes with a new management approach of five modern practices and principles:

the primary goal of the business is delighting the customers
workers are self-organizing with support from management
organizations are dynamically linked to respond to market situations instead of following plans
the business moves from the value of the company to the values of the company
progress occurs through conversation and collaboration amongst workers and between the company and its customers

The second session was a very lively and informative workshop on angles to consider when trying to delight your customers. It is fun brainstorming exercise to run through with the product or services that your company currently delivers. Some of the steps to think about include:

committing the organization: in order for the organization to delight the customer, there must be commitment and vision from all levels of the organization
targeting your core market: you must understand who your core target market is; these are the first customers that you must delight
focusing on the primary feature: there are typically a small number of problems (or even one) that your customer is trying to solve. make sure you solve this problem
reading your customer's mind: you must understand what your customer is looking for, possibly even before they understand it themselves
innovating in stages: selectively add new features to the product once you have addressed core needs first
exploring new features: before adding new features, explore them deeply to ensure they are consistent with what you have already built and will solve your customer's problems
customization: provide ways for customers to customize your product to make their experience more personal and deeper
partnering with customers: work closely with your customers and welcome their feedback very early so that it can meaningfully influence your product
empowering the organization: ensure that everyone in the organization has the tools and responsibility to resolve customer issues
measuring: determine and measure the metrics that allow you to know you are delighting the customer. See The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld

Stephen Denning's Original Blog and Current Blog
The Death--and Reinvention--of Management: Part 1
The Reinvention of Management: Part 2: How do you delight the client?
workshop exercise on Creating Customer Delight (PDF)

Stephen Denning's Creating Customer Delight on Prezi

Agile 2011: Christopher Avery on The Responsibility Process

2011-08-24T01:35:22Z

Image via christopheravery.com

I think the most rewarding session I went to at Agile 2011 was Coaching Success: Getting People to Take Responsibility & Demonstrate Ownership by Christopher Avery. There were a number of reasons to attend this session, including a recommendation from a friend based on a session at Agile 2009 and the applicability of the topic as our team becomes more focused on assisting our growing customer base. I didn't enter with a notion of what to expect or exaction what I wanted and this likely put me in the right frame of mind for his introduction to The Responsibility Process.

]]> The responsibility process consists of a number of levels of progressive awareness:

blame: looking outward and pointing at others as the source of your problems: they didn't deliver their part of the project in time for me to complete my work
justification: finding reasons in your environment for why things are the way they are: my computer wasn't working well and it slowed me down
shame: an inward laying of blame or guilt for the situation: why can't I work harder and get this done?
obligation: the sense that you have no choice but to get something done: I have to get this done because people are expecting it
responsibility: the target state of owning up to the situation and actively engaging from a positive position of power: I will complete the project because it gives me the opportunity to master this skill and opens doors to new ideas

There are two associated states that you also need to be aware of:

denial: you do not believe that a problem exists or choose to ignore its existence. this is an avoidance mechanism that only serves to delay
quit: an means to avoid the pain of coping with the other states. this is a passive attempt to resolve the issue but still leaves the underlying problem unresolved and likely to repeat.

Once you have gained awareness of this mental model of responsibility, there are three keys to engaging to successfully reach an empowered state of responsibility:

intention: you must enter a mindset where you are willing to act from a position of responsibility
awareness: you must recognize the problem you are addressing and your mental state relative to the problem
confrontation: you must look inward to discover the facts of the problem so you can confront it and yourself to find ideas and solutions

My takeaways:

this is very much a thought process that comes from within; you can introduce people to the concepts and coach them, but the ultimate decision on how far to go lies with the individual
the most effective way to foster responsibility and ownership is to demonstrate it yourself; actions really do speak louder than words
I now have a better understanding and framework from which to understand situations

our local agile community: responsibility
cooking for the kids: obligation (something to work on!)
biking with the kids to school: responsibility
my stumbling squash game: justification (lucky bounce!) but moving quickly back to responsibility

Below is a lightning talk that I gave to the Ottawa Scrum Users Group to summarize the key points and point people in the right direction to do their own exploring.

Christopher Avery's Responsibility Process on Prezi

Book: Outliers

2011-08-17T15:26:10Z

Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell

Summary: An investigation into the conditions that lead to successful individuals and why traditional assumptions about intelligence, personality, and effort are only a part of the picture.

Intended Audience: Widely accessible book for those curious about why some are successful and some are not
]]> Why You Should Read It: This book provides ten solid stories to describe how opportunity and legacy can greatly enhance the chance of someone becoming very successful. Traditional views of working hard, networking well, and using your natural intelligence can only get you part way on the path to significant achievements. Other environmental and situational circumstances can play an even large role in separating the merely good from the insanely great, including:

when you are born in the year relative to category cutoffs
the amount of time you have to practice, coupled with an emerging opportunity in your area
cultural advantages that can open significant avenues to explore and develop at a young age
being fortunate enough to discover, be exposed to, participate, and grow meaningful work
your position in and the structure of the social organizations that you interact with
the structure of your language and how it influences or enhances your brain's capabilities

As someone with the responsibility of raising two small kids, it is very interesting to see how some of these lessons can be applied in what I teach and how I lead to provide them with opportunities and circumstances that I wouldn't have normally considered.

My Takeaways

The payoff of hard work and persistence may not be realized in the current generation. Often the rewards only accrue to your children and your children's children, and those rewards can be significant.
Never read a chapter about the cultural causes of plane crashes as the pilot attempts a tricky landing in a brisk crosswind in a small commuter plane.
To become truly elite at something takes upwards of 10,000 hours of practice, so get started early. The very best spend much more time practicing than actually doing, so take time from your workday to find ways to sharpen and expand your skills in a error-tolerant environment.

Recommended?: Solid book with lots of great anecdotes; an enjoyable read

Book: Do More Faster

2011-07-28T15:25:45Z

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
by David Cohen and Brad Feld

Summary: A compendium of short discussions on what you will encounter in an early-stage startup and advice that can help you to handle these situations.

Intended Audience: Anyone involved in startups that is looking for guidance or new ideas
]]> Why You Should Read It: This is an extremely pragmatic book that contains invaluable lessons learned by entrepreneurs who lead and participate in the TechStars program. Each item is short (2-3 pages) and focuses on a single story and lesson learned, quite often the hard way. It is divided into seven themes that discuss items related to the conceptualization of the company, building and growing the right team, executing on your ideas, determining the right product to build, financing the startup, legal structure, and how to take care of yourself so you don't burn out. Taken together, all these tips can help you avoid many fatal avenues, greatly enhance your chance for success, and give you more opportunity to enjoy the wild ride.

My Takeaways

Validated learning is perhaps the key element to determine if you are successfully executing on your ideas. If you don't have customers confirming your progress (preferably through financial commitment), then you cannot be sure you are building a viable company.
Startups need friends and external champions for your ideas. Look for opportunities to share experience with similar stage companies and engage early customers as development partners.
Find the one thing you are going to do better than anyone else in the world to delight customers and focus on executing only this until you know otherwise.

Recommended?: This is a book I wished I had at my first startup 13 years ago

Xpresspost Days

2011-07-08T15:17:50Z

Image by Rwk via TravelPod

At the end of the last release in December, we had our first FedEx Day with good results. One of the main pieces of feedback received was "Now what?". Some of the things that people had worked on were very solid product ideas but needed more time to complete and integrate into the product.
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we extended the time frame from 1 to 3 days
we changed the name to Xpresspost Days to reflect the longer delivery time
the product owner committed to including at least one item in the next release
the demo was run via a ReadyTalk session so the entire company could participate

I was a little worried about what the team's energy levels would be like since we were coming off 6 hard weeks of sustained effort to complete the last release. Overall, the freedom to work and experiment on pet projects greatly outweighed the collective fatigue and the team jumped into the exercise with great gusto. We also jumped into the Belgian Waffles, home-made preserves and Turkish coffee with great enthusiasm on the third morning (thanks Irina!).

The closing demo featured a significant number of product and process ideas:

accessing information: we prototyped some great and surprising ways to quickly filter the contents of the infrastructure tree and to visually present more information about an object
controlling infrastructure: we added a number of handy commands for administrators to help them manage their virtual environment and understand how they are using it
visualizing information: we also prototyped charts and graphs for visualizing categories of search results (and quickly discovered how much additional work there is to do...)
build servers: after batting the idea around forever, we retired our tried and tested CruiseControl build servers in favour of Jenkins (big win for the visibility and control of builds!)
understanding our journey: we have been very good at capturing the outcomes of our retrospectives so we compiled the results from the last three years to get a pulse on where we are strong, where we are sufficient, and where we are slipping

At least three of these items will find their way into our 4.2 release, as well as a feature that was prototyped during our first FedEx day.

We closed with a small retrospective at the end of the demo, with particularly good buy-in from product management. For the next iteration of FedEx days, we will be making the following changes:

extend the time period from 3 to 5 days to take advantage of the momentum we have built
have a demo after 2 days to select the best items to continue working on
attempt to complete the selected items before the end of the last day

Becoming Iterationless

2011-07-04T15:16:59Z

Image by Yogendra174 via Flickr

For our 4.0 release, we experimented with shortening our iteration length and got some mixed interim results. At the retrospective to discuss our what we wanted to do with these observations for the next release, we talked about the positives, negatives, and related ideas about our ideal iteration length. The results were actually somewhat surprising.]]> Big Information Radiator has been evolving more kanban-like characteristics (including limited queues, loose work-in-progress limits, and swarming to eliminate blockages), so when it came down to a vote between keeping iterations and moving entirely to a continuous flow system, the latter won out. We are now iterationless.

Arguments to retain iterations:

timeboxes create a natural heartbeat
we have a high-level of predictability from week-to-week and month-to-month
short time horizons provide concrete milestones to help people complete work
it has worked well for us so far so there is risk in changing it; e.g. 'leave well enough alone'

Arguments to adopt a flow system:

it eliminates the stop and start of iteration endpoints
flow provides another opportunity to learn and experiment
on-demand story estimation sessions fit better into the product owner schedule
it allows the product owner to reprioritize sooner if there are customer implications or commitments
it introduces a change to a stable system that may perturb us to a different stable point with better characteristics such as faster story completion
we have a seasoned team that may not need milestones to drive progress

I think this change will not be without its challenges:

Our minimal toolset (a spreadsheet and the wiki) has evolved to support our iteration structure. We will need to tweak them over the next few weeks as we discover what we need.
Our minimal tracking artifacts are currently hand-drawn burndown charts and velocity numbers. We will likely keep the latter but start to focus more on burn-up charts and story cycle time.
Our velocity calculations give us a reasonably tight envelop for probable release dates and provide a good means for planning where new features into subsequent releases. We will need similar visibility in a flow system.
Iteration timeboxes provide a cadence for our day-to-day work and provide regular intervals for planning, demos, and retrospectives. Without iterations, we will need a mechanism for maintaining these (possibly separate) rhythms.

This ought to be a fun experiment.

The Importance of Slack

2011-06-08T16:56:28Z

Sometimes in a startup environment, the pressure to constantly deliver new features to support existing customers and potential leads can fill your entire working day and then some. However, when the team is fully utilized and committed to feature development, the lack of time can introduce some significant challenges that can only be addressed by slowing down and introducing some slack.
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Slack Allows You To Respond to Unexpected Events

In a small team such as ours, a significant customer support issue can disrupt a couple of team members for a few days. Depending on the skills involved and the stories in play, this can have cascading effects on the rest of the team and severely hamper an iteration. Having a slack developer allows us to intercept this issue and possibly minimize or eliminate the impact on everyone else.

Slack Allows You to Reorganize to Remove Blockages

When blockages occur on in-progress stories, a slack member of the engineering team can quickly jump in to remove the impediment. It is impossible to know everything when you start a story, so it is prudent to have the ability to have another person to quickly jump in and help, be it with development, testing, or infrastructure needs.

Slack Provides Breathing Space

Cranking through features and stories to solve customer problems can be rewarding, but a sustained effort for a long period of time can also be tiring. Part of maintaining a sustainable pace is allowing team members timeto periodically slow down, recharge the batteries, and return with renewed energy. A few hours here and there may be all that is needed.

Slack Provides Time For Planning

To properly decide what features to add to the product, engineering estimates of complexity and risk must be taken into consideration. These take time away from core development to give them proper consideration. Additionally, backlog grooming is essential to maintaining flow and it needs input both from product owners and engineers.

Slack Gives You the Chance to Improve the System

When you are immersed in a system, you are only able to see the problems and solutions that are in your immediate field of vision, assuming you have time to look for them at all. Slack provides time to step back and look at larger and larger parts of the system to understand where waste is occurring. A great benefit of this is that the discovery and correction of a waste situation often frees up time and money that can be invested back into product development or into the next system improvement.

Slack Provides Room For Experimentation

Sometimes you need to have the ability to experiment on something and fail in order to discover new ideas, techniques, skills, or features. Slack during iterations can provide this opportunity. FedEx Days or similar events (organized slack!) are also great proving grounds from which amazing things can emerge.

Book: Management 3.0

2011-06-02T15:23:41Z

Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders
by Jurgen Appelo

Summary: A wealth of explanations, techniques, and tips for building and leading agile teams so that you can effectively solve complex and complicated problems in your organization and for your customers

Intended Audience: Agile managers and leaders and those who want these responsibilities
]]> Why You Should Read It: This book explains emerging management and leadership challenges as businesses become increasingly networked, social complexities and linkages increase, and information flows more rapidly. The sheer number of reviews and the quality of the reviewers in the book's opening pages is in itself astonishing.

Image via noop.nl

Jurgen provides succinct background information about agile software development before diving into Martie, his 6-point Management 3.0 model. Each of the following points is presented in a two-chapter format, one to explain the reasoning behind the principle and one to provide advice and experiments to pragmatically apply it:

energize people: software development in a knowledge-based activity and people must be motivated and energized to produce their best creative work
empower teams: immense knowledge and capability lies within the members of the team and self-organization is a highly effective way for this information to collectively emerge
align constraints: leadership must ensure that the team has a shared goal and boundaries so that they have a solid framework in which to make decisions
develop competence: to better deliver correct solutions, the entire organization must development competence by improving skill and discipline
grow structure: improving the structure of the organization's systems improves communication. teams should be constructed with an appropriate size with a common value goal.
improve everything: foster continuous improvement through adaptation of the existing system, exploration of alternate solutions, and anticipation of emerging problems

My Takeaways

there are many stable states in systems, some of which are difficult to escape using small changes. to move to a different stable state, additional stimuli are sometimes needed such as the introduction of new team members, relocation or reorganization of workspaces, or experiments using ideas acquired from other teams or companies.
retrospective techniques such as "Five Whys" are great at identifying root causes but are not so good in non-causal relationships that involve feedback loops. it is important to identify and understand both positive (reinforcing) and negative (opposing) feedback loops in your systems.
in order to understand and improve a system, you must have a model of that system. while all models are inevitably wrong, some models are useful and it is important to continually reflect on the model you are using to see where it is failing and where it is helping.

Recommended?: One of the two most important leadership books I have read this year