Archive for November, 2008

• Quantum of Solace

  Date: 2008.11.28 | Category: Movies, Personal | Response: 0

  Saw this movie on Friday when everyone was out shopping (or shooting themselves - you take your pick).  I really enjoy Daniel Craig as the latest incarnation of James Bond and like the physical aspect of this Bond.  There are very few gadgets and these movies tend to be about leaps, fights and other physical feats.  Not to give away any spoilers, but the movie starts off in typical Bond-fashion: very thrilling and gets the action moving with good pacing between action scenes and plot development and Bond being roguish.  In general, the film is good with the climatic confrontation between Bond and the villains at the end being a bit tedious.  Surprisingly, the famous James Bond theme music is not shown until the credits.

  After watching this movie, I get the impression the studio is retelling\reimaging the Bond storylines with Quantum being the new SPECTRE. I am not sure if this is the case, so we will have to see.

  

• “My Name is Carlton Nettleton…

  Date: 2008.11.25 | Category: Agile, Collaboration, Communication | Response: 0

  “… I have been with the company for about a year and I am an Agile coach helping people improve their software products by focusing on communication and collaboration.”

  is just about the worst way to do introductions in a big group setting.  Why?  Well, think back to the last time you were in a situation where you were asked to introduce yourself to a bunch of strangers…

  • If you were the first person called on, you probably were struck dumb at first; the total deer-in-headlights experience.  When you finally did speak, you felt tongue-tied and probably did not know how much detail to give, when to stop or what the facilitator was even asking.  Of course, once you were out of the spotlight you knew exactly what to say quickly and succinctly, but there no second chances for first impressions.
  • If you were some where later in the order, you probably were relieved and then had that “Oh crap, I’m next” feeling.  Instead of listening to what the other people ahead of you were saying, you probably spent that time thinking about what you were going to say, likely drawing a blank until the person next to you started talking, getting very nervous until you blurted something out.  In effect, short circuiting the introduction process.  Once finished, you likely were thinking “That was OK, but it least it was not bad as hers”.

   

  Next time you need to do introductions try this short exercise of pair interviews as a much more meaningful and rich format for introductions:

  1. Ask people to form pairs with a person they do not know\normally work with.
  2. Allow people 7 to 10 minutes to interview each other and take notes if needed.
  3. After the timebox is complete, ask each person in the pair to introduce the other.

  The pair interview exercise does not put people on the spot, allows people to gather their thoughts and then to showcase themselves as the interesting and accomplished people they are.

• Indiana Jones & Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

  Date: 2008.11.21 | Category: Movies, Personal | Response: 0

  This movie was barely watchable, I wish I had those 2 hours back.   Talk about milking a franchise to the very end!

   

  I mean, how old is Harrison Ford these days?  When you have a head full of gray hair, its time to hang up the bullwhip and fedora.  Oh, and how much money did they give Cate Blanchett for that dismal performance?  Not enough, ’cause she had the worst “Russian” accent ever!  And don’t get me started on Spielburg & Lucas – can they even write a story that doesn’t have aliens in it?  Puh-leaze – Indiana Jones fights Nazis, not ET.  Talk about a lack of immagination.

  Just to show I am not a complete snob, to this day I still like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  I think it is the most slapstick and funny of the series.  How can you beat a banquet scene where they serve bugs, eyeball soup and monkey brains for desert?

• Picking The Right Tool

  Date: 2008.11.21 | Category: Agile, Coaching, Collaboration, Tools | Response: 0

  Last week, I ran a “lessons learned” exercise using the Wall of Wonder.  There were some issues around trust and safety with this group and I did not think the venue of “lessons learned” was the right forum to confront these issues.  So, when one of the participants piped in with a suggestion to do the exercise anonymously, I figured it was worth a try.

  First off, let me say there is a time and a place for anonymous feedback, especially when you think the results will be skewed one way or another on how one or two key actors will respond.  In this case, it probably would have been a good idea to do anonymous feedback, just not with the tool I selected.  The tool I selected relied on people owning their comments by reading them out loud and then answering questions posed by the group in order to provide clarification or further refinement.  Wall of Wonder is designed to generate a free flow group discussion and analysis of ideas in rapid succession.

  By running the exercise anonymously, what I ended up with were a bunch of post-it notes gathered from everyone, reading them out loud and asking people if they wanted to comment on what they thought the author intended.  It had a less than satisfactory result; people were trying to guess at the author’s intent and not revealing their own thoughts and feelings.  Well…that is not exactly true, it was just very indirect.

  So, next time you think you might want to gather anonymous data, don’t use a group exercise like Wall of Wonder.  Try things like secret balloting\anonymous dot voting on pre-selected topics or even a Triple Nickels exercise.  Just select the right tool for the job at hand.

• What Is Your Problem?

  Date: 2008.11.18 | Category: Agile, Coaching, Extreme Programming, Scrum | Response: 0

  There are five commonly accepted Agile processes in practice today:Scrum, Extreme Programming, Crystal, Unified Process, DSDM.  Often times people who are interested in starting with an Agile process want to know “Which one is best?” or “Which one should you start with?”.  Unfortunately the answer is the classic consultant response: “It depends on what problem you are trying to solve.”

  First, a little background on me – I started using XP in 2001 when I worked for the dot.com at the beach.  I was a programmer-turned-XP-Coach after the boss\owner had read Kent Beck’s book Extreme Programming Explained (1st Edition) and asked if we could make it work there.  After my time with the dot.com ended, I used XP to develop a moderately successful, niche commercial software product for print shops with a very low defect count.  So low, we never used a bug tracking tool!  In 2005, I took a Certified ScrumMaster class from Ken Schwaber and have been involved with many Scrum projects since then.  While I do a lot Scrum today, my heart is still with XP – it just speaks to the developer in me more than Scrum does.

  Here is my answer to those people who are curious about my opinion on what Agile process new teams should be using:

  • If you are having problems “getting things done”, use Scrum.  The 30-day Sprint coupled with the Sprint Review has a powerful focusing effect on both the business and technical people.  It helps both decide what is minimum feature set they can deliver now, while prioritizing what needs to be done for the future.  The inspect-and-adapt cycle which runs throughout Scrum will direct teams to the places in the enterprise that need improvement.
  • If you are having problems with releasing a quality product or you need to improve the skills of your technical people, use XP.  XP places a clear emphasis on the technical aspect of programming (not so much in the 2nd Edition) and gives you concrete practices to follow.  The central artifact of XP is the code and many of the XP rituals revolve around making the code better – testing, refactoring, continuous integration, coding standards, simple design, pair programming and so on.  If you can stick with XP long enough to get over the learning curve, it is very powerful.

  Recently, I attended the SD Best Practices Conference and I was interested to hear Rick Brenner and Nancy Van Schooenderwoert say this about XP and Scrum:

  The technical practices of XP give [teams] a sustained productivity increase, while Scrum practices give a quick productivity boost and then level off.

  This observation is in alignment with my experience with both processes.  Scrum is much easier to start than XP because, as a colleague of mine likes to say, “Scrum is about the stuff you should be doing already.”  By design, the Scrum framework throws in your face all the nasty things, i.e. gunk or friction, that have accumulated in your organization; the processes, people and artifacts that get in the way of delivering finsihed software in 30 days and challenges you to fix them.  It does not ask people to do too many new things in their day-to-day lives, but it does requires you address what the teams find.  This is why Scrum is VERY hard to do and many people fail with Scrum – the organizational inertia is sometimes too powerful to overcome.

  XP does similar job in finding organizational dysfuntion, but inspect-and-adapt is not the central focus.  The focus of XP is quality and demands rigorous discipline and attention to the process.  Since XP is about a whole new way of writing code, working together and communicating, you need to be mature, skilled and disciplined.  If you have team members committed to changing the way they write, test and design their code, XP will soar and you will get the sustained, lasting improvements in quality and productivity.  If you do not, XP quickly devolves into hacking and creates a BIG mess.

• What Jim Shores Says…

  Date: 2008.11.16 | Category: Agile, Coaching, Extreme Programming, Scrum | Response: 0

  “It’s odd to talk about the decline and fall of the agile movement, especially now that it’s so popular, but I actually think the agile movement has been in decline for several years now.”

  Check out the full entry on his site for more.  Not much I can add; I agree with it all since it matches my own observations.  Even down to the part where clients are asking to be “rescued” from bad Scrum implementations.

• Agile Transitions Workshop

  Date: 2008.11.13 | Category: Agile, Agile SD, Design for Six Sigma, Presentations, Transitions | Response: 0

  I am quite busy with the presentations lately.  Next up is an appearance at XPSD on December 4th where I will run a workshop showing how to use some simple tools to chart and monitor an Agile transition for your organization.  This will be a hands-on session.   The tools I will be demonstrating come from my Design for Six Sigma work.   Look forward to seeing you in December!

• A New Puppy For the Obamas?

  Date: 2008.11.11 | Category: Personal | Response: 0

  The BBC is reporting that Peru’s Friends of the Hairless Dog Association is offering the Obama Family a 4-month-old puppy – a Hairless Peruvian Dog.

  

   

  Turns out that Obama’s daughter, Malia, is allergic to most dogs.   It is certainly an interesting looking animal, but not very “American”.  If they were to ask me (and they are not), I would suggest getting a Boston Terrier.  They are very smart, affectionate, fuzzy, energetic, and small – a good dog for little girls.

• Ever Been Distracted?

  Date: 2008.11.11 | Category: Agile, Coaching | Response: 0

  Write everything distracting you in a list on a sheet of paper, crumple the paper into a ball and toss it into the center of the room (or the trash).  Try this out next time you got too much to do or when your in a meeting to regain focus.

  

• Wall of Wonder

  Date: 2008.11.06 | Category: Agile, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Conferences, Tools | Response: 0

  At the SD Best Practices 2008 conference, I attended a tutorial by Ellen Gottendiener where she showed a storyboarding technique she calls the “Wall of Wonder” – it is a way to capture modern day “cave art“ifacts of our discussion.  This facilitation technique is a combination of individual work followed by sharing with the big group.  This technique allows big groups to tackle hard problems while respecting each individual’s thinking style and encourages collaboration.

  It is well-known (by people who facilitate a lot) that when you work in large groups that the extraverts are often the loudest and first to speak in group exercises.  Often times it is their ideas that permeate discussions and drive solutions.  However, many times the introverts atre the often the one to have the really profound and insightful comments that move the discussion into a new, exciting and interesting directions.  How do we find a tool that can challenge both the extraverts and introverts?  Let me show you how in the example below.

  Here is how the “Wall of Wonder” works; I will be using an example of a software team trying to decide what is in-and-out of scope for the next release.

  1. Gather the group in a large space where there is plenty of room to move around and there a good-sized wall to work on.  Have people arrange\group themselves any way they see fit.  Be sure each person has a marker and plenty of post-it notes\index cards to write on – everyone should have the same color ink and paper in order to foster annoyminity.   Use this opportunity to instruct the participants what and how you want them to write on the post-it notes\index cards – “write big enough to be seen across the room”, “give the headlines”, etc.
  2. Start with an image related to the problem the big group is trying to solve.  Remember, in order to think well as a group, we need to think well alone first – we want each person to think silently about the image that is coming up.  “Imagine you are at a party with our customers after this next release and one of our customers is shaking your hand about what an awesome release we just delivered.  What are they talking about that has them so excited?”
  3. Now give the group the focus question, the question that has brought this group together.  Instruct the participants that once the question is read they are to begin writing ideas on the post-it notes\index cards silently.  “Write down all the features that need to be in the next release.”
  4. After a timeboxed period of time has passed, ask each person to read one example of what they wrote.  When they are complete, ask them to post their item on the wall.  This technique helps focus participation and injects energy into the exercise through movement.  Anyone may ask for clarification.
  5. After five or so items have been placed on the wall, begin to ask the participants if they can sub-group the items into categories.  It is important to stay nuetral during the “Wall of Wonder”, so do not force the issue, eventually the items will coallesce into groupings.
  6. Continue until all non-unique items have been read and placed on the wall by the participants.
  7. If there are no groupings, now ask the participants on how to group the items on the wall.  Once the grouping is finsihed, ask the participants “Is this list complete?”.  If not, return to step #4 and repeat.

  Hopefully you can see how this tool works and give it a try next time you need to engage a big group in some creative problem solving.