Friday, August 28, 2009

Are you a micromanager?

Most people will say: "What a ridiculous question. We hire smart people and stay out of their way so they can do their jobs." However, asking the following questions will lead to a much better answer:

1) Do you pride yourself on being on top of your people and details of every project?
2) Do you judge the tasks of your people and think you can do a better job?
3) Do you pride yourself on asking detailed status reports and updates?
4) Do you believe that being a manager means that you have control over the decisions and you are better at making those decisions?
5) Do you believe that you care about quality, deadlines, more than your employees?

If answer to any of these questions is "yes", you need to see a leadership doctor.

"...more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value."

- Tom Demarco

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Meetings

Some folks are going to eight hours of meeting a day. Many of them have meetings to prepare for meetings. If you are serious about solving this problem and interested in getting things done you need to ask some serious questions:

- Why am I here?
- Why there are too many people in the room?
- Why is there a default length?

Perhaps this meeting-meter which calculate the cost of a meeting can give a guilt zone for those folks.

Monday, May 18, 2009

The portraits of former CEOs

When I was walking into the lobby of our main headquarter building in my previous company, there was an area where portraits of former CEOs were on the wall. We had every CEO or chairman’s picture back to when company was founded. The company’s focus was very executives heavy.
In the heart of change by John P. Kotter there is a story where the new executive team decided to remove all the pictures of old CEOs and replaced them with the pictures of their customer’s stores. Soon after the new pictures were up, several leaders mentioned that it is about time to focus on the customers and thereafter this become the talk of the company. It seems that little change made a big difference in their attitude toward customer service.
Perhaps next time you see your CEOs portraits – you can suggest a different type of art.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Power tools

I've been working with couple of interesting (great) tools recently. These tools are for those with an attitude and willingness to play around until get it right. “do it right the first time” addicts are doomed!

1) Visualization tool ManyEyes
2) Pentaho – NP and I were paring and quickly we felt that the ETL piece can save you time, money and reveal interesting insights about your data. I would recommend this to any friend who wants to extract, load or want to build a data warehouse application.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Other people's view (perspective)

I keep getting conflicting stories. The story of the blind men and an elephant (originated from India) shows why we need to consider other people's view (OPV) before moving forward with any project.

The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe.

A wise man explains to them:

"All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all the features you mentioned."

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

New connection

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Visual view of Obama's stimulus plan

I am a big fan of creating information visualization problems in purposeful,understandable, and beautiful ways. While creating some of our own reports this way, Charly mentioned that there is a nice treemap visualization on A breakdown of Obama's stimulus plan. The treemap boxes are proportional to the size of the proposed cost of each program.

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The ones in this posting were created with IBM’s free Many Eyes tool. It is a very simple tool to create many types of information visualization. It gives you opportunity to look at things differently and uncover hidden aspects of data with one glance.

Test your organization

Some people got to the top of your organization. Did they deserve what they have been handed with? Perhaps the better question is "What have they done with that power?"

As Bob Sutton the author of The No Asshole Rule
puts it:

"The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power."

If the test doesn't smell good then he suggests the following:

"Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them."

To test your organization he says:

"The best single question for testing an organization’s character is: What happens when people make mistakes?"

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Why "As a" in User story template is important

It gets interesting if two different persona (different users) find a given feature of software contradictory. I was thinking about one today, where we worked with one group and same story could cause whole bunch of unintended activities for other groups.

In software development process people write stories in the similar manner that a filmmaker make a blueprint of a movie by constructing story board.

Each feature is captured as a "story", which defines the scope of the feature along with its acceptance criteria. The narrative should include a role, a feature and a benefit.

The template of user story: "As a [role] I want [feature] so that [benefit]" has a number of advantages. By specifying the phrase "As a" within the narrative, you know who to talk to about the feature and also reminds you of a role or persona. Someone who can benefit by using the system (until then the system just costs). By specifying the benefit, you cause the story writer to consider why they want a feature. If you can't actually spell out the benefit, then something is missing.

Having done the homework and describe the same story from different point of views can save time and re-work. It seems like a good habit to write the same feature from different group's perspective.

Here is a an Aesop fable (great for telling your kids at night time) showing two different persona (Fox and Crow) having different goals in a situation.

The Fox and the Crow


A fox was walking through the forest when he saw a crow sitting on a tree branch with a fine piece of cheese in her beak. The fox wanted the cheese and decided he would be clever enough to outwit the bird.

"What a noble and gracious bird I see in the tree!" proclaimed the fox, "What exquisite beauty! What fair plumage! If her voice is as lovely as her beauty, she would no doubt be the jewel of all birds."

The crow was so flattered by all this talk that she opened her beak and gave a cry to show the fox her voice.

"Caw! Caw!" she cried, as the cheese dropped to the ground for the fox to grab.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Important lesson on Credit crisis

"I don't invest in anything I don't understand."

—Warren Buffett

Monday, January 05, 2009

valid measure of code quality

By Thom Holwerda: