Babble burble banter balderdash

We need to change some behaviours!

2010-12-24T11:14:00.009+11:00

Recently I've spoken to a few people who have told me "What we need here are some changes in behaviour", then they let me know what they will do to make these changes come about. It may be a new policy, or some kind of punishment/stick combination, it will certainly involve microsoft power point, but what ever the mechanism I would be amazed if it has the desired result.

Changing behaviour is rather difficult, and using a single device to achieve change will fail (maybe drugs or extreme violence would be the exception to this rule). This is because there are multiple factors that create behaviours, and a change to just one of these will not have much, if any, impact on the others.

The model below is by Edgerton & Palmer and is an attempt to show the interactions involved between five factors that have an effect on an individual. Actions (behaviors) is only part of the story here.

Social context - the where, what and when of the situation. The working environment is a constantly changing social context, from sitting at a desk and working alone to being in a formal meeting with colleagues to having an informal chat when making some coffee. As the other factors are effected by this they are also in flux.

Cognition - the thoughts of the individual will be as varied as the individuals. In different contexts and with different people these will also vary. In a situation where there are project managers playing a game of schedule chicken the thoughts will be a mix ways to defend their current plans to demonstrating the faults in their peer's plan - of course this would only happen in theory as all PMs are on the one team to deliver the best result for their organisation.

Emotion - apart from the emotions someone brings in the door to work, emotions will also be affected by many other factors. A chat with non-competitive peers will give more pleasant emotions than being in a performance review. Emotional responses are essentially responses to the other factors, but once fired up can create feedback into these factors.

Physiology - sleep and diet are pretty reasonable places to start when considering this factor (lots of over time and pizza will cause issues), but there are many other elements to physiology that may occur by situations at work. A stressful and aggressive exchange will create a physiological effect which may then create specific actions in response to this - heart rate up, adrenaline flowing.

Action - the thing we want to change, which is going to be a piece of cake when we consider the other factors.

All these factors can play on and build on each other, hence the double headed arrows.

Changing behaviours is not going to occur through power point, it will just add to the frustration of the person/people who created the power point presentation - probably making them angry, and they will then start raising their voices and being aggressive in meetings, finding their heart rate has increased and getting red faced, and thinking "why doesn't anyone listen to my perfect idea, they're all morons".

Edgerton, N. and S. Palmer (2005). "SPACE: A psychological model for use within cognitive behavioural coaching, therapy and stress management." The Coaching Psychologist 1(2): 25 -31.

Goals Goals

2010-12-23T09:20:00.014+11:00

Goals are fantastic as standards or aspirational states for regulation. Using a goal as a way to set direction is a fundamental part of Scrum and I am seeing it more in generic "Big A" Agile. of course the goal needs to be the right goal, and if we are inherently goal directed organisms then we need to make sure everyone has their goals aligned.

Having learned some skills for project management the idea of managing a plan based on the original estimates (aka commitments) never seemed right to me. In this situation the goal is to make sure the plan is met, be that the dates/scope/budget. Ah hah! that's project management, the magic is to drive the team to achieve this result. Of course it's also utter bunk, it's hitting the target and missing the point.

My rough sketch above is an attempt to show what I am on about. An idea becomes a plan, then there is some action followed by measuring progress, then checking the progress against the plan. This assumes the plan and the idea are correct. With these two assumptions there isn't much room to make changes. This is a simplification and plans do change, but from what I have heard it's more about "updating" the plan than intentionally varying the plan and re-planning is a significant effort that is met with disapproval.

Now if we manage our work to achieve the goal rather than to follow the plan there is greater opportunity for changing what we doing. The second sketch shows this simple difference, that is to check progress against the goal rather than the plan. Each cycle through the action, measure, check and change needs to be treated as an experiment, where we learn what works and doesn't work to achieve the goal. In this scenario nothing is assumed to be correct until it is proven to help achieve the goal, and we can refine the goal as well.

Unfortunately within a traditional work environment this is a big change in thinking. Outside of a specific R&D team trying something that might fail is rarely approved. Changing this will be a significant challenge as structure of the organisation reinforces these ideas of how to view success.

Goals

2010-12-23T09:14:00.001+11:00

Goals... simple stuff really. A goal is just something you want to achieve such as "get that job!", "get a promotion", "run the four minute mile". Interestingly there are some people who have made a career out of studying goals, weirder things have probably happened.

Austin and Vancouver (cool names for co-authors) define "goals as internal representations of desired states, where states are broadly construed as outcomes, events, or processes" which extends the discussion (and the career) on goals.

The upshot is that any person at any moment has multiple goals. Right now I have the following:

Sit comfortably
Write something sensible
Don't let me right eye dry out - as it isn't closing properly
Enjoy listening to Portico Quartet's Isla whilst writing this post

but wait there's more

In the very near future I will need some sleep
Right now I want to keep my body at a comfortable temperature and it's warming up in here
I also want to read a few books that I have recently acquired
Earn three stars on each level of Angry Birds (known in this house as Cranky Chickens)

This list could extend for a lot longer but it's boring enough.

So what? So everything we do can be interpreted as pursuing a goal. Whoop de do.

What if you want me to pursue a goal that's not on my list? For example you may want to change the way I work. Now we may have some difficulties as your goal may be discordant with my goal. Our first reactions in this situation are going to be interesting.

You - Lachlan just doesn't want to change.

Me - Why would I want to do that? What I am doing is fine.

Is this resistance? Rather than thinking in a confrontational way about the situation perhaps we could consider that we have competing goals and then we can start to dig into what these and whether they can be aligned.

Within the trans-theoretical model this conflict on goals is coming from one person being further through the cycle of change than the other. In my two line example I am in pre-contemplation, I think what I am doing is fine, I have no reason to change. It's back to raising my awareness of the alternatives and the limitations of the way I am acting/working.

Changing - conceptualisation

2010-12-06T20:12:00.016+11:00

Earlier this year a colleague asked me what I would look for in a organisation considering adopting agile. Where would I stick my nose? (paraphrasing, she was more polite than that). Being a whiteboard junkie I grabbed a marker and drew the following.

Technology - what the development group create and maintain

People - organisational culture, teams and individuals

Process - how do they try to make the work work

Environment - what is the physical environment like to work in

The idea is that agile software development is influenced by these four forces/elements/modalities/thingies/horsemen. The conclusion of my 5 seconds of thinking is that if you want to adopt agile you need to have a good hard look at each of these and how they will influence the change.

I now like to think about this without "agile" in the middle of the picture - as I think the idea is more generally applicable without the A word there. How do these forces influence the way an organisation develops software (or do pretty much anything)? So something more like this (based on Greene and Grant 2003 - house of change).

I think each of these forces has a balancing influence on the others, so that a change to one will be pulled back by the others, a sort of equilibrium. Any attempt at making a significant or lasting change will need to take this into account. (There is an inkling about entropy too, but that's still in progress.)

For example making a change to "go Agile" may start with changing the way projects are run to work in iterations ie a process change. The organisational state before the Agile adoption came about from the influence of more than just the delivery process and none of the following processes have changed:

Hiring
Release management
Funding/budgeting
Organisational change

The organisation has been structured to support these processes (and many many more) and the original project process is part of this melange. There is now a foreign body in the organisational system and it may end up being treated as one.

What about the other forces?

Technology - no change. Unless there was attention to technical excellence before the process change this is going to hurt. Odds on that delivery to time and budget trumped internal quality.

People - no change. The same people, who may have been comfortable with how work was before the change, and the same structures to support the people. A culture that developed from how the organisation worked. Teams that may have competed now need to collaborate.

Environment - no change. Maybe everyone on the team is on the same floor or in the same building, but this is not real collocation. A nice open plan office - recommended over the alternatives - is not really the place for noisy exchanges of ideas, you end up having stand ups in a meeting room, story walls hidden in the computers so no one is disturbed.

What's the point?

To make a change you need to have a holistic or system perspective, unfortunately conceptualising the entire system is difficult. Making effective change is hard, even when there are no explicit forces against the change there will be tacit forces that will hold you back. No amount of analysis will reveals these forces so get going and expect to learn about these on the way, and make that explicit.

Greene, J., & Grant, A. M. (2003). Solution-focused coaching: Manging people in a complex world. Auckland, New Zealand: Pearson Education New Zealand; New Zealand.

Changes - ambivalence

2010-12-06T10:04:00.008+11:00

Moving yourself into action can be challenging, helping some one or some people move into action can be bloody frustrating. The following is a tool from Tony Grant (dunno if he came up with it) to help deal with the ambivalence of change and try to get some one into preparation/action.

Start by rating the motivation for changing on a 1 -10 scale. Where 1 is "not likely matey", and 10 is "why are we having this conversation as I am on the move".

Use the following (crappy html) grid to explore the ambiguity of the change - better off with a white board, or something biggerer to review the items. Remember not to try to persuade, explore the ambivalence.

	Stay the same	Make a change
Positive	step 2. What's good about staying the same? Get it out and talk about it. Explore the hidden pay offs of not changing.	step 3. Dig into the positives of change. This will be the opposite of step one, but get into the details. Make the benefits clear and obvious.
Negative	step 1. Explore the downside of the change by brainstorming the negatives of the current situation. Don't dwell here.	step 4. Use this space to stick in a plan of action. If there are still barriers, explore these, get them out in the open.

then re-rate from 1 -10. There should be a shift, cease on this.

Here is a worked example. A team is considering increasing the unit test coverage in the legacy portion of a solution (ie code they did not write), there is "resistance" to doing this work and this is a look at the ambivalence around incorporating this work practice.

Motivation: 3

	Stay the same	Make a change
Positive	Quick to get the work done. Don't need to waste time reading through someone else's crap code. Only need to focus on my work and any new changes.	Learn more about how the entire solution works, perhaps there are opportunities for abstraction, decrease complexity or general improvement. Less brittle code base as the tests will support any refactoring. Decreased risk in enhancing or fixing the solution in the future as there is a safety net of tests.
Negative	Will never understand legacy code. Refactoring is very risky. Changes will take longer as time goes on.	As a start write some tests for what is considered the riskier parts of the solution, rather than everything. Expand on these whenever we work on the solution.

Motivation: 6

The tool is not a panacea, maybe there won't be a shift in motivation. Using the technique should help bring out more of the issues around the change, use these to help raise awareness and try again.

Enterprise Architecture

2010-12-01T21:31:00.005+11:00

Having written no production code in the last few years I feel qualified to rave on about EA. Actually I don't really feel qualified, I know jack about it. I do know there are a number of people who works as EAs and how widely their work is ignored. So in the interest of efficiency here is the Enterprise Architecture chatterbox.

Folding instructions

Change in action

2010-11-27T22:03:00.020+11:00

My last post on the Transtheoretical model was a quick summary of the basics of the model:

Stages of change
What to do in a stage
Self-efficacy
Decisional balance

I am going to try to give some more applicable examples of the theory in action. These are subjective interpretation of my experience, if you want to read empirically validated studies of model check out the references in the last post.

Introducing change

"A sense of urgency", or "the burning platform" are phrases often used as summaries for how to kick off change. Honestly, if the floor was on fire, I would feel a sense of urgency and we would be changing pretty quickly. This often doesn't work so well in organisational settings. The executive burning platform is probably not shared with the people who ... um ... do the work. I think this is particularly so in IT, especially with the great job market.

From a TTM perspective senior management may be well into preparation or action, but the rest of the organisation is in precontemplation where the what to do is "raise awareness".

As leaders get amongst the work and the people doing the work. Look at what is happening and let the people know about the organisational situation and what they can do to help. Take down the motivational posters or the awards or the press releases and replace this will real data that affects the day to day work lives of the people who need to change.

The information and education needs to be situational. I am currently working with two groups trying to adopt some new practices. For one group there is great technology and industry support for what they want to do, for the other they will need to break new ground. The education for the two groups is quite different, the former is more on "how, with a little why". For the latter it is much more about "why", focusing on the principles behind the change, the benefits to them and their work. If I take the same approach with both groups one would never get out of precontemplation - of course there is no certainty they will anyway, but let's give them the best chance.

Group 1

Good technology support
Good industry knowledge
Expect a reasonably quick shift in decisional balance and self-efficacy due to this external validation of the change - will vary on an individual basis

Group 2

Poor technology support
Bugger all industry knowledge
Expect to maintain high self-efficacy and no change in decisional balance as "no one else has done this, so why should we"

It's not that the change we want to adopt is not beneficial but there is no burning platform. There is no urgency for these guys if there was other people would be making the change. If we can get an understanding of the benefits of the change then the decisional balance may shift and we can get some movement.

Starting to change

If we get through precontemplation - maybe it's been mandated that people change what they are doing, that's always effective - then we need to help people get through contemplation.

Contemplation is where the decisional balance is pretty even, and the self-efficacy is low. For example if you want to introduce a new way to estimate (or get rid of estimation) for projects then just about everyone involved is going to be feeling uncomfortable. You'll probably hear this like "Why don't we just do this the way we always have?", which is ok because change is hard. Now it's time to "roll with the resistance", don't confront it.

In a team we want people working together so if you attack someone who is feeling out of place then you lose part of the team, it's a bad choice. Focus on any ambivalence, use the data/information you have used before to help work through precontemplation. Explore the pros and cons of staying the same and the pros and cons of changing - for example talk about what happened with projects that were estimated in "usual way" what was good about that, what was bad, focus on the principles behind the change rather than the mechanics. Let the individuals decide to make the change.

Getting going

Preparation needs to focus on small steps to help people build in their self-efficacy. If you want to adopt XP it's going to be very hard to adopt all the practices over night. In an organisation there will be existing social, process, environmental and technology moderators to any change, so you need to create some success in this complex environment. Having senior organisation support can be very helpful in clearing blockers to change, but few senior managers are going to be blindly courageous so you need to give them some evidence the change will work.

When taking action make sure you have something to measure with rather than just imagine everything is going great. Demonstrate the progress and check on whether it is growing.

TDD adoption for example can have some simple steps of just having a simple test written in some example code rather than aiming for a unit test coverage from day 1. The success of setting up the unit test framework and then writing test, executing the build to watch the test fail/pass gives someone some obvious success with this practice that can be built on.

Once you are going be ready for the grinding halt of relapse. This will happen and it will happen a few times.

Back to the beginning

I am waiting for you, Vizzini. You told me to go back to the beginning. So I have. This is where I am, and this is where I will stay. I will not be moved.

Relapse will happen, be prepared. Learn from relapse, look at what was tried, why didn't it work, what will need to be different.

In an organisation there will be many potential causes for this, perhaps it's a time constraint, or how bonus structures are put in place.

From my experience tracking delivery is a common area of relapse for teams trying to change. When organisations are used to committing to dates and scope and dollars the change to measure delivery in contrast with measuring the plan is very difficult. Relapsing to old ways of thinking and behaving is reflected in commitment based planning, extended hours, tracking partially done work. If you know this is going to happen then you can be ready for the event, accept it and be ready to demonstrate the side-effects.

The way we work

Maintenance and termination is what we are aiming for, and this requires long and sustained effort. Building on small successes and adapting from failures is hard work.

In my last post I had "party" as what to do when you have made it to termination. This is rather facetious as in termination the change is part of normality and how often do you have a party for the run or the mill parts of life?

For teams adopting agile practices you know you are in these stages when people feel uncomfortable when not working collaboratively. For example no one person on the team will estimate a piece of work, when the teams starts a new delivery they want to talk about it with the customer/product owner to get a good understanding of the why and what of the delivery.

Resistance

In the TTM framework resistance can be understood as a mix of the stage of change and decisional balance. People who are in precontemplation - not thinking of changing - that suddenly have some kind of change thrust upon them will be extremely unwilling to change not because they are necessarily people who won't change, but they think the cons of the change outweigh the pros. From this perspective it's easier to work with people in precontemplation as the situation is depersonalised and have a less confrontational discussion.

Changes

2010-11-21T14:37:00.027+11:00

Transtheoretical model is widely used to help people make and understand change. The research for the model comes from health studies, particularly focused on drug addiction (e.g. tobacco). Some researchers have tested the model outside of the realm of addiction and found it to be a broadly applicable model for change.

The model integrates several theories - hence the name - and its core is a stages of change structure.

Stages...

Precontemplation - In this stage you are not thinking about change in the next six months

Contemplation - In this stage you are thinking about change in the next six months

Preparation - Making plans for change

Action - Executing the plans

Maintenance - Successful action over several month

Relapse - Reverting to old behaviours

Termination - New behaviour is natural

An important feature of this model is the open recognition of relapse. When making change there are is always the possibility of falling back into old ways, and acknowledging this gives you the opportunity to deal with it.

Many change theories have stages, Kubler-Ross's stage of grief for example, the advantage of TTM is that it you have guidance at each stage. Stages of grief for example can help you explain what is happening, but not what to do about it, TTM gives you more than "oh, I am bargaining now".

What to do...

Precontemplation - raise awareness, give someone the reason to change

Contemplation - an extremely ambivalent stage, play on this, tease out the tension, let the person make the decision

Preparation - plan small steps, you need to build on success

Action - support and encouragement, prepare for relapse - it will happen

Maintenance - support and encouragement

Relapse - this is falling back to another stage, it may be precontemplation, contemplation, use the techniques required at that stage.

Termination - pat yourself on the back and select a new goal

There a two other fundamental elements to the model (adding up to the transtheoretical name):

- Self efficacy

- Decisional balance

Self efficacy is how well someone thinks they can perform in a specific domain or circumstance. The degree of self efficacy an individual will feel across the stages of change varies and can be an indicator to where someone is within TTM.

Self-efficacy...

Precontemplation - High

Contemplation - Lower

Preparation - Lower

Action - Growing

Maintenance - High

Relapse - Low

Termination - High

What I find interesting is that self-efficacy is high in precontemplation. In this stage someone is feeling good about what you do and how you do it, you have no reason for change, so you "resist" change.

Transitioning into contemplation self-efficacy is lowered because of uncertainty about the new behaviours and no longer convinced about the existing behaviours.

As you practice the change through preparation and action you will build in your self-efficacy through small successes. Eventually the change is part of who the person is and how they act, self-efficacy is once again at its peak.

Decisional balance is about weighing up the pros and cons of change. Over the stages of change this balance changes.

Decisional balance...

Precontemplation - Cons out weigh pros

Contemplation - Pros and cons are equal (near)

Preparation - Pros start to outweigh cons

Action - Pros outweigh cons

Maintenance - Pros outweigh cons

Relapse - Cons out weigh pros

Termination - Pros outweigh cons

In important implication of this is that when you are thinking resistance it may be that someone doesn't see the need to change. The cons of change outweigh the pros, they feel effective in what they are doing, there is no reason for them to change.

Brief summary (in crappy HTML table)

Transtheoretical model
Stage	What to do	Self-efficacy	Decisional Balance
Precontemplation	raise awareness	High	Cons outweigh pros
Contemplation	work with the tension, let the person make the decision	Low	Pros and cons equal
Preparation	plan small steps, you need to build on success	Growing	Pros outweigh cons
Action	support and encouragement, prepare for relapse	High	Pros outweigh cons
Maintenance	support and encouragement	High	Pros outweigh cons
Relapse	revisit other stages	Low	Decisional Balance
Termination	party	High	Pros outweigh cons

Some light reading to kill off the insomnia

Velicer, W. F., C. C. DiClemente, et al. (1985). "Decisional balance measure for assessing and predicting smoking status." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48(5): 1279-1289.

McConnaughy, E. A., J. O. Prochaska, et al. (1983). "Stages of change in psychotherapy: Measurement and sample profiles." Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice 20(3): 368-375.

Prochaska, J. O. and C. C. DiClemente (1983). "Stages and processes of self-change of smoking: Toward an integrative model of change." Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 51(3): 390-395.

Prochaska, J. O. and et al. (1982). "Self-change processes, self-efficacy and self-concept in relapse and maintenance of cessation of smoking." Psychological Reports 51(3, Pt 1): 983-990.

Prochaska, J. O., W. F. Velicer, et al. (1994). "Stages of change and decisional balance for 12 problem behaviors." Health Psychology 13(1): 39-46.

Grant, A. M. (2006). An Integrative Goal-Focused Approach to Executive Coaching. Evidence based coaching handbook: Putting best practices to work for your clients. Hoboken, NJ, John Wiley & Sons Inc; US: 153-192.

Grant, A. M. and J. Franklin (2007). "The transtheoretical model and study skills." Behaviour Change 24(2): 99-113.

Ball point game - debriefing and options

2010-03-29T21:01:00.006+11:00

The ball point game is a fun exercise to help people understand a whole bunch of ideas for agile/lean/scrum. I have been running the game regularly over the last six months and thought I would put together some variations I play with.

The game was invented by Boris Gloger but I picked it up from Rowan Bunning and you can read the instruction on Kane Mar's blog.

Most recently I have been running the ball point game after a discussion on continuous improvement as the game lends itself beautifully to this. After running the game as described in the links I like to ask the following questions:

Who had all the ideas?
What roles did you all take?
When something went wrong what did you do?

I haven't found a team yet that doesn't give answers like:

No one had all the ideas, we all suggested ideas and tried some out.
Apart from the person starting the cycle there were no roles.
We tried to work out how to fix what went wrong.

I then ask the team to compare this way of working with their usual delivery process, thinking about the three questions again.

Then ask about flow, improvement, reinforce the PDCA cycle ideas.

Dysfunctional forms

Odd balls

For running the ball point game I like to have a mix of balls. Various sizes, textures and weights. The variability greatly interrupts the flow of the team and several teams work out that as the balls all have the same value (one point) they might as well discard all but one type.

Debrief - the varying ball sizes are like varying sizes of requirements (stories, PBIs etc). With varying sizes it's difficult to create flow. As requirements are information there will be some variation but there needs to be effort put it to even these out to allow teams to develop flow.

Multi-tasking

As the team is going so well (after the 5th iteration) I need to take some people out of the team to help another team to do better, so these guys will be available part time. All rules stay the same and the part timers are considered part of the team.

To make this happen the part timers need to stand with their hands behind their backs when I say so - this is when they are working with another team. The team has 2 minutes to plan and give an estimate.

When running the iteration I watch the clock and call "out" to signal the part timers are to have their hands behind their backs and "in" for them to return to the team. The whole team stops when I call "out" and restarts when I call "in".

This is not a fantastic analogy for multi-tasking, it would be better to actually have two teams going at once and have these people on both, or have the people walk away from the team to give them as sense of task switching maybe I'll try that some time.

One team recently put the part time staff at the end of cycle, and when they were "out" the team put all the balls in a bucket ready for these guys when they started again. What happened was the bucket near the end filled up quickly, never emptied and the original ball source ran out of balls. This was interesting to debrief to help these guys see the problems of a push workflow with the throughput constraint on the end not having any control on what was coming in - dunno if I succeeded with that.

Debrief - multi tasking can really interrupt flow. People working on multiple tasks/projects/teams make it difficult to get work done.

Problem - this makes it look like people working part time are a pain in the butt for delivery.

Co-location

Another fun dysfunctional form is to stop the team from co-locating. Give the team the usual planning time but no team member may stand within 3 metres of another. All the rules are the same.

Debrief - it's harder when you are not right next to someone you are working with. It's more difficult to respond to what they are doing and vice versa. There is essential non-verbal communication that you can have when you are co-located that helps to enable more useful verbal communication.

Chocoholic agile adoption strategy - cont'd

2009-05-27T14:38:00.002+10:00

After adopting the chocolate scale the team I wrote about has started using the scale as punishment for arriving late at stand up. The first person late must bring the smallest chocolate on the scale (furry friend), the second brings the next larger (chunky) and so on. The punishment resets after the 1kg block has been bought and consumed.

After a few days of non-belief and some small chocolate bars bought the team is now up to the 500gm block for the next late arrival, and has been for a week.

Do we really need to sit together?

2009-05-24T23:38:00.005+10:00

I think co-location rocks for teams. The first time I had the pleasure of trying Scrum proper-like I stuck three devs in a broom cupboard to work together, one of them still talks to me (he even uses nice words). Is co-location really important? Software development is a social process so people will communicate anyway even if they are close but not co-located, won't they?

In Managing the Design Factory Donald G. Reinertsen has a graph very much like this one. It shows the probability of technical people communicating weekly by distance. The original data is from a 1977 publication, so pre-email/SMS/IM/Twitter.

Warning - graph is an approximation of the data. As I don't have the actual data I have reproduced this as best I can.

At a distance of 10 metres the probability of technical people communicating to each other everyday is pretty low.

If you're working in a serialised process you probably don't care - they don't need to communicate, it's in the spec.

If you're working with a concurrent or collaborative process then you need the people side by side.

"But we have a stand up/daily scrum, so everyone communicates once a day. We can skip this co-location bollicks and leave people at their desk." OK, but are you more more open with someone you know well or someone you don't know well? Co-location allows people to have the general getting know each other conversations that break down barriers and build relationships allowing for richer communication so they can tackle more important issues (eg What's blocking me). So nerr.

Chocoholic agile adoption strategy

2009-05-21T13:25:00.007+10:00

I have been working with a team that had a go at relative estimation of their work rather than absolute or duration based estimation. We had some difficulties that I may cover in another post - when I get my act together - but the most enlightening part of the process for me was coming up with a scale they were willing to adopt.

The team members were more comfortable with duration based estimates for their work, but it was hoped to move everyone away from this to a scale that didn't carry any commitment baggage. During the discussion on estimation this came up

"If I am doing this work then it will take a day, if someone else does the work it will take longer"

this gave us a basis to talk about using a different scale that does translate between people and tasks.

Story points didn't mean anything to the team as they are not working on user stories. I flippantly suggested Gummi bears, and this was quickly changed by the team into chocolate. The chocolate scale - based on Cadbury's chocolate blocks - has been adopted.

From smallest to largest:

Furry Friends
Chunky
Half block
Family block
Half slab
Slab

Potential problems with the chocolate scale
How do you calculate velocity? Is it 5 furry friends and chunky? What does this mean? The team lead is looking at using the net weights of these blocks as a numerical measure, we'll see how it goes.

What about inconsistency across teams because of different scales? In the longer term I think this would be a big issue, currently there are only two teams using relative estimates (this team and one developer working solo) so it's not an issue now. At present this is traded off against having the team start to think about their work in a different way. Eventually it may be required to standardise for communication and metrics, the risk of this approach is to give the team control of something and then take it away.

What did this achieve?

The team now has a scale that is their own, I think ownership is important when you are asked to change. It might be flippant, but it is relative and there can be no confusion as to whether this is a commitment or an estimate. (Though I'd love to hear the usual please reduce your estimates conversation "4 family blocks and a chunky, come on that's way too big, surely it's only 3 blocks and a furry friend".)

The team have also estimated 2 weeks of work using this scale. Previously the estimation process stalled now using their own scale it was estimated very quickly.

Managing the design factory

2009-05-04T20:43:00.003+10:00

I think I picked up "Managing the design factory" from the references in the Larman & Vodde special. I wish I had read it years ago, so far it's a cracking read.

From the introduction

There are no best practices

...Best practices are only "best" in certain contexts and to achieve certain objectives.

..The great danger in "best practices" is that the practice can get disconnected from its intent and its context and may acquire a ritual significance that is unrelated to its original purpose.

Aaaaaamen brother

Some observations on my boys

2009-04-14T21:40:00.004+10:00

I have two boys aged 5 & 3. I have no idea how my gender survives beyond this age range, here's why:

No distance is too short that I can't cover it at full speed.

I like to carry out conversation at ear splitting volume levels.

Anything you ask me to do is, at best, a mere suggestion (unless preceded by "I've told you x times already").

"yeah, she's crying" is empathy.

My selective memory is photographic "awwwww I never get to stay up".

The direction I am running is not the direction I am looking.

I am in constant denial "I'm not a little boy, I'm a big boy. He's a little boy" .... "No I'm not. Muuuuuuuuuuuuum!".

Are defects the original user stories?

2009-04-14T14:14:00.003+10:00

Just asking, and yes the defect comes after you've written something and someone somewhere found out it was not working as expected, but they feel similar to me. Well at least similar in the context of "We have to have a requirements document signed off by everyone up to the CEO before we can even begin to consider to think about starting some kind of technical specification for the solution, so we could never use stories."

I would guess you already have defects, and when you are decide to fix these there isn't a document that bundles them together in some way (why would you try to do this, most defects would be independent, not all, but most). There wouldn't be a sign off process, there is nothing to sign off. The person doing the fix would need to spend time talking with the people who found the defect, and others to work out how to fix it and what the fix will look like - hopefully.

The defects would be - to a greater extent - recorded from the perspective of someone outside the system, rather than a technical task. Of course there would be some prioritisation on what to fix first, because some defects have a greater impact/value than others.

Defects come with test criteria as standard.

It all feels very story like to me. Surely if you can work with defects, then it shouldn't be too much of a leap to work with stories. Maybe.

HBR bloggers wake up; find themselves in 1950s Japan

2009-04-03T12:09:00.005+11:00

Managing Resources in an Uncertain World

From a blog called "The Big Shift".

We're moving from a world of push to a world of pull. Push programs operate on one key assumption - that it is possible to forecast future demand. When demand can be forecast, we can efficiently push resources to where they will be needed when they will be needed. But what happens when our forecasting ability diminishes--as it surely has in these big shifting times? Push programs become bottlenecks preventing effective responses to unanticipated changes in demand. In the business world, the result is often large accumulations of inventories.

I hope this isn't new to the authors. It's probably new to some of the readers.

We only need to look at our dismal record in forecasting business cycles, financial risk, and earnings projections of individual firms from quarter to quarter to see that forecasting is no longer working as well as it once did.

When did the forecasting work?

Book Review - Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum

2009-03-14T20:34:00.002+11:00

Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum by Craig Larman

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a fantastic book to help with the issues of taking scrum/agile/lean/xp from a small software development team into a much larger scale product development effort. The depth of knowledge and experience of the authors is demonstrated by the fact that they don't give any silver bullets, but describe tools for dealing with complexity of scaling.

The first half of the book on Thinking tools is well considered and useful. Most of it isn't a surprise to me, but the section is well written and distills the fundamentals of systems thinking, lean thinking, queuing theory, false dichotomies and being agile very well. These thinking tools are used to help the reader understand the concepts in the second part of the book on Organisational tools.

Organisational tools is fantastic, covering Feature teams, Teams, Requirement areas, Organisation, and Large-scale Scrum. Using experience and the thinking tools Larman & Vodde describe why you would adopt these tools to help scale. I regularly did the "d'oh, it's so obvious when you put it like that" forehead slap reading this section of the book.

The recommended readings and fantastic reference list at the end will ensure I blow another huge wad on books this year.

View all my reviews.

Something you can talk about at dinner

2009-03-10T20:46:00.004+11:00

Lying in the shade, drying off after swimming. My two boys jump on my back and proceed to blow loud, and long raspberries. There is the occasional pause for laughter if one of them lets out a particularly good sound.

My eldest takes a breather to tell me;

"Dad, you can talk about this at dinner"

Rasing boys

2009-03-10T20:38:00.003+11:00

I was putting on a "rashie" as I was about to go for a swim and my eldest boy comes out with
"Dad your tummy is very big"

Fair enough, I do support the Australian reputation as the fattest nation and I do it well.

"yes Mate, it's too big" I reply.

"no Dad, it's way way way way waaaaaaaaay too big"

Chick Corea Five Peace Band - amazing

2009-02-24T20:29:00.009+11:00

"Will Kenny Garrett's sax live?" was what I kept thinking during his first solo after the interval. It was an amazing performance. Mr Garrett took the sax places it really shouldn't go, and was lucky to make it back from. I'm sure watching Pete Townsend smash up a telecaster was great, but Garrett did it with no percussion required.

The Five Peace Band concert was in the Concert Hall, in the Sydney Opera House. (Both named in the traditional "name it what it is" Australian way.) We had seats a few rows back staring at Chick Corea, and (to our pleasant surprise) with a clear view of Brian Blade, the drummer. Listening to five musicians who use all elements of music in their playing is great in the concert hall as the sound is so good. There's no fancy light show or pyrotechnics, it's just the music, and the music was brilliant.

The concert was only seven tunes, each one packed with a density of virtuosity that almost hurt. I don't know the full set list, but they did a blues "New Blues Old Bruise", a weird assed seven final sections Chick Corea thing"Hymn to Andromeda", something from Milestones, and encored with "In a silent way". All very tasty. Each player given space to solo, with the rest of the band following their lead; louder, quieter, pushing the beat, laying back, repeating phrases, all brilliant playing. Then for fun Chick, John and Kenny switched to 4s, ie four bar solos in turn, utter show offs.

Kenny Garrett was the highlight. Amazing sax work. Brian Blade and Christian McBride were the surprises. Blade looked to me like a happy idiot who was allowed to play on the drums, constantly smiling. His fills were amazingly tight, and just when I thought he would never settle into a groove he pulled one out and sat on it for ages.

McBride is a great bassist. Used upright and electric as appropriate. His "bring the house down" solo was on the upright, and again the sound quality was excellent, we didn't miss a note.

John McLaughlin said that he and Chick Corea have been collaborating for 4o years, which is a healthy amount of time to be working with someone - even on and off. (I did think there are people in my industry who haven't collaborated for 10 minutes.) It's great to see such excellent musicians working together rather than trying to out do each other. There was no mystical connection between them due to the time they had been together, but they listened to what each other was doing and played off that.

We didn't all rise when the jazz fusion nobility entered, maybe we should have. We did when they left.

Behind Closed Doors: working with people

2009-02-14T22:20:00.002+11:00

Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management by Johanna Rothman

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A good book with clear ideas that are well presented.

The over all human-focus to the techniques is excellent and very relevant for managing in a collaborative workplace. There are techniques for coaching, delegating, prioritising and planning, giving feedback, facilitation and oodles of others. The descriptions of the techniques are short but the brevity of lessons does not reflect a lack of usefulness, rather a deep understanding and distillation of the essentials.

The book has a story as well as factual advice. Having the story can give the reader a greater understanding of the application of the techniques, as well as taking the lessons out the fact/instructional education mindset and making the lessons more humanly applicable - it is a book about dealing with other humans. Unfortunately the dialogue is contrived (ok, as it's fictional it must be), and Sam is a some kind of omniscient super-manager who always has the right answer, rather than a real person dealing with the complexity of dealing with people. It was ok, but not great.

Having the Techniques section at the end is fantastic, this shows great respect for the people who will use this book saving them from trawling through the pages looking for these handy tidbits.

Despite the the story line I think it's well worth the read, and I should have pulled it off the shelf much earlier than I did.

View all my reviews.

Scrum Chef

2009-02-14T20:57:00.003+11:00

Similarities of Iron Chef (Japan) and Scrum:

Scrum	Iron Chef
Time boxing	60 minute battle
Sprint theme	Theme ingredient
Single Product owner	Chairman Kaga
Sprint planning	Menu planning (esp Michiba)
Daily Scrum	Regular getting together of chefs with Iron chef/challenger
Sprint review	Tasting and judgement
Sprint retrospective	- - -
Self organised teams	Iron Chef/Challenger with a team of trusted chefs carry out the work

OK, there are quite a few differences too.

The inmates are running the asylum, and Mr Cooper needs to whine about it

2009-01-14T22:35:00.001+11:00

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
If this is meant to be the business case for interaction design, it's a pretty sad business case. The ideas are good, but they way it's put is frustrating.

There's some useful material in this book, but it's hard to dig out in the constant noise of Mr Cooper's whining. You could easily scan the first 120 pages, then read about half of the chapters on persona and goals, and you'd have it.

I am left with the taste of BUFD in my mouth too. That may be a misunderstanding, but it seems that we need to have a big interaction design to get it all right, right from the beginning. This is not something I like the idea of.

Yes, interaction design should be handled by pro's. Thanks Alan.

A book to borrow, quickly scan through, then return.

View all my reviews.

Goal based design (with bad photos)

2009-01-14T21:58:00.006+11:00

I don't get excited about car parks ("parking lots" for any non-Australian, or "core porks" for any South Africans) , if I had to list my top five car parks I'd be hard pressed to get beyond the first, and that's only because I now have one. I drove into a car park a few weeks ago and was greeted by a big sign informing me how many spaces they had for my car. Blah, seen it before.

This sign was curiously different, rather than "We have 786 spaces where you aren't", it looked like the information might change.

One of my daughters asked "What are those lights for?" and before you could see "geek car park love in" all was revealed.

It's a wonderful arrangement, when the space is empty the light is green (see above). When the space is occupied (by a car or silly people), the light is red (below). So when I drive around the level I can see where to aim my car without the hassle of driving up and down trying my luck.

If you deserve a special space, you get a blue light (no disco, sorry).

What struck me was that someone thought about what you want from using a car park - a space as fast as possible and or as convenient as possible - and came up with a nice way to help the driver achieve that goal. Having been back on a wet day with the car park near full, it was fantastic, child yells out "there's a green light" and off we go to the empty space. There was only a short drag race with another car heading for the spot, but my van had the momentum, they backed off and we won, woohoo.

Christmas weirdness

2009-01-12T17:10:00.006+11:00

My mother bought this tin of biscuits for my family because she thought "you might like the picture on the lid". Strange idea in itself, but biscuits are biscuits and I'm not going to say no.

Bothering to read the side of the tin to see just how messed up the ingredients are I noticed that the "Photograph is a serving suggestion only". This may be fine if you're Bertie Wooster, but I had trouble getting all this arrange just to eat some shortbread.

After I got over the locomotive weirdness I noticed the extra-sureal bonus. "Biscuits not at actual size". How does that work? How are the biscuits in the tin not at actual size? Is this why I sometimes didn't feel sated after just one?

The best of ... if only

2008-11-12T22:32:00.002+11:00

Apparently changing the labels for your blog posts makes them pop to the top of the blogs.thoughtworks.com list.

Apologies for the spamming.

It works, who'd have thought?

2008-11-11T22:06:00.007+11:00

Why do a stand up?

Last week I had a call from the lead that is not on same site as the QA ask "can we do a deploy, or will this affect the testing?". It's nice to be asked, and the answer was easy "In the stand up the QA said she was not testing in that environment today..." and just to keep everyone chatting "...give her a call though".

Why demonstrate at the end of the iteration?

Business availability on my current project is not a problem, they're at stand up, they're around the team, they're on the phone, they're there, it's great. Despite this proximity and their close involvement with work as it progresses, at the last demonstration they asked "what are we doing about saving in this app?". Then there was a discussion about what they understood the behaviour should be and why. It was great to have this feedback with entire team there to hear, question and understand their ideas.

Scrum certification test

2008-11-11T19:51:00.005+11:00

At the Stockholm Scrum Gathering there was beta of the soon to be used test for CSM certification. It was an online, multiple guess test that covered topics you'd read in the three scrum books, and learn on the course or working on a project using scrum. There were a few questions on the agile manifesto, something I don't remember talking about when I did the CSM course. I thought it was quite good, and many of the questions required some thought, rather than a rote response.

After InfoQ wrote an article* on the test there has been an almighty flap (big enough to penetrate the usual volume of noise) on the Yahoo scrum development group. People firing off their 2c worth (0.5 c Australian) on things like:

Certification means nothing
The test is ridiculous
It's testing the wrong stuff
The CSM is not what people really want
You could end up learning the wrong thing by taking the test

For a group of people who should be pushing the idea of continuous improvement - Inspect and Adapt people! - I am amazed at the carry on. The toys are well out of the pram on this one.

The only point from the whole broo-ha-ha worth repeating is from Ron Jeffries:

"How did it suddenly get necessary to do everything right the first time?"

* article in the sense of taking quotes from the Yahoo group and arranging them.

BTW - My mark was 88! Missed the top score by 1. Blast.

washing up

2008-11-09T19:19:00.008+11:00

disappointment

Washing up (washing the dishes) after dinner was always a power game when I was a lad. There were three jobs to do for the kids to do, wash, dry, put away, and there was always the shout "I'll put away" because this was particularly cushy. I remember one evening when my brother was on the gravy "putting away" train he declared "I'm leaving after I put that knife away", I seized the opportunity to have my brother trapped in the kitchen for all eternity by putting the knife away myself. I was sure I had delivered a crushing blow, the logic was brilliant, he just walked off, my cries of "but you said 'I'" fell on deaf ears.

After a kitchen re-fit my Dad created a hole big enough for a dishwasher. He ran some tubes into the back of the sink and did some other magic, and stuck a dishwasher into the gap. This was fantastic as we wouldn't be fighting any more about who was doing what job, after dinner would be a time of love and caring, communal, domestic, happiness. The family sat around the table as Dad went through the instructions for the new wondrous device (curiously, reading instructions before use is not something that is genetic). To my horror there was a list of items that couldn't be washed in the machine. To steal from Douglas Adams it's like a video recorder (look it up kids) that would only record some shows and not others. What a waste of money! Piece of junk! It wasn't a dishwasher, it was a (Some)Dish(es)washer. The games continued.

service

My Father-in-law is a very generous man in all manner of ways. But he's not a man of great "practical skill", so we don't ask him about fixing holes in walls and such work, but he is a domestic wonderman. Within minutes of arriving in one of his children's homes he is at the sink, sorting, filling, tidying. When you have one or more pre-schoolers the dishes stack up like a students kitchen. Towers of plastic bowls, with branded cartoon characters and food stuck on with the strength of a mother's character label, it's always too much to comprehend, so you use the least disgusting equipment for the next meal. Having a compus adult waltz in and re-arrange it into an order and clean mass is wonderful, beyond a dream. It seems like an utterly inconsequential act until it is done for you.

joy

All my horde of kids (4, what were we thinking?) have loved to stand on a chair next to me when I am washing up. When they are two or three years old they take great pride in helping, picking the next thing to wash, and dumping it with a splash in the sink (extra points for covering Dad with the spray). It has been a great time to talk with them about everything and nothing, "whose plate was this", "what can you see out the window", "yes, that is water running down the glass, who put it there?", "look at the angles the bubbles intersect at" (closely answered by "Bubbles, yey"). Now my girls are older there is less wonder in helping with this chore but there are still good conversations and occasionally some splashing.

secrets

We occasionally torture our children with domestic work. The brief effort of washing up is met by my eldest with a look of disgust, of course her little sister jumps straight in (what a goody two shoes). After brief lecture on the topic of "you have to do something for your pocket money" there is a pair at the sink. Within a few plates the conversation is flowing, but hushed. Sometimes we hear riotous laughter, sometimes a name is exclaimed. Then whenever the girls are asked what they are talking about, it's always a quick exchange of glances and a reply of "nothing".

The best things in life are free, but that's for the birds and the bees

2008-10-30T19:57:00.009+11:00

Compensation of agile teams (XP teams, scrum teams, what-have-you) is a tricky issue. Ken Schwaber takes a stab at it in "The Enterprise and Scrum" (if you haven't read it, the bad news is the lack of Star Trek references) where he ties parts of compensation to enterprise performance (doesn't even say "warp factor" anywhere) which is nice because you want everyone focused on the enterprise and not their individual role. Mary and Tom Poppendieck have a swing at it in "Implementing Lean Software Development" and make some nice points about promotion, influence and my favourite "Find better motivators than money" - something I particularly support because
1 - I'm not motivated by money (ok I like not being poor, but I prefer books & music to cash though I do like Pink Floyd's Money)
2 - It works with Prof Vroom's expectancy theory, which looks to have some reasonable thinking behind it and how can you doubt someone with onomatopoeia for a surname?

The problem with compensation is - IMHO - organisations couple compensation with organisational structure and motivation/incentive (can you couple three things?). The higher up the structure the more compensation, and the bigger and broader the bonus (eg retention bonuses). When you have a self-organising, cross-functional team the structure is removed. These teams are organised around enterprise/product/project goals so incentive for role based performance fractures the team mindset.

So here is an idea I have been toying with ready to be torn apart by better thinkers.

Salary should be a factor of responsibility and (positive) influence (ok that does mean the higher up you go in the org chart the more salary you should have). Individuals with great deal of organisation experience should have both of these, ie if you can influence how the organisation behaves you should have some overt responsibility for the outcome. This allows for people with different skills and preferences to be adequately payed without giving up their vocational passion to earn more by becoming a manager.

If there must be a bonus give it at the team level, if there are multiple teams give it at the project level. Then have the team decide how to adequately distribute the bonus. Wait, that was too easy, and you can't trust the team to look after that kind of thing - but you can trust them to deliver on a strategic, money making project.

Ok, how about do it like this. If there is monetary bonus it should be associated with the outcome of some work. Some of the benefit the organisation receives from this work should be taken to reward the team. I now depart from K Schwaber's idea in that I think the bonus should distributed dependant on your contribution, and not you seniority. Taking Kerth's Prime Directive (that's a touch treky "remember the prime directive number 2s") everyone has worked to the best of their ability and I think should be rewarded evenly, they are already being payed based on the difference in influence and responsibility so don't double up.

Distribute the bonus based on the number of days/iterations people were working on the project. If you're on the gig from day one, you receive the maximum amount, if you're on it one day it's the minimum. People who work across projects in a kind of consulting role should pick up the dosh from all the projects they touch.

To make this work all projects will have to have explicitly stated value that can be demonstrated, which is surely a good thing. Think of the pleasure of portfolio management.

A side effect would be that everyone wants to be on a small team doing a high value project. Which is ok, because why would you do low/no value projects, and to deal with the need to have longer project have these projects do multiple releases to deliver some return before the end of the project.

No one will want to work in BAU or Support, so get rid of it. "Developers should eat their own dog food" J Sutherland 2008. If you make it/design it/depploy it you're responsible for it. So this should keep people focused on delivery high quality results.

The product owners that regularly return their estimated value would quickly stand out, not just in the finance department, but when teams form everyone will want to work with these people.

There must be significant problems with this agile utopia, but I hate to contradict myself so I'm not going to think about it. I also didn't bother with expectancy theory and trying to work out the motivators for individuals, get over it - I did. There is nothing here about how to hire or review people if this is implemented, sorry about that.

Dutch ovens

2008-10-30T19:55:00.003+11:00

My eldest boy sleeping in my bed

The big bang smack down

2008-10-27T22:31:00.004+11:00

Recently watched a couple of peeps from Salesforce.com give a presentation on their fanfare, reverb for the voice "agile transformation". There were many points to their presentation that made me go "ewww" and "ahhh" but what struck me the hardest was the big bang, all at once approach for the change.

My general opinion is incremental change, prove the new stuff works, and grow teams and projects organically from this. The hassle with this is the still running waterfall projects that will be running when the first agile project is started. No agile project in a normal waterfall shop will start well, it will be a complete disaster, every problem from every project will be exposed in the first few weeks. The project will be red - because project managers can only cope with three colours - and everyone up and down the food chain will hate it. The concurrent waterfall projects will be considered a haven of tranquility and good news, not like that *$#@ing agile project. Any team member who isn't comfortable in the new project will want to run back to the good ol' way and they will have the voice - from experience - to let everyone know how crappy the agile project is.

If you do all projects at once, every person and team, then everyone has a crappy time together. There is no "well running waterfall project" (ohh look at that spec, and that Gantt chart, now that's how you deliver software) to turn back to, to compare to, to contrast with. It's all or nothing. Lance the boil. I like it.

Sydney Scrum User Group

2008-10-15T09:31:00.003+11:00

Come and talk things Scrum.

This is an attempt to kick off the Sydney Scrum group.

Where: ThoughtWorks Level 8, 51 Pitt St Sydney

When: Wednesday 5 November 2008 - from 6pm

What: The Stockholm Syndrome - what happened at the Scrum Gathering in Stockholm

Contact: Lachlan

Pre-school education, you can't beat it

2008-09-15T22:36:00.005+10:00

Number One Son holding up a bowl full of steaming pasta "Dad, can you cool this down?"

"Just leave it mate," then I get clever "thermodynamics is on your side"

"I know..."

They're not people

2008-09-11T21:55:00.002+10:00

My first wife was extracting children from the car at school today when she said "Come on people, out of the car".

The response from the eldest boy was "Mum, children aren't people"

Panic

2008-09-09T21:38:00.004+10:00

I was content in the knowledge that my sweet biscuit craving was to be immediately satisfied. I opened the fridge then searched around for the packet to find there were no Monte Carlo's in the fridge - simply the only place to keep them. OMG!

"Where are the Monte Carlo's?" I cry out. "Your children have eaten them" replies the echo.

Those meddling kids, always one step ahead of me.

In desperation - with my coffee going cold - I turn to the pantry - where the emergency supply is kept behind a glass sheet. There were no Monte Carlo's in the pantry. Even after I lifted some things up I could find none.

"Hey! There are no Monte Carlo's in the pantry", "That's right".

But there are venetians.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh

Apple store in Sydney - revisited

2008-08-31T15:46:00.003+10:00

When I went to the Sydney apple store to buy a nano for my sprightly 74 year old mother I was impressed with how things worked.

As there is no counter I had to find a suitably uniformed person to ask about the desired toy. This guy disappeared and returned with a lovely silver nano still in it's clear plastic shell. Then I asked "where do I pay for this". The transaction was handled on the spot, excellent, and the tax invoice emailed to me, double plus excellent.

My only complaint. The man in blue needed to go and get a paper receipt for me to sign.

"The race of his/her/their life." Yet another phrase that must die

2008-08-17T11:33:00.004+10:00

Maybe if the losers were going to be sacrificed to the gods of Olympia, then I think it would be ok to describe it as "the race of their/his/her life", though perhaps the "race for their lives".

Probably bad advice

2008-08-06T22:12:00.003+10:00

My youngest has just moved from a cot into a "big bed". Out of all the kids this has been the easiest transition. In the previous three attempts there are have been weeks of putting the child back in bed until you want to use super glue to keep them there.

This guy has had a couple of nights mucking about in his room, but not coming out to say "Hi" every few minutes. It's been great.

The nicest part of the whole experience is that we haven't had to use our tried and proven child torture method Removing the soft toy. We have given all our kids a few soft toy things to sleep with each night (ducks, bears, pigs, penguins) and the kids have become attached to these toys. It's very cute and very practical. After you've put them back to bed for the second time you can say

"If you get out of bed again I'll take ".

We've usually started with a less significant toy and on a few occasions worked up to the final, favourite, night companion - that will only happen once, then they learn.

Ok, it's probably torture, but water-boarding is ok, so I can sleep well at night. It's certainly easier than having to sit outside the bedroom door and hold it shut (true story, not mine).

When you're certain you're right

2008-08-03T09:01:00.004+10:00

On a cold winter morning (ok, it doesn't get that cold in Sydney) my eldest son son is sitting on the couch in pyjamas. We had this exchange...

My eldest son: I'm sooooo coooold, can someone get me blanket
His wise father: How about you get dressed and put a jumper and shoes on
My eldest son: That won't help meeeeeee

"In the spirit of agile..." yet another phrase that must die

2008-07-28T21:38:00.002+10:00

Changing your mind any time you want to, for no good reason, is not "in the spirit of agile".

If I could have a personal soundtrack

2008-07-09T22:13:00.012+10:00

The kind that plays when I am doing stuff, something appropriate to my mood or action I would want to Nik Bartsch to write it. Stoa is an amazing piece of work, wonderfully indescribable. It sounds spontaneous, like some of the best small group jazz, but must be insanely well rehearsed. It feels like some of Reich or Glass's minimalist work with a less rigid frame, no phasing and more emotion.

I found Bartsch's description of "Zen Funk" confusing when I listened to Stoa. Having now spent up big on the Ronin canon I can understand the description. REA certainly has some funky grooves, but not so much Stoa.

My label is "Small Group Minimalism". A poor attempt to bring together the
ideas freedom (small group jazz) and constraint (minimalism).

Stoa takes you on a journey through brilliantly described aural landscapes. Each Modul has its own rhythmic and harmonic landmark that is regularly shown, sometimes in the distance or brought quickly into sharp focus. Sometimes built upon with extra timbres or dynamics, sometimes left starkly exposed like a solitary peak.

There is always a sense of motion with this music, fast - slow, staggered - even. The moving is well contrasted with periods of rest. Staring out a train window, as we are flying through stations with this music coming through head phones is an unreal experience taking me out of the carriage through the waiting crowds.

Stoa is both comfort music and music that demands my attention. I can't keep away from it, I listen to it at least once a month. It's musical crack. I find myself trying to tap out the polyrhythms on the mouse when my mind has wandered. It's way too addictive. I just need to stitch some little speakers into my jacket, have the nano buried in the pocket and get some clever-clogs to attach the controls to my heart-rate, blood pressure, and whatever chemical my brain is playing with at the time. easy peasy

The only hassle with this as my personal soundtrack is the deep loathing my wife has of it. Am I willing to pay the price...hmmm.

Modul 33

Holiday Wall

2008-07-06T12:59:00.005+10:00

First attempt at a holiday wall as suggested by DM...crumbs! The kids had fun putting this together. Cutting out the pics from the brochures and sticky these on the wall has increased their interest in the trip to the point that they are starting to pack. On the down side we now have to convince oldest boy that the plane won't be landing in snow in Launceston.

Movie Review - Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom

2008-06-30T21:18:00.002+10:00

Having sat through the new Indiana Jones movie we bought the original three on DVD. After struggling through the Temple of Doom my wife sum the situation up with:

"I won't be disappointed if I never see that movie again"

perfect.

PowerPoint - Pitching out

2008-06-24T21:00:00.008+10:00

"The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" is a fantastic essay that should be read by anyone using a computer. Do it now. Go on. Off with you.

"PowerPoint promotes a cognitive style that disrupts and trivialises evidence"

When I joined TW I was amazed at the number times the peeps (TWers and Clients) referred to PowerPoint. I was particularly surprised by the term "deck", I hadn't heard it before, maybe I had been living in a bunker.

The idea was to produce a deck for this or that and stick it in front of the right people and something would happen. This clashed with two notions of mine:
1 - having spent time in Scrum land PowerPoint is shunned and replaced with showing off working software or having huge bits of paper stuck on walls showing stuff
2 - the agile principle that the most efficient way to communicate is face-to-face

Reading Tufte's essay just made me dislike using PowerPoint that little bit more. The biggest kick was reading about organising tabular data. This opened some old wounds I had received from trying to present this kind of information in my dark and dull past, just as PowerPoint was starting to take over the world. The impact of having to summarise, and dissociate data is beautifully demonstrated demonstrated by Tufte.

PowerPoint is becoming (or has become) ubiquitus as a way to present and organise information. It is part of school curriculum for the students to present a few slides using this tool. As a parent (gotta love that) this is troubling as my kids will not be learning how to organise and present their thoughts, they will learn how to pitch. I guess I had better procure a few copies of the essay to hand over to the teachers.

Tufte refers to PowerPoint as a "Projector Operating System" this change in language changes the way you use PowerPoint. Taking away the idea that the application is about presenting information deals it a blow that it should not recover from.

Apple store in Sydney

2008-06-20T21:22:00.002+10:00

People travelled across the world and then queued up to get into this place. Inconceivable.

It's a pretty shop, in a fitted out by Ikea kind of way. The toys are nice, but nothing worth queuing for - and there will be another in a few weeks when the iPhone comes to town.

Do people queue when Walmart opens?

I wonder how the guys at Next Byte feel?

Sporting Team Analogies

2008-06-18T21:56:00.003+10:00

After writing a sporting team analogy I read Peopleware and DeMarco and Lister don't like the analogy as it's all about competition. To be part of the team there is competition within the group to perform, and this will lead to disunity.

But what if the competition is to get into the team, and then you are treated as equals? Would this establish the a sense of eliteness that can help a team gel?

Learning - Maturity

2008-06-15T21:54:00.015+10:00

Watching two games of netball last weekend I witnessed an example of team maturity.

The first game was children learning their favourite game. Two good teams, but both are still learning how to play the game. Both sides were "teams", people drawn together with a purpose and direction. They worked together to achieve a goal - no pun intended.

The second game was a professional game with highly skilled and trained athletes. These teams are made up of masters of the game, some of the best players in the world were on the court. The rules were the same as the first game and the outcome was just as close (one point) but the execution was different.

The first teams were strongly focused on what they needed to do in their role, where they could go on the court, where their matched opponent was, what ritual in the game was being performed. The children would stop suddenly at the sideline or the line of their zone. They knew if they were Centre there was another Centre to look for, when the ball left their zone they stopped as there was nothing more they could do. They exemplified a strong demarcation in their roles and actions, and this is part of learning about the game. Just like learning a new role, or new job.

The second teams were markedly different. Apart from the skill, the boundaries were constantly being pushed. The ball moved forward, across and back down the court with the one team working as an organism attempting to achieve their purpose. Individual marking was replaced with a zone, if one-on-one marking was required marking your exact opposing player was less relevant, what mattered was that opposition players were all marked. The lines of the court meant Jump! Stretch! as the players played the ball in the air, not touching down out of the court or offside until they had passed. The team worked within the rules but pushed each one.

What am I going on about?

A team that works within its rules and boundaries without pushing these can achieve their goal, but is an immature team or a team that is learning what it can do. A great team is the team that pushes their boundaries to achieve their goals. The focus shifts from individual effort first to team first.

Hardly profound

Frank Woodley is Possessed

2008-06-15T09:17:00.005+10:00

Is Frank Woodley the funniest man in Australia? He's a lot easier to find than Rod Quantock so I think he might have to get my vote.

Possessed is a one man show about two people who are having trouble getting out of their current, unpleasent situation. The show had me laughing from the moment Frank came on stage. It has a mix of physical comedy, surealist stupidity,and general Frank Woodleyness - such as regularly breaking the 4th wall to talk directly to the audience, or comment on the show itself.

A great show and easily worth the price of entry.

Some highlights from Waltzing with Bears Part 4

2008-06-05T21:18:00.009+10:00

We now know all about what, why and how for risk management so it's time to get down and dirty with How Much.

It's about value. This is great, I work for a bunch of people who start to go a little weird if they haven't said "Value" at least three times a day, and there's a good reason for this, apart from them being odd.

You make something, anything, for some value. You put effort in to get something out. The value of a software project needs to be clearly stated, and someone/some people need to be accountable for the delivery of this value. The other side is easy, there is always accountability for cost, schedule, scope, but what about the purpose of the work, who is accountable for that.

When benefit cannot be stated more precisely than "We gotta have it" then the cost specification should be "It's going to be expensive."

Explicitly stated value allows you to prioritise the work, essential if you are to deliver incrementally. Best of all it allows you to stop the work. When the value is lower than the cost to develop, don't do it. So easy, well so easy to write, is very hard to do. People don't like to spend the time to do this kind of work, it's hard and can be confronting. It's out of the ordinary "my business case said we'd get 300 new customers a month, that's value" but "which bit of this project will give you that? Surely some elements do more than others?"

2 points Tom and Tim make on why this is either not going to happen or be very hard
1 - it opens the door for an additional level of accountability
2 - there's no obvious pay back

I would say that one payback is that you can stop the development when what you spend is more than you will get back and if you don't explicitly state value how do you know what risks you can take?

Some highlights from Waltzing with Bears part 3

2008-05-29T09:37:00.014+10:00

The "meat and potatoes" section of the book. Here we're getting into the details of how TDM and TRL recommended we carry out risk management. There's a lot in here, the majority of the book, and I won't be going through all of it - buy the book if you want it all.

Risk management is about learning to live with uncertainty and having some degree of quantification of this uncertainty. Rather than saying "We'll get there some day", say "There is zero percent chance by next month, but 50% in 3 months, 75% in 5 months". (Putting bounds around uncertainty made me think of having clearly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty, Douglas Adams did some serious damage in my formative years.)

"Yesterday's problem is today's risk" but what if I bothered to do a root cause analysis, and solve the problem once and for all. Ahhhh haha, this is IT there's very little chance of that happening, and greater than 75% chance of coming across the same problem again. (Note the great use of the percentage.)

Use the knowledge of projects in your organisation to work out what the risks will be, and what the chance of these risks occurring is, so don't just make up a number like 75% (damn!).

Calculate budget and schedule reserves for the risks in the project. Spend time to examine the risks and how you will deal with them, how you will know you need to deal with them, can you actually deal with them.

Have a formal risk discovery process. Make sure that talking about risk is acceptable, maybe even admirable. Don't do this once, make it a continuous process.

Finally deliver incrementally. WHAT! It was all leading up to this. The best way to keep you risk under control is to do bits of the project, rather than big bang, one pass, all at once delivery.

Hiring Pregnant Women

2008-05-23T08:17:00.019+10:00

An interesting little conversation starter Hiring Pregnant Women - Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay

Would you hire someone if you knew you had to give them long-term leave soon after starting? There is also the chance that they will not come back to work. What if the child has special needs and the parent never returns? Maybe they will decide that parenting is more important than the success of your company - crazy notion. Some children can really suck the life out of parents with lack of sleep, so even though you have your employee back they are less than effective. The urge to discriminate would be extremely high.

This is particularly relevant in Aus right now as the government is looking into paid maternity, paternity and parental leave. Are we opening the doors to an increase in discrimination, or do we accept that as a potential negative for a stronger positive? Is this a question of values? Do we value parenting higher than paid work?

I would hope we are going to back parenting, but then I am biased.

Unfortunately I suspect most organisations hire with a very short term need. We need this person to start doing this job right now, and we hope there will be more work for them in the future. If this type employer has a pregnant (or likely to soon be up the duff) candidate and they must give this person maternity leave then they are looking at hiring a liability and will reject the candidate. So there are a few perspectives on this the first is that this is discrimination that is not based on poor fit of candidate (as the recruitment process is all about discrimination) and the second is that the candidate is lucky to avoid working for such fools.

Should we help the employer see the light and hire the right people, or just hope they make enough stupid decisions they have to close? Harsh and off topic, kinda.

Getting down in the Dip

2008-05-22T22:30:00.010+10:00

Seth Godin - The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

Is there anything to learn in such a short book? Especially when the author repeats himself so many times? It's good to quit, to succeed you need to quit because you can't do everything, people will tell you to never quit, quitting is good, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit. I get it.

I've never been one to listen to advice and I have quit many things, some of which have been significant some of which haven't
1 - Destructive relationships - close and not so close
2 - Studies - there's part of a PhD out there somewhere
3 - Books - what is so good about The World According to Garp.
4 - Games - Rayman Raving Rabbits, total crock.

I'm a quitter, and I do sometimes feel I shouldn't have quit. Sure it would be great to have a PhD, but I'd never use the knowledge, so why bother.

I have previously worked for a company that completely failed to understand when to quit. They stayed with appalling clients, getting paid well below market rate, doing lousy work and losing people because of all this. The strong belief that a customer, any customer must be kept at all costs was and is foolish. For example I asked the directors if they made any money out 3 years with one customer, as it seemed inconceivable and was assured (by one director) that they certainly had. A few days later the MD had done some useful book-keeping and showed me that at best they broke even. So they had a cliff rather than a dip and they should have quit and put their energy into something else.

I guess you can learn something from such a small book. (Or if you prefer, There are significant take aways, structured as learns, from this diminutive publication.)

And now I am quitting.

Commitment test at Zappos

2008-05-21T14:20:00.004+10:00

Bill Taylor has posted a neat little article at Discussion Leaders on about
Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too

If you're too lazy to read the whole thing here are some nice bits...

After a week or so in this immersive experience [training], though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.

Companies don’t engage emotionally with their customers—people do. If you want to create a memorable company, you have to fill your company with memorable people.

Some highlights from Waltzing with Bears Part 2

2008-05-17T22:59:00.001+10:00

Part 2 describes 99% of the software industry in Australia

In "The Case against Risk Management" I particularly enjoyed these little snippets...

"Some organisations are so desperate to believe they are in complete control that if they realise the aren't they settle for the illusion of control. The most common symptom of this is ridiculous precision (a very narrow window of uncertainty) attached to estimates that subsequently turn out to be very inaccurate."

Working in Agile Land we face up to the inaccuracy of our estimations everyday. We avoid trying to make precise estimates as we know this is just an illusion. So we use story points or ideal days or gummi bears or dog sizes. We assume an estimate is well an estimate, and for most people in software this is a strange idea, a confronting idea, even a stupid idea.

The whole section on Risk management in isolation is significant - ok lots the book is significant, maybe not the Library of Congress bits, and the advertising. If you start down this road to finding risks and acknowledging uncertainty but you are working in a land of happiness where uncertainty is not acknowledged you are sunk. "The worst organisations penalise unappealing forecasts, but not unappealing results". A friend working for a rather large telco told me the story of the three program managers, the first two were fired as they said the plan was impossible, the third kept their job because they agreed to the plan. Number three gave Churchillian motivational speech to his team "The schedule is impossible but we are going to stick with it anyway".

The Indy Car analogy is excellent.

"When you challenge your subordinates to pull out the stops and bring the project home on time (even though the schedule is ludicrous ... they will take every chance ignoring every imaginable downside, in order to preserve - at least for the longest time possible - any thin, little chance of winning."

I remember discussing one of the side effects of this behaviour 12 months ago with the director media company. He was (and is) a very savvy guy in all things online, but not really in software development. We talked about how in online news it's great to have stories that have long tails ie people keep coming to read the articles after the initial burst of interest. In software development there is a long tail too, but it's not a nice one. If we have a flurry of activity trying to complete some work to a foolishly short schedule we cut corners - either intentionally or unintentionally - the long term effect is when you come back to that code it takes longer to change, the changes are riskier, and the long tail is what looks to be a small cost but it's one that adds up every time you hit that bit of code. Add to this fun that 40-60% of code is developed after release you have created for yourself a serious problem.

How can we avoid this kind of stupidity? <agile rant goes here>

Change

2008-05-15T22:36:00.001+10:00

"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."
W. Edwards Deming

Some highlights from Waltzing with Bears Part 1

2008-05-14T22:31:00.011+10:00

A rip snorting book full of horror stories and help to avoid them. Title of chapter 2 says it all:

RISK MANAGEMENT IS PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR ADULTS

Other highlights...

Prologue
Ok so I get a project that is going to fail and I have to believe in the schedule, despite the impossibility. When it fails we all go "oh dear, what a shame, but we tried". Using Clifford's argument about the ethics of belief is interesting, you need to have some evidence for your belief. Of course people will believe the crazy schedule anyway, as Cialdini points out in his book on Influence, once you make a public commitment to something you create reasons for that commitment, so this is part of being human. Wow this was going to be highlights and I am babbling.

back to the other chapters

If a project has no risks don't do it

Obviously the authors are nuts. But wait it's Tom DeMarco, he seemed sane before. "Risks and benefits always go hand in hand", phew, that seems more sane. So if I don't take a risk I don't gain anything. The risk elevator is nice analogy, a business that is standing still - ie not taking risks - goes backwards.

"Taking explicit note of bad things that can happen (risks) and planning for them accordingly is a mark of maturity." Where as technical proficiency is not a sign of maturity.

Denver International Airport disaster sounds like a great application of the 5 who's. Ask who five times and you can find the best person to blame.

The case for risk management is well put. The first one sounds wonderfully exciting "Risk management makes aggressive risk-taking possible", gosh. I hope I can remember this and the others next time I need to be "negative" on a project.

In the eyes and ears

2008-05-14T16:19:00.004+10:00

Reading

Listening