Slack

There is a great lesson in watching the faces of Olympic athletes just before they start a race. Bolt the fastest man on earth has a calm and peaceful and playful confidence. Swimmer Michael Phelps has a quiet and intent look and is always connected to his iPod (great unintentional advertisement for iPod).















When facing the project – minimize noise, long meetings, leaks and ask yourself what could I do about this thing to make it doable and great.

Visual thinking

"When it comes time to discover, develop, or share an idea, nothing is more powerful than a simple picture drawn live in front of--and ideally with the participation of-- our audience.

Aside from the cognitive and neurological science behind my statement, the fact is that when an audience sees an elaborate and polished presentation, they instinctively believe it is done and have a very hard time adding anything constructive to it. On the other hand, when they see the picture coming together in front of their eyes, regardless of how simple or ugly it may be, they emotionally respond and participate. "
- Dan Roam - the author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

Here you simply watch the video below where Dr. de Bono, presents his six thinking hat ideas to the audience with the drawing in the back of the napkin style (an effective way). I have used the six thinking hats in the planning games for software to cover all the aspects. This video has the sticky factor for me and I can’t imagine getting the same effect through a power point presentation (unless it is a cartoon).



You might consider presenting your ideas on the plain paper next time you are posed to present something for your next project. For sure it won't be boring.

Micromanagement

There is a style of management with which comes from these assumptions: 1) People are motivated by reward and punishment 2) System works best with chain of command and control 3) People should obey their managers 4) Employees must do what their managers tell them to do.

Now you have a system in place where subordinates are incapable of doing the job, giving close instruction and checking everything the person does. Managers seldom praise and often criticize. Whatever their subordinates do, nothing seems good enough.

Your great people now are being treated as if they are incapable and untrustworthy. In this way, people who are micromanaged can become dependent, unable to make the smallest decision without asking their manager. Your system requires robots and "yes man" people to fulfill the top leader’s insecurities and needs. There might be a chain of managers who are criticized and they in turn pass this and become critical to others.

How to cope with micromanage? One way is to build a feedback loop (carefully) to show how these things are broken. When they over-control, avoid them and when they give you space, give them a positive feedback. In this way you have more control yourself (don’t micromanage your boss) and you are on the road of changing the command and control culture.

Random thoughts

1. Finish one thing really well before starting something new.
2. "Loosen up." – life isn’t that serious
3. Exercise — it is more important for your brain that your body
4. Being irreverent and off tangent helps
5. This is geeky - logical data model concept is out of date
6. Your project should have a good story – Hollywood way of making things happen.
7. Why CA does spent 3 Billion on Education and 9 Billion on prisons and criminal affairs?
8. Release your product daily

Cutting in the bad time

Cutting is typically Recession obsession-preoccupation. It may well be necessary, but smart leaders can always increase profit by promoting great and creative bunch, people like you who read stuff like this. The cutting mentality is deadly – most everyone goes into a demoralizing shell when "cutting" becomes the smell of the place.

The Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition

As well as providing a useful description of each stage of learning, the Dreyfus model describes how best to help the learner progress to the next stage in their learning.
According to the Dreyfus model there are five distinct stages, as the learner gains experience and develops insight and intuition. Very briefly:
The Novice wants recipes, best practices, quick wins
The Advanced Beginner wants guidelines, a safe environment to make mistakes
At the Competent stage you want goals, freedom to execute
The Proficient learner wants maxims, war stories, metaphors
The Expert wants philosophies, discussions and arguments with other experts(!)

Below is a video clip from Ben Zender’s talk at TED where he is coaching the audience to realize their untapped love for the classical music. This is a very entertaining talk which Ben plays like a 7, 8, 9, 10 year old child and then play like an expert. This video is fascinating and shows the Dreyfus model in action.

The Dreyfus Model - from beginners to experts

First Created by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus in 1980 while researching AI, the model was popularized by Dr Particia Benner in the mid Eighties in her work on theNursing Crisis in the US.

Most people achieve a level of 'Absolute Beginner’ or ‘Competent’, with few moving to ‘Proficient’ and fewer to ‘Expert’. It seems people get stuck somewhere in between, they can move from being beginner to competent by their own but beyond that they need proficient and experts around them. Well, it all depends. Listen to the rest of the story by Andy Hunt of Pragmatic Programmer fame interviewed by Rich Sharpe (15 minutes).

Multitasking - Driving while talking on a cell phone is like driving drunk.

Bad for your brain

Multitasking is a taken for granted attitude for many managers. I recently reminded one about the cost of multi-tasking, but the answer was “you can drive while you talk…” Surely this is multitasking. But are we serious about paying attention? When it comes to that your poor brain isn’t capable of multitasking. However, multitasking is a great way of prolonging your projects.

Cartoons for teaching

I always wanted to design games or create attractive stories for teaching things. Why not replacing the boring physics and math formulas with an interesting story where events happens in a city that people move with speed of light and most of the quantum phenomena affects their life in a dramatic way.

I also thought it would be cool to play a game “LoanOpoly” for learning the mortgage banking cycle instead of reading a dry, boring, thick and expensive book on the subject. I love books and presentations that tickle your creative spots using visuals, cartoons and charts. Here is a wonderful presentation [the author is unknown], using cartoons for teaching the subprime story.

All too true!

Virtualization is green

Jon made an interesting comment while we were talking about virtualization of servers. Beside other benefits he added: “it is also green”. It is good for our environment since you don’t need many servers, less heat, less parts and it requires less space.

Buy Don't Build

Now that I am working at a Start up, the concept of build vs buy is the top topic of my daily life. Here is the principle that I am following:

• Buy big things (operating systems, compilers, database engines) and build small things.

The main question is? Does a system “Upgrade your users” and not just the product? Does it enhance user’s life?

Reverse Living

I've been too busy changing job and starting things from scratch in the new company. Things like using open source development tools, getting back into creativity mode and working closely with business. I should say that I miss seeing my friends and should have a better plan to meet with them. I also feel younger in a reverse living fashion. As Roger von Oech says:

"Reverse Living":

… The life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, and get it out of the way. Then you live for twenty years in an old age home, and then get kicked out when you’re too young. You get a gold watch and then you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement.

What is your story?

You make a story. You verify your story (if you are a programmer – you write tests to shape up your stories). Then you do work that matches the story. Your decisions are toward accomplishing the story. The story will become true because you're living it.

New Book on Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior

If you do project work, you need to read the latest book from Tom Demarco and his co-authors, Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior.

This book captures memorable names for frequently encountered situations (project patterns). I am sure these phrases will be used in the future to paint the right concept for a given context and enhance the communication. Some of the patterns:

• Project Sluts—managers who can’t say no
• Soviet Style—building the product no one can love
• Hidden Beauty—an ethic that drives great developers
• News Improvement—status gets rosier as it rises in the organization
• Dead Fish—learning to appreciate project odor

and many more

When it's time to quit?

It is time to quit when you realize you have been saturated and you need to open the space for your friends to move things forward. If you are working on project O then it is keeping you away from doing project N. It is time to quit when you think what you are changing is small and you can create a much bigger change and opportunity for your friends by conquering a new horizon.

Something that’s framed as a loss is really effective at changing behavior

From NPR Radio:

"Yale professors Ian Ayres, an expert in contract law, and Dean Karlan, a behavioral economist, both entered weight loss bets. And both won. They took off the weight they pledged.

With their new company, StickK.com, they hope to facilitate personal commitment contracts for weight loss and other types of personal goals. If you don't live up to your end of the contract, StickK will give your money to charity or a person you designate. The service is free to registered users. The professors, ultimately, hope to make money through advertising revenues."

“What we know about incentives is that people work a lot harder to avoid losing $10 than they will work to gain $10,” explains Ayres. “So something that’s framed as a loss is really effective at changing behavior.”

Some psychologist estimates the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one; it will lead to an emotional deficit. I have seen this effect when my team of 11-12 years old losing a soccer game (big deal) where winning seems just a normal thing.

Estimate using probability curve

Programmers usually pick the earliest possible date when they are asked to estimate. Tom Demarco and Tim Lister make this observation with the probability distribution diagram. The area under the curve shows the probability from 1 to 100%. The most probable date of complete is August 9 and we are certain that 100% of the project will be complete by February 20. Tom Demarco and Lister refer to earliest possible point of completion, June 17 as the "nano-percent date". Nano date is the one that managers like and if you give them a range like this diagram it may not go well with them at all. This explains the fact that programmers estimates at Nano date and things always takes longer.

Appraisal Process

“If the appraisal process is so useful, we should consider using it in our personal lives. Would we say to our spouse, significant other or intimate friend, ‘Dear, it is time for your annual performance appraisal. For the sake of our relationship and the well-being of the family unit, I want you to prepare for a discussion of your strengths and weaknesses and the ways you have fallen short of your goals for the year."

”Also, honey, I would like for you to define some stretch goals for the coming year."

- Peter Block, Forward to Abolishing Performance Appraisals book

Unpredictability with Style

Real leaders use unpredictability to inspire, teach and make the world a better place while tyrants use it to meet their numbers (management by spreadsheet) and profit from people.

Here Victor Borge shows this philosophy with a brilliant piece of musical comedy in an inspiring and unpredictable fashion.

Arthur Benjamin - a man faster than calculators!

Thanks to NP for mentioning this TED talk - I had a great time watching this pure entertainment show by the "mathemagician" Arthur Benjamin. Remarkable!

Productive times of the day

What is your most productive times of the day? Don't go to meetings or tasks around these times of day. Look at your energy level during the day to find out when you are at the pick. After a week - you are positioned to do something about it.

Adjustments! When power adjusts the scientific results

Two Roman rulers, Julius and Augustus permanently got themselves into the western Calendar. I don’t know how many months we would have if other Roman rulers were as powerful of these two!? To accommodate them, there were some calendrical adjustments made. Sept means 7 and Dec means 10 but their months are shifted. August month is so important that an extra day needed to be taken from February, which originally had 29 days (30 in a leap year), and was reduced to 28 days.

I see same pattern happening now in many areas where people with power easily override the outcome of a scientific result. The "I don’t like that number" syndrome.

Use Red to change your attitude towards a habit

To stop smoking, put a red band around cigarettes to give the smoker a guilt zone. By stopping at the red band, the smoker gains control over her or his smoking habit.

Suggested by Edward De Bono.

The Red, Yellow and Green pattern

Using colors can add intelligence and meaning to your work. I found using red, yellow and green pattern in many different situations giving you the control needed to achieve quality. Control is a wonderful feeling when you have been out of control. While busy red indicates that you don’t have time to talk, yellow means strictly business and green shows that you are open for any kind of conversation.

In today world of agile software development, Red is failure, yellow is for code smell and green asserts that you are in control.

Cars use the color pattern indicating oil, gas and other things that are running out. Where else do you see this pattern can be used?

“If you do not design your own life then someone else will do it for you.”

Key on Caring

Our offshore coordinator asked this via Email:

What courses of technology would you recommend for your staff to take?

He had a list of classes (mostly specific to Microsoft Platform) in the body of email.

My answer. They shouldn't take any of those courses. They shouldn’t key on languages and platforms. They should key on learning to communicate, to think, and to work well with other people as well as to care for their craft. Once they have those, learning the languages and technologies become simple matters.

Reading principle-based books like Pragmatic programmer and Peopleware is by far a better start then blindly following those courses.

Subtracting = Simple = Better = Beautiful

Fresh from several years of computer programming, 137-year-old Sirius settles in the LA to finish his research on the behavior of computer programmers. But during his research he found most of the code written so far follows the Brownian motion that happens in physics. He was fascinated by a gentleman (Danash) who learns all the computer languages alphabetically…Ada, Basic, C, C++ etc. His research shows that people are always adding stuff and he thinks: “Kids should learn subtraction at school prior to learning addition”. He remembers in his dream while having fever, that a fat hand starts writing really bad code in solo. There is only one hand coding and the other one is missing. The hand then opens his mouth and starts drinking coffee and throw up almost instantaneously on the code. This goes on for the entire development cycle.

Over time, his disgust towards bad-code forces him into near-insanity, and finally Danash introduces him to a group of people who actually care about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful. He anxiously study and searches for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.

Their code was like a garden with a few things carefully selected and placed, simple, beautiful. Sirius realized that they also eat in smaller plates, pass the keyboard frequently to each other, laugh frequently, test like there is no tomorrow, and build their software 20 times a day. That was a turning point for Sirius’s research. There were no bad dreams and there were always 4 set of hands involved in any coding episode.

I should take my medicine, before this writing gets totally out of hand.

Sarbanes-Oxley

"When the cost of a new control is small compared with the legal exposure it covers, CIOs will implement the control. But this has always been true. Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't change anything. I predict that Sarbanes-Oxley will still be the law of the land 20 years from now. I further predict that it will have no effect whatsoever (other than causing a bit of panic in the first year or two) and will eventually be universally ignored. It will be like the blue laws still in existence in most states that prohibit a Wal-Mart from being open on Sundays, even though Wal-Mart is open on Sundays in all 50 states."

- Tom Demarco

Blitz

Blitz is a fast game of playing chess game. You must use 40 moves in 5 minutes, as you think and when you go over time you lose. The objective of this tight restrains is to keep the game brief and focused.

It reminds me of stand up meetings (they are Blitz meetings) which give all the members a chance to express their thoughts in a few seconds.

In chess there is a timer to keep track of moves and time. In stand up someone needs to play the role of the timer. How do you make one lose if she goes into details?

Committees

Some quotes on committees:

"A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours."
"The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present."
"You'll find in no park or city a monument to a committee."
"Committee - a group of the unfit, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary."
"A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled."

Sounds familiar?

I wish had seen this 5 minutes clip before buying my new car

Rob Gruhl the car buyer expert gives some great, practical advice on how to buy cars.

Trust

Most corporate default company assumption is "Employees are NOT to be trusted!"

You can not use a DVD writer, portable devices, access blogs or certain sites. On top of that your computer will log off automatically whenever you walk away to drink a cup of tea (drinking coffee had the same side effect). Actually, company loses money on the policy by wasting its employee’s time and drives the creative one away.

"Do employees who aren’t trusted behave as nicely to the customers as those who are trusted? If we don't trust them why are we hiring them?"

The Healthy cycle

"Listen to your employees, listen to your customers. Do what they tell you."

Video Specification

YouTube is a great way of learning almost anything. Why not create a similar tool for your company to deliver visual requirements to remote teams besides sending a textual specification.
Those who are remote then have a chance to watch a three minute video and get an idea as to what the topic is. However, if people who are making a 300 page of boring specification are the same who will make these videos then forget it.

Take a personality type test to find out who you are

NP was very excited about his personality type test. Meanwhile I was talking on the phone with AM and he just came back from a personality checking type of a seminar. He was very thrilled too. It is my personality to look into this further, if two smart guys are very excited then I should be too. That itself explains my type. You can check yours and your spouse here. I am not too sure as to how scientific these tests are but some of the points are very valid and fun to play with.

See the waste

Do you think if you replace a great developer with 10 mediocre ones you save money?

Do you think 10-20 mediocre developers can produce the same thing that a great one creates no matter how long they work?

Would you rather to work with 2 great people or deal with 20 unknown ones that you never see daily?

Final question:

Would you rather fly in an airplane having a pair of extremely skilled pilots or die by a crew of 10 clueless one?

Contagious

Seth Godin talks about a study that shows obesity is contagious. “If your best friend gets fat, your chances of gaining weight more than double.”

It is very important to have a tool for enticing you to choose what you learn when you’re hanging out with friends. I often tell my kids “Show me your friends, I tell you who you are”. A fat free blog could act as a tool to stay in touch with your selected friends. There is also RSS tool like google reader to let the flow going.

Value Stream Mapping

You are able to see that your process is taking longer than ever and your gut feel says you need new resources to remedy this situation. If application is running slow you think you need new servers or changing the application itself etc.

The question is what tools do we have to map our gut feel to reality? How do you know all the way from start to finish where the waste (waiting) vs. work reside in the process?

Value Stream Mapping - it simply plots the course of the added value vs. non value added (waste) to distinguish where the areas of attacks are. Mary Poppendieck’s presentation on productivity clearly has a great example of this process. You can also watch her presentation here.

When in doubt reverse it

Language is a tool to express situations. However our language for expressing the software life cycle is very poor and deficient. We couldn’t find a suitable word between 'Development' and 'Test' and we have been stuck with Analysis->Design->Dev->Test cycle. Reversal is a great tool – doing just that you get TDD or TDDA. Now we are equipped with words like “TestDriven” and “Refactoring” coined by Martin Fowler, but there is much more to be done.

Channel 137 - a TV funnel that worth watching

I have created the Channel137 site to contain intelligent videos. This is a channel for people who miss intelligent contents in regular TV channels, topics like agile methodology, Lean, extreme programming, and interviews with great minds on any subject. You just turn off your TV and watch the shows from your computer or by connecting them to your big screen.

You can also rate the channel and vote on its content.

What should project managers do when it comes to planning?

What should project managers do when it comes to planning? There are tones they can do to avoid wasting people’s time and bore them to death by putting fungible names on a list while playing with fake numbers.

I think there's a better way (this tool has steps), one that gets everybody just about everything they need, project managers, bosses, programmers etc. Here goes:

Step one: download Jeff Patton’s (from Thoughtworks) wonderful article on “It is all in how you slice”. You should print the article on a colored paper (forget the lousy cost savings policy – it costs more not to have it in color). Read it carefully.

Next step: Print more copies for people who might be interested or benefit from this tool.

Next step: follow the steps in the article for one of your projects. See if your team or customers will benefit from this process/tool.

Next step: visualize your exploration. Something 1 foot by 2 foot or so. Printed on cardboard. You can transfer the findings onto a spreadsheet or just take a picture and communicate.

Last step: Make this a habit and invite your best customers to help in your planning. Look into yours and other people energy level and compare it to the way planning was done before.

Send me a testimonial comment if this helps.

Four walls to trigger positive behavior toward having a balanced life

Remember there are four walls in your room. They are for Education, health, Art and friendship. I have drawn a simple picture of walls for my kids and every night they put dots on walls each time there is a success for a specific activity.

Today I looked at my own walls and it looks like this picture. I am not doing well when it comes to Art. To score on that, my daughter decided to teach me how to draw picture of Nemo the fish. I am very excited about getting points on the Art and friendship both. It is amazing how a simple tool can have a long lasting effect on your behavior.

It Is Up Side Down

Why people who don’t know anything about projects and work impose policies, deadlines and reward on those who perform the work? The mind set is that people are prisoners (of promotion, reward, title, etc) and they should follow orders. The wrongest thing is when they judge an employee and reward an individual or stop their work. I always give a score of 0 to managers who reward an individual publicly instead of acknowledging teams. I often wonder how they treat their own kids. There is a big difference when you say “you are a great kid” vs. “I liked the way you helped your sister today”. The first one is Jugging on the personal level while the second feedback is very useful and sticky.

Here is a great Video illustrates how these kind of small-minded people act as if they somehow deserve to judge far more talented people than themselves.

Boring

Sometimes while driving I see a person holding an advertisement sign. The person behind the sign does nothing all day but waving a sign. If you pay attention around you at work, you see some people having the similar sings up all the time.
Why not make these people helpful? Perhaps we should ask them questions. How is the traffic? Where can I find a nice restaurant? Where is the closest bank? Can we skip boring people with administrivia at staff meetings? Perhaps an engaging experience can help to reduce stress and make this world a better place.

Simple way of gathering metrics

Despite of huge investment in tracking tool still process oriented mangers struggle with gathering meaningful metrics. According to Tom Demarco a useful metric should have the following qualities:
1. It must be a consistent indicator of the cost factors to be projected
2. It must be available early enough to satisfy reasonable political constraints imposed on the estimating process

A very simple and low cost way of gathering useful metrics is suggested by Esther Derby which you draw a picture of all the modules and each time there is a production problem put a color coded dot on the module – red for a crash, yellow for an issue with a workaround and blue for a data problem. You will see quickly the most error-prone modules, and gradually you can tackle those problems one by one.

Turtle

Adding requirements for security, data shield and audit purposes come with a cost of slowness. Look at the nature – animals with shells (security) are far slower than others.

Simplicity

“How come my car is so much larger than my camera, but my camera’s manual is thicker than my car’s manual”.
- John Maeda MIT Professor

SPECIAL THINKING DAYS

Friday afternoon you feel different since Saturday is a special day. Many groups have special days and they look forward to have them. The concept here is the same, to create special days that increase productivity and enrich your life.

1. SMALL PROJECTS DAYS

Many of us have tasks and projects that they mean to start but don’t for various reasons. Often something unattractive mandate or meetings get in the way. However, on this day we break through by committing ourselves to spend a short specified amount of time 2 hours per pair on doing interesting stuff. On that day we say “No” to meetings – email or any other things to get things done.

2. LEARNING DAYS

Whatever your potential is - you become better through learning, study and practice. It would be a great day to design new tools like inventing a new game for learning the business. On this day you can learn a new skill, new programming language, crafting a new screen you always wanted for administrating your shared files, etc.

3. GETTING THINGS DONE DAYS

On these days your mood is clearing clutters. No email review when you start your machine and allocate time for reading emails same way C programmers do for allocating arrays [1024]. Read email at 10, 2 and 4. Reinforce the habit of making a small to do list of 4 things on a sticky or index card. Set short deadline for each activity and do one thing at a time (multitasking is evil).

4. POSITVE ACTION DAYS

On these days you invest time and energy to help others. Positive actions create a permanent effect of team work and long lasting friendship.

5. CLEAN UP DAYS

Increasingly we seem to spend our lives rushing around with stressful meetings, phony deadlines and many other things passes easily through our firewall. One consequence is failure to extract the full value that every moment offers and emotional bankruptcy. On these days you make “no” the default answer for new tasks, meetings, and other demands. Those things should wait and earn their way into the attention field. On these days you don’t review your email when your day or machine starts. Morning is yours, afternoons you can spend time with your teammate to refactor that piece of a code that make you feel unclean. You delete emails, trash documents and turn off your phones.

6. TRY SOMETHING NEW DAYS

It is very easy to become entrenched in the same habits and get used to your daily habits. There is always stuff in the horizon with the potential to enrich our lives – we just have to be willing to seek them out. On Try Something New Days start trying different kind of food (spray coffee powder on your pasta – it is great), talk with different kind of people, go visiting somewhere you’ve never been. Write a utility you always wanted in new language. (I am not qualified on many of these items, as I am too lazy to go to new places or do some of the aforementioned items; however I believe in trying new things. I have tried the grounded coffee on pasta and can’t eat pasta without it ever since).

7. WORK FROM HOME DAYS

On working from home days we get into the creativity zone and purposely engage our brain into thinking of “possibilities”. Your mode will change and you can perform better at work when you have these days (pauses).

Learning from monkeys

NP told me that monkeys peel bananas at the ‘wrong’ end. I have tried it and it seems peeling is easier and actually banana taste better.
Are there more possibilities at your daily routine that can benefit from this principle? XPers tests before writing code, Dell sells computers before making them…

Fail over

There is a joke (by De Bono) about the airline pilot who apologized to the passengers for having to shut down one engine. He explained that it meant they would arrive two hours late into New York. A second engine failed and he explained that they would be four hours late. Then a third engine failed. At this point the co-pilot leaned across to him and said:” I hope to goodness the last engine doesn't fail or we shall be up here all night!"

Welcome to feedback culture

Smart customers know that projects are done by a step by step process, not an event.
Instead of this:
Request ---> Complain
It works like this:
Request---> sample ---> ask for feedback ---> learning ---> more sample ---> accept ---> relationship

Who says we need our logo on every slide?

Garr Reynolds says: “The logo won’t help make a sell or make a point, but the clutter it brings does add unnecessary noise and makes the presentation visuals look like a commercial. And people hate commercials or being sold to. We don’t begin every new sentence in a conversation by re-stating our name, why do we bombard people with our company logo in every slide?”

He also shows a clip of Lewis Black appearing on CNN and getting fed up with the extraneous graphics on the display. Fun to watch:

When to stop

Toyota assembly line stops when something is wrong. There is a willingness to quit when things are off track - then they are on the path of mastery.

If you fire your worst boss, clients, stop working with the people who have no value, stop working on wasteful activities, then you free up an enormous energy. Direct that energy toward conquering great things and odds of success go way up.

Your pick?

You are presented with 2 options of picking a bottle of wine in a restaurant. One is going for 20$ and the other one goes for 30$. Which one do you pick? What if there is a third choice for 40$?

Last week I provided estimate to our users in a range, 4-8 weeks, 4 being the probability of have something to deliver. User’s understating was that we are going to finish in 6 weeks!

Better = Simpler

Many organizations view complexity as a sign of getting better. They make things overly complicated by imposing new processes which create metrics (usually they are not based on results) they like to have. The end result however, is very depressing: fear, pressure, uncertainty, and complexity. What suffers? Human CPU is not very good at handling pressure when things are complicated. Since complexity is the default (law of physics), you need highly creative people to make things simple. Creative people survive only in an environment which creativity is allowed. While many advanced teams are implementing proven methods to increase teamwork and creativity, still many managers are at sleep or denial, ignoring possibilities of doing things new ways.

At one time China was ahead of the West in science and technology then they started to believe that information was enough and progress came to a halt because they never developed “possibility”.

Simplicity is the best indicator of “getting better”.

The more "done" something appears, the lesser and narrower feedback get

One of my colleagues at work has asked me to give feedback on his vision document (position paper). Oh well, the document is so strongly voiced that I am not sure that it is a vision document, a road map or a solution to a perceived problem. The document is definitely looks sharp with pretty pictures of sunny vision and green road maps. It also has an appendix section containing code snippets of a tagged language (xml/xslt). I am sure that our friend has put tones of work into this and his document is well thought out and incisive.
So, why am I losing energy as I read through the document? So much of what I read strikes me as correct but somehow belittling of the problems real domain face. The vision: Reuse, shared components and shared database. The document then goes through some lengths to show a solution along with a possible implementation.
The problem with such a generic vision statement is more or less the equivalent of a manager advice/order to "get better." That is no help at all if not insulting. I am also not a big fan of vision first, team later approach. Most successful companies define a domain to explore, build a team and then have the team to come up with the vision.
I am losing more energy as I see the perfectly fonted and formatted draft, every sentence seems more done than you’d like it open. The solution proposed deal with small amount of real problem, pretty much like an iceberg where 90% of it is underwater. The best design is emergent and done through exploration rather than a perfectly prescribed solution.
Am I just grumpy, or others may get annoyed as well? I shared the document with NP and DR, they both reacted the same way as I did - just a little stronger.
Don't make the Vision or a design document look done. Here is the most damaging part of this exercise besides setting the wrong expectation as Kathy Sierra suggest:
The more "done" something appears, the lesser and narrower feedback get.
If you show me something polished and pretty, you’ll get feedback on font sizes. The possibility of getting feedback is far more achievable if you do it on a piece of paper, napkin or white board. Java people use Napkin Look and Feel, for the same reason.

When measurement becomes dangerous

Tom Demarco - based on the Rob Austin's book, Measuring and Managing: Performance in Organizations is that measurement is a potentially dangerous business. When you measure any indicator of performance, you incur a risk of worsening that performance. This is what Rob calls dysfunction.

Make the study interesting by using test driven approach

I was helping my daughter with the goal of making the social study subject interesting. Initially she was torturing herself by reading a page passively trying to get through the chapter. I was thinking that timing of this material isn’t right for an eleven year old person. We all get interested in these subjects later in life when we are busy working and there is no time for literature, social study and other great things.
To achieve our goal (learning the topic by injecting interest) – my daughter and I decided to use the test driven approach. Without reading any of the chapters we tried to answer the questions first. It was kind of like a guessing game which you do your best to come up with the answers. Now that acceptance criteria were defined early in the game and our brains were sensitized to those questions, we started reading the chapter. Every time we hit the line containing an answer – we look at each other, if we’ve gotten it correctly we smile, nod and hi five, otherwise we learn and that learning sticks.
This is a fear reducing method that can help your child [team] overcome something that is perceived as boring or scary.

Helping people determine if they work for an asshole.

This is the test of ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam ) scores based on Bob Sutton’s book, The No Asshole Rule . Clearly, I am not a fan of profanity and forgive me for using this word here; however "asshole" is the only word that delivers the proper message in some situations.

How do you improve the productivity of meetings for software developers?

Bring a mobile projector to meetings. Many people may raise their eyebrows by saying it is expensive but if you use a projector in your working session you’ll see the difference. These days I say that every team should have one projector handy.
Why is this important? If you have a working meeting and need to share and see different things, it is far better to show everyone the same thing on a big screen. If you print screens on paper people will drift off and meeting can’t follow its course. The feedback loop increases once everyone is on the same page and usually your meetings are very focused and productive.
This is not as expensive as most people think. One of my friends said the price for a mobile projector is in the range of 1000 to - $2000. People are expensive; it doesn't take much to recover that kind of cost.
Sharing ideas over a big projector screen is a wise investment and cost reduction act.

Measurment Rules

"Isn't it about time we quit measuring professional success in one dimension, vertically, and start considering how much your actual work matches your desired work?"

1: A useful measurement should help you to understand and make decisions.
2: The cost of gathering metric shouldn’t exceed the benefit it provides.
3: The aim of metric shouldn’t threaten the safety of employees.
4: People who measure shouldn’t design it to nudge the numbers to make themselves look better.
5: Management shouldn’t have a preconceived outcome in mind and are open to whatever the data tells.
6: It is about learning
7: Use “Just enough” measurement to understand the system
8: Don’t measure individuals
9: Create Safety – Before collecting data, talk with the entire team. It’s critical that your team understands that they will not be blamed, ranked, or rated based on the data.
10: Assure your team that you won’t be using the data to evaluate them. You are depending on the team to collect the data, and you want accurate data.
11: Having distorted data is worse than having no data. If your team starts reporting the data in a way designed to make their performance look better, you will be relying on distorted data.
12: See the whole - Increase employee safety by only seeing aggregate data, not the results associated with any one employee. Otherwise you lose trust.
13: Gather Data based on your department goals, anything else is irrelevant.
14: Find the motivation - Ask why five times to get to the root cause of why we need these data in the first place.
15: You don’t have to have fancy automated data collection or an elaborate measurement program to do this.
16: Make sure the collected metric is used in a way to increase customer satisfaction.
17: Check the progress
18: Stop - if there is no reason to keep collecting the data.

137

Sometime back our team had a lot of fun using number 137 to estimates unknown requirements. We could have used another number like pi but pi was a known number and less likely to believe by the project office.
137 is a mysterious number mentioned by physicists as the value of the fine-structure constant (the actual value is one over one-hundred and thirty seven), which is defined as the charge of the electron (q) squared over the product of Planck's constant (h) times the speed of light (c). This number actually represents the probability that an electron will absorb a photon. Pauli the famous physicist did a lot of research about this number and he died at room 137.
137 is the odds that an electron will absorb a single photon. Protons and electrons are bound by interactions with photons. So when you get 137 protons, you get 137 photons, and you get a 100% chance of absorption.

Two biggest mistakes

1. Not giving your team authority and enough space
2. Not managing peer relationships effectively

Stand ups

It seems that people have a fear of justifying their work during standups rather than focusing on what can be done.
Last week I created a big visible chart (story wall) of actions, how and when columns and stuck it to the wall for everybody to look at. This helped people to become focused and they started signing up for tasks as oppose to a push system which managers assign tasks to programmers.
We also tried to prevent people from going into detail. Initially we were showing the red card as a signal but recently adopted yawing for indicating too much into detail sign. Yawing is very contagious - start yawning couple of times when a meeting gets boring, you’ll be amazed as to how many people will get infected and start to yawn.

The twenty happiest countries

According to the study by Adrian White the twenty happiest countries are (the world map of happiness):

1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Bhutan
9. Brunei
10. Canada
11. Ireland
12. Luxembourg
13. Costa Rica
14. Malta
15. The Netherlands
16. Antigua and Barbuda
17. Malaysia
18. New Zealand
19. Norway
20. The Seychelles

Other interesting data: USA (23), France (62), China (82) Japan (90), India (125). This seems like a good list of places to travel to. I am thinking about spending my next vacation in Costa Rica (ranked 13th).

Guide to success

From Richard St. John, author of Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and Rich: Spike's Guide to Success.

Do you recommend this presentation to your friend?

Please let me know by adding * in the comments.

Measuring what? Criteria for good measurement.

1. Measure the cycle time
2. Measure the Business value, ROI and not the number of items or hours worked. Who cares if fruit that you made isn’t juicy.
3. Customer satisfaction – most will put their faith into customer survey – they allocate 1024 questions and forget to free the customer off. The ultimate question is much superior approach, you ask just one question. It goes like this: Would you offer this (product) to a friend? The scale would be from 1 to 10, 1 is recommending it to an enemy.

What happened to you?

To see how you have been evolved, do this simple comparison. Watch a movie that you have seen 5, 10, 20 years ago. Can you compare your feelings about this film to the feelings you had when you first watched it over many years ago? To put things into perspective, look at the code you have written many years ago. Back then, when you were young and trying to do new things with an open mind. What has changed?

Communication pattern

Couple of years ago I adopted the thinking process of assuming that everybody in the meeting is smarter than me. Since then I realized that this pattern gives you ammunition to communicate and understand others better.

The killer in any communication is the Curse of Knowledge. When we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become ignorant to others people’s view and lousy communicators. Doctors can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a simple question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. He is trapped in a road which when he talks to you, he talks from his view that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the Doctor in our own domain of expertise.

This is illustrated in the story by Roger von Oech about a creativity teacher who invited a student to his house for afternoon tea. They talked for a while, and then it was teatime. The teacher poured some tea into the student's cup. Even after the cup was full, he continued to pour, and soon tea overflowed onto the floor.
Finally, the student said, "You must stop pouring; the tea isn't going into the cup." The teacher replied, "The same is true with you. If you are to receive any of my teachings, you must first empty out the contents of your mental cup." His point: without the ability to forget, our minds remain cluttered with ready-made answers, and we're not motivated to ask the questions that lead our thinking to new ideas.

Design by looking at Nature

Steve Jobs mentioned that human can learn a lot from the nature and use those in design. Here is an industrial designer, best known for his work on the Sony Walkman and Apple iMac Ross Lovegrove presents his recent work. Here is a link from his wonderful presentation at TED talk conference.

Performance Evaluation

If you are like me, you would be a big fan of outsourcing tasks that you are either not capable of completing (like ordering things, creating legal documents or whatever is your skill gap) or loathe doing (like filing, copying, estimating numbers for some boring planning or responding to tons of administrative tasks).

One observation I have is seeing our most talented people are doing tones of administrative at different points. Would it be better to focus on what we are good at?

This brings us to one of these tasks - performance evaluation process (one I loathe passionately). Wouldn’t be better to focus on people’s strength rather than telling them “You need to improve on x and y area” and judge them based on some stupid grading system. Imagine if we have a Mozart in our team and wanting him (a great composer) to be good at audit, running reports, and tracking projects! I feel many managers killing talents this way unintentionally.

Process

Tim Lister said: "Process is like swimming, you need a process when stuff you do is not natural." Your real process is what you need when there is a pressure (drowning), the rest is window dressing. If you see a human new to water paddling so hard isn’t because he is asking for a sign off, he is trying to save his life. Under pressure he wants a floater or rope to hang on – the process of having a floater or rope around makes sense then. Waiting for somebody to sign off would be deadly.

Simple test

To see if you have created a great product - simply ask this question:

Would you offer this product to a friend?

A simple question

Is your boss gets mad at you?

If you're not doing something that someone hates, it is possible that you are not doing a good job.

Whether you're a leaf or a branch (employee or manager), pick your battles carefully, one poke at a time. Better to live another day to keep fighting the good fight then, say, being fired for trying to do it all at once. Build support for the leaf nodes, and find some brave branches who manage them.

How to get yourself out of a rut

Things I learned from many years of being stuck in a rough situations (Chess, meetings, stuck at a piece of code, etc), I have adopted a general formula for what to do when I’m faced with a problem that’s got me stuck. You need to take a creative pause in that situation. The “attacker” could be a person like your boss or a problem on hand.

The first step is to change your focus – this could last seconds to couple of minutes, you just pause and say “hamburger….” or drink your tea. I am drinking lots of tea for this very reason. Otherwise the first thing out of your mouth may make the matter worse. Once you feel you are in control and thinking is coming from the right place of your brain then you can return to the stage you were in the first place.

Everybody gets stuck from time to time, so have a handy bottle of water (it is good for you) or learn to say “…Ok …hamburger”. If you have a technical challenge just walk away and talk about other things. Many times you can turn and change toward a better direction by just following this simple practice.

1) Create a pause before you react. 2) It keeps you from taking things too personally
3) It helps you ask more questions instead of jump to conclusions.

Formula for success

Quoted from Tom Peters:

A man approached JP Morgan, held up an envelope, and said, “Sir, in my hand I hold a guaranteed formula for success, which I will gladly sell you for $25,000.” “Sir,” JP Morgan replied, “I do not know what is in the envelope, however if you show me, and I like it, I give you my word as a gentleman that I will pay you what you ask.” The man agreed to the terms, and handed over the envelope. JP Morgan opened it, and extracted a single sheet of paper. He gave it one look, a mere glance, then handed the piece of paper back to the gent. And paid him the agreed-upon $25,000.

The Paper:

1. Every morning, write a list of the things that need to be done that day.
2. Do them.

Get into the zone - working from home.

AG is one of the most productive players in our current project who is working from home in the Bay area. I am not going to generalize this to a rule and say “To be productive you should work from home…” As much as I love team’s interactions on site, I also appreciate giving people a degree of freedom so that they can be creative at other places. This is a standard benefit that good teams provide and is a great way to send your employees the message that you care about them and spark creativity in them.

I can tell you, the food at home is much better than the corporate cafeteria standards. Writers, programmers, scientists, analysts and even sportsmen will tell you about being in the zone. To get in the zone you might need to do something different. People get into the zone by working from home.

People get energy when they daily routine is decorated with a pleasant event like eating with their colleagues, taking a break and working from home, which increases learning and communication. They get back to work fresh, being more productive. They also feel you care about them, making them more loyal.

If you are legislating for people to come to office all days, then you should be prepared to make their environment better than their homes.

Over 50% of any piece of software is communication with its end-user.

The first law of Bad Management is:

“If something isn’t working, do more of it.” – Managers who think they can decide instead of users are following this law.

Crawl before you walk

Change comes through having great people doing extraordinary projects. You crawl before you walk. I see people jumping into solution forgetting the fact that they can’t even crawl. I hear: “version 2.0 will fix all of these….” Before jumping around and advertising a new solution ask yourself these questions:

What are you working on right now to make you learn how to crawl first? Does it matter? Is it creating a change momentum? Do you care?

Why Robots Are the Best Employees

This graph wonderfuly done by Kathy Sierra shows why many bosses like "Yes man" employees. Using the brain is all secondary!

Timing is everything

Paying the Technical debt is very important aspect of dealing with legacy code. However, timing of it is even more important. The team estimated 2 weeks for something that normally takes 1 day to do. The re-engineering effort is considered as part of business feature making the estimates longer. I am thinking that overhaul of system effort should be separated from implementing the business valued features. Who said business should wait 2 weeks for something that they can get now! Timing is an essential ingredient of success. If gods are telling you to do something – would you do it or …
Here is a questionnaire for leaders:
* Challenge: do you question what is and what you are told?
* Decisiveness: do you make up your mind in good time?
* Speed: do you take necessary action?
* Clarity: are you clear about what you are doing and why?
* Change: are you prepared to change anything and everything that needs changing?
* Basics: do you do well all the basic things that need to be done?
* Objectives: do you have written aims for this project, next year and five years’ time?

Queuing Theory

We spend a lot of time in queues. Life is a queue itself. You get stuck at traffic jams, for somebody to approve a request, lines at stores, waiting for your mother in law to call, or for rain to wash your car.

Queuing theory deals with making your wait as short as possible. One hotel used its front help desk to route people to specific elevator which takes them to their destination floor (reducing waste). “Take # 3 it takes to 10^th floor faster…”

The main measurement of a queue is cycle time – that is, the average time it takes something to get from one end of a process to the other. Nine months for a baby to come into this world. Sometimes if they come 2 months earlier they can play for another soccer team.

Today we worked on queuing jobs that are behaving badly. The time spent waiting in the queue is wasted time. There are two ways to reduce cycle time (I hate to limit to two); one is to look at the way work arrives and the other is to look at the way work is processed. Doctor’s office use reservation system to assure that patients arrive at regular intervals.

One way to control the rate of work arrival is to make sure small arrival of requests, if the same work is released in small batches, the queue can be much smaller. However, the other way is to go after fixing the processor – which is faster service (it is not in our control).

Next time you are waiting at store pay attention which cashier service faster. The first criterion (managing arrival) is natural assuming you are picking the leveled and shorter line by default.

Top 10 symptom of sick projects

• Over-preparation for the meetings. The more people prepare in advance, the more likely they will be boring.
• PowerPoint overdose
• Documentation overdose
• Big bang delivery
• Invisible clients. If you don’t see client’s visiting something is wrong
• Framework overdose
• Developers are awfully quite
• Phony celebrations
• Phony roles
• Analysis overdose

“Every project plan should try something new otherwise it is boring.”

NP and I started figuring out what the legacy code does. First we started writing learning tests. First we copied the legacy code and made sure it worked. Then we decided to try something new. We decided to delete the existing code until we get to the revealing part. That worked great, it felt good deleting that code and quickly we discover what was needed to make our learning test pass.

Michelangelo was telling the literal truth when he explained that his principle accomplishment was removing unnecessary stone to get to the piece of beauty. We found the same pattern works to get into the key point of a legacy code too.

“If you can’t test it, it is not working”

This week I heard/read many misused words (untested) from many people. Words like “Transition plan” or “Best practices”. “We should be done by tomorrow”. “Should” sends a false sense of security. A better translation of it is “we are having a lot of trouble”. Best Practices means: I don’t know what they are. “It is Better” is too broad to mean anything. “Transition Plan” gets translated to: I don’t know how to handle this problem. The list goes on and on. It you can't test what you say why bother ... "Wasting people's time is the biggest sin."

Week four-six (diff and merge)

The truck number on this project is 2. If two people get hit by a truck the project suffers irreparable harm. Every piece of work is also get assigned to these two people while there are more people in the team.

Collective ownership and shared code is a good next step for this team. No single person should claim ownership over any part of the system and anyone can make any necessary changes. The team goal should be to increase the truck number. The nice side effect would be the improved code quality. The good news is that the team members are all open minded and willing to work it out. The bad news is that pressure is already too high and technical debt is increasing.

Friday Nov 9^th over having a wonderful food in an Indian restaurant – one of my friends said an interesting thing: “start deleting code…” - Looking back at 4^th week, while doing a short iteration, that advice would have been the best strategy. It is obvious, the more software you have to maintain, the more it costs. The team is doing a lot of diff and merge of code. Customers are demanding and then something new comes. To deliver this version quickly, the team duplicates the code base, make the changes, and ship it. Sometimes the shipped s/w is not accepted and new things get added. Now, the line of code to maintain is doubled and code needs to be changed and merges in many different places. I’ve seen this cost cripple team’s ability and it is nearly impossible to merge a split code base without heroic and immediate action of 2 people. It feels good to write this: Don’t duplicate your code base. I have also mentioned short iteration and shortening the UAT cycle for fighting this syndrome. Please post a comment if you have a suggestion.

A true story

Week One:

2006

I changed my department. I have a desk and a Laptop borrowed from my previous job. Time to get to work. I shared with the team how automated test (Nunit) works. I heard one person resisting the change. “Ya, Ok – this works if you have formulas but our thing is different ….”

Then I showed them the continuous build (Cruise control) - One developer got it working on his machine day after. There's hope.

Week Two and Three:

It seems that DRY “Don’t repeat yourself” principle is violated big time here. Smell like copy and paste everywhere. There are many screens doing the same thing and rules are scattered all over the code.

It doesn't take long to identify the communication problems. Business people are saying something today and want it tomorrow. However, they aren’t talking much with developers. I’ve picked up a lot of information about the project and people just by talking to them. Stand Up meeting sounds like a good start.

The good news is that my boss is very supportive. The dev managers saying "our business people never show up in the meetings." Well, I hope this time is different. I start building a good relationship with the users. My boss schedules a series of stand up meetings in the morning at his office. The good news is that business people are showing up and liking it. The room is covered with index cards. However the stand ups are taking more than 10 minutes. I reminded everyone to be aware of this overrunning meeting and started raising a red flag when people go beyond 1 minute talk. It isn’t perfect but at least business and developers are talking.

Week Four:

Comming soon....

Mortgage for Women

Brand a bank which caters mortgages only to women. Sounded crazy here however, Women are more reliable and I believe their mortgage rate should be better.

On the same subject, I am very happy to see that Muhammad Yunus has won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. My favorite sentence which goes deep into "people first" is:
"It's not people who aren't credit-worthy. It's banks that aren't people worthy."
"Conventional banks ask their clients to come to their office…. The entire Grameen Bank system runs on the principle that people should not come to the bank, the bank should go to the people. ... "

Film Loop on Lean principles

These slides are created by using FilmLoop and is based on Mary Poppendieck Slides on Lean Software Development. If you install the FilmLoop player, you can turn these pictures into a screen saver.

Mehrdad Rashidfarruhi

Estimate-risk spreadsheet

I stumble upon a wonderful tool created by Robin probably a long time ago. (http://www.agilemetrics.com/tools/estimates-risk.html).

You’ll see a spreadsheet captures the Stories (Requirements) in a visual and easily risk ranked way. “One of the nice things it does is provide a framework for quickly capturing subjective customer (business) perception of the stability/completeness of their requirements. It then uses this to give a graphical representation of the Estimates/Risk of the project.”

Number of conversations inversely proportional to the likelihood of having trust.

Extraordinary how much organization talk about culture change and trust

Rule of Thumb is that number of conversations inversely proportional to the likelihood of having trust. More people and management talk about trust – more it is lacking.

Agile/Lean Screen Savers

Everyone chose their own screen saver, wallpaper, and pictures on their monitor. Since the screen savers appears on computers (especially in a corporate environment they can appear on all), there is an opportunity to introduce the company’s visions, values, and principle by pushing those words to people’s computers.

Add meaning to a search

What is a Lens?

Seth defines lens as:

"A lens is one person's view on a topic that matters to her. It's an easy-to-build, single web page that can point to blogs, favorite links, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, Google maps, eBay auctions, CafePress designs, Amazon books or music, and thousands of products from hundreds of other trusted merchants. You can pick whatever content you want to put in your lens to bring context to your topic. Then, when someone is looking for recommended information, fast, your lens gets him started and sends him off in the right direction. It's a place to start, not finish. "

I have created two Lenses:

http://www.squidoo.com/lean/

and

http://www.squidoo.com/testfirst/

Establish a simple rule to change behavior

I was recently thinking about how to make change possible. Started Reading “the heart of change” – the pattern discussed in the book goes like this: see->feel->change. Robin has a great example of using an application like Cruise control as a vehicle to change the developer's behavior. People have to write the test and do frequent check-ins to integrate. Good example of establishing a simple rule for injecting a behavioral change.