Let Go

The really interesting thing about having a job for a while (over 2 years) is that you get a really good opportunity to compare one years performance against the previous year. And although many things change year on year, you know that one thing has been a constant - you.

And given that I'm not one for resting on my laurels, I look intently for areas where my activity has yielded an improvement, or for areas which, despite my best efforts, appear to have remained poor or under- performing. I'm pleased to say that 2012 has been a good year with some strong improvements in my department, but it has rather driven some odd behaviour in me. In summary, I'd say that I've started to let people 'get on with it' by themselves.

Ordinarily this wouldn't be an issue, but of course few of us work in a vacuum and there are a couple of side effects. Firstly, and the easiest to resolve, is a distinct lack of basic knowledge of what your team is up to. Of course, without having problems escalated to you or requiring your intervention, you never get to have those conversations where the poor guy or girl has to explain to the manager how things all went astray. So you need to replace these sessions win your own - either walking around chatting to individuals, or organising catchup sessions, steering groups, etc. Either way, it's solvable.

What is more difficult to fix is your peers and managers behaviour: when they continue to apply the same old rules and techniques to a situation which no longer requires it. So they insist on the same level of documentation, the same Spanish Inquisition when you have a meeting with them, the same panic when a problem is found - or, more likely, fever pitch levels of communication around a crisis because there hasn't been one for a while.

My suggestion to them: let go!

Recognise that the world has changed, and that it's changed for the better. That you need to change too, and up your game to that level that you wanted to be at when you first joined. And we'll all see the benefit.

The challenge for the rest of us, therefore, is helping them come to this realisation!

17 years .. not a bad run for a Start Menu

So i've had the latest Windows 8 release on my laptop for about 2 weeks now .. perhaps longer. I've come directly from Mac OSX and was determined to show that I could work as efficiently and effectively on Windows as I could on the Mac.

Sorry, but I can't.

For those of you who don't know (or who have a normal job), Windows 8 is Microsoft's latest and greatest operating system - one which builds on the success of such noble predecessors as Windows 3.1 and Windows 7. And, given the underwhelming releases which were Windows 98, Windows Me (remember that?) and Windows Vista, I was pleasantly surprised to see some radical changes.

The Close

There's an art in 'the close'. Ask anyone in the sales profession, or used to pitching ideas and they'll tell you all about how a brilliant demonstration or tangible rapport with your customer is worth nothing unless you can close the deal. Infact it's worse than that - you've probably burned a fair few dollars in the process.

Yep, closing a sale is critical; much like closing a film I think. Sure, I can accept a few duffers where the whole thing is a dream sequence or the saga is 'to be continued' but 90% of the time I'm sorry but I need a proper ending. It doesn't have to be happy, but if you're going to tell a story, write a book or make a movie please please PLEASE can you make sure you finish it off.

Cutting the film as you prepare to fight a wolf single-handed is not what i call an ending. Joe Carnahan please take note.

KPI KPI KPI

If you don't measure it, you can't manage it. How many of us have heard this?

Driving along the other day in the car I heard a noise. I can't tell whether it's getting louder, so I rigged up a microphone. And connected it to my laptop. Unfortunately there's a lot of background noise, so I keep my speed low. The noise seems to have disappeared.

Have I fixed the problem? Have I even measured it?

Some systems are acutely sensitive to measurement or the endeavour of measurement - you may be familiar with the observer effect - essentially it means that an observation of something affects what you are seeing. To observe a dark room you may need to illuminate it - it's no longer a dark room. It's hard to measure the air pressure in your car tyres without letting some air out, therefore you've changed the pressure.

And it's true also with human systems and processes. If you ask a team to report on the number of defects they have introduced, you may encourage a focus on defects, but you may also inadvertently encourage a failure to log trivial or quickly-fixed defects. I mean; nobody wants to be the team with the highest number of introduced defects, right? So we don't log the trivial stuff, perhaps we start forgetting about them, and we end up dropping defects into production.

So you then ask the team to report on defect fix times - surely an innocuous measure of how long a defect is outstanding? Yes, but longer is worse, so why raise the defect as soon as you know about it? Why not go have a chat with a developer first, discuss the problem, make a note on a piece of paper, wait for the solution to be found, and then log the defect, swiftly followed by a closure. The problem here is that your defects aren't being logged, trends can't be discovered, you may be inefficiently using the team - ironically real fix times elongate all because you've started to measure them.

How about measuring velocity? Certainly it's an 'output' measure - if a team delivers 400 story points in one sprint, and 300 the next, they've delivered 'less'. Is that a problem? Well it might be, so lets measure it. Hey presto, the next sprint they deliver 410, the following sprint 510 - excellent, we've got more output, right? Well no - all they did was relax their 'done' criteria so they didn't have to do so much performance testing - this allowed them to get on with more work, but the system is now 20% slower than it was before. A good result? Not really.

So we have to be careful what we measure, and thoughtful in what behaviour we believe it will encourage, and it leads us to consider what the purpose of the measurement is. I went to visit a company a couple of years ago who had transitioned to agile and asked them: how do you show that you are efficient? My question was clearly aimed to elicit a response which would include the metrics which they gather. The development manager looked at me quizzically and replied: we don't need to prove anything - we deliver value to our business at the end of every sprint, and they are happy to pay our wages.

The KPI in this case is clear and simple: delivery of value on a regular basis. And how would we assure that this continues? I believe it may boil down to three key scrum metrics:

1. commitment
2. delivered
3. done criteria

#1 simply allows us to ensure that the team is predictably delivering (as it must correlate with #2), #2 measures the value which the team actually delivers - it must be > 0, and must be acceptable to the customer, given our cost and #3 is our 'control' measure to simply ensure that no gaming of the other two values occur - in essence, to ensure that quality is maintained.

With these three, I believe we have all we need to measure, surely?

In Pursuit of Perfection

Very often i'll hear the conversation in meetings turning naturally towards a consensus that something is missing. Something which, if it were to exist, would have prevented the situation, would have made things easier, would have saved us money, saved poor Jonny from falling down the well, etc etc

And most of the time, this is absolutely correct. I mean, given that extra £100K we asked for, given the extension on the project, given the physical redundancy that we asked for 'last year' or the magic document which would have clarified the situation, we wouldn't be in this mess.

But we need to stop and think carefully about why this didn't happen.

Windows 8

Is it just me, or is Windows 8 a massive disappointment?

I'm a recent Mac/iAnything convert and love the way Apple lag behind the trend, appear to consider the best way to implement something, then just make it all look so easy. The Mac OSX multi-desktop is a good example - there have been desktop managers around on Windows for years - i've tried many and none have lasted. I've bought bigger monitors or reduced my font size rather than struggle with an odd virtual desktop thing which never seems to behave rationally and consistently. But on the mac, just do a three-finger swipe to the left or right and your other desktop slides into view - as natural as opening a drawer and looking at what is inside, or turning over a book to read the back cover.

So I rather expected something exciting and new from Microsoft with Windows 8 - something of a game-changer, something which would make OSX look old fashioned and perhaps show us that there is life in the 'old dog' Microsoft yet. But no - what we have is yet another 'skin' on the familiar Windows 95 UI with a fancy codename - Metro.

What can IT learn from F1?

So i'm a great F1 fan - I love lots of parts about the sport and to be honest I can't quite rationalise some of these things; on the face of it, the industry makes a lot of noise and spends huge amounts of money making bits of metal and rubber go faster and faster round in circles. It makes millionaires, advertises banking, burns many gallons of fossil fuel and ultimately what do you achieve? Not a great deal .. i'm not even sure they can lay claim to non-stick frying pans or velcro like the space programme can.

Horses and Stable Doors

Wikipedia shut down recently in protest against the proposed SOPA bill. And it got me thinking about online piracy itself - why is it there? Why is it such a problem?

If you stop to consider the origins and ethos of the internet it starts to make some sense. Look at why we build friendships, why we congregate in groups, why we created local area networks, and why we then joined them together with such enthusiasm. Our desire is simply to share.

Sharing is a good thing, right? We share ideas, we gossip, goodness knows I love Apple's Bonjour protocol because it finds printers, Macs and devices I didn't know I had. And then it lets me communicate with them. I move documents around, I use DLNA to share music, watch films, I use the internet to share ideas, to find out how to repair my car, to laugh at other peoples' misfortune (and marvel at their friends who somehow manage to video it).

At its core, the value of The Internet is only sharing. But we didn't tell it what to share. We didn't differentiate between the pattern of bits making up a copyright-protected audio file, and the pattern of bits making up my Word document. Primarily because we weren't interested - we were just evolving our natural instinct to the world of technology.

So when your business depends on sharing and you charge people for the privilege, you need to be careful. My advice - steer clear. Why would a recruiter publish the client details for all his vacancies? A trader share their deals? A journalist share their sources? And why would a business built upon the premise that sharing 'costs' find a use for the internet?

But wait, here comes the music industry, already making a tidy profit using technology to package up recordings and distribute them - deciding to leverage the internet as a sales channel. Of course, it gives them an opportunity to slash their production costs, revert to their core 'digital' product, drop any 'value add' around gatefold sleeves, picture discs, exclusive special edition booklets - dare I say it - analogue warmth versus digital convenience and massively open up a much wider audience. Now we can start to see their mistake - times have changed, sharing is easier now - we don't need a distribution chain, shops on every street corner, physical media and home-based playback systems - all we need is an mp3 player and the internet. In the blink of an eye, their core business model has disappeared. Remind me - what am I paying £13 for again?

I'm sorry, guys, but this is a bed you made for yourself. No surprise then that much of this noise around SOPA makes no sense. Why would we stop sharing? Why would we censor? Why would we have a problem with people communicating freely?

Not so fast and not so furious

Most of the talk nowadays is around fast networks - gigabit LANs, fast broadband, 3G data. And it's fair to say that he quicker we can get the data to our front door, the more functionality is available to us, and the more possibilities it opens up. Anyone fancy live TV over he Internet? Well, it's here! Anyone fancy software downloads via the net, or cloud syncing of large mounts of data? All here, today, ready for you to take advantage of.

But what about the low bandwidth connections we are often left with? Think they are a thing of the past? Think that it's only people in remote areas of the country, or those with older phones? Nope even those of us with posh iPhones and androids suffer from slow networks. I'm typing this on the train and my network connection is terrible. I was trying to get a connection from the office in the centre of London the other day too and it was awful. Why? Well, I was in the middle of the building with about 2ft if concrete between my phone and the outside world!

So what does his mean? I think it means that there are plenty of us on slow network connections even in this day and age. And our experience is often not considered. Take, for example trying to load the Apple 'App Store' app on a slow network connection. You are presented with a blank screen, shortly followed by a spinning icon which simply says 'loading'. You try again - same story. Try another app - a slightly different experience, but still unrewarding and often disjointed compared with the WLAN-based experience.

The message? Don't assume bandwidth - it's not always there!

Agile: Getting it

Talking to one of my scrum team members the other day, I learned that one of their techniques was to split longer stories into pieces so that they would fit into a sprint. Not particularly a problem I thought - until I discovered that they literally split it into two. And decided that 'done' for the part of the story in sprint 1 was simply defined as 50% through the work, and 'done' in sprint 2 was when it had all been tested and was ready.

I also learned about a PM who, determined to deliver his project in the new 'agile' way, had shared his project plan with a wider audience:

sprint 1 - requirements gathering
sprint 2 - design
sprint 3 - build
sprint 4 - test

I wonder what sprint 5 would have looked like?

I also discovered a project manager claiming to be both PM, scrum-master and product owner. I'm quite surprised that he wasn't also planning to do some of the testing.

The problem is clear - when we say we're agile, how do we know? And when we say we're using scrum, are we really?

Some simple 'is this a scrum' tests:

Is the team between 4 and 9 in size?
I've seen one-man scrums claimed before, and teams > 10 trying to be a scrum. Clearly 7 +/- 2 is ideal, but i'd settle for between 3 and 10.

Who distributes the work?
If the answer is anything other than 'nobody' then you have a small group of people under the leadership of someone who is likely to be using scrum to avoid taking responsibility. And you need to fire your so-called scrum-master who doesn't have a clue.

Does everyone attend the stand-up?
The answer is clear, but a large offshore supplier quite recently suggested to me that their scrum team would consist of a core team in which some members would 'represent' other members who wouldn't attend the stand-up. I guess these guys would appear to have superhuman delivery characteristics - huge achievements, disproportionate impediments and planned activity far in excess of other 'puny' team members.

What tidy-up activity would be required if we fired you all after this sprint?
Again, if the answer is anything other than 'nothing' then there is something wrong - the basic premise of scrum is that you keep asking the question: what next? And you do it after every sprint, and you must be prepared to completely change direction. Everyone must understand that it is more valuable to have fully delivered 0.5% of a featureset than have partially delivered 80%.

Why are you doing this?
I expect each scrum team member to have an excellent grasp of the work they are doing, not only from a technical perspective, but also from a value perspective. They need to have bought in to the work they are doing, so that they can look for better ways of doing it, so that they question appropriately, and so that they become more than just a pair of hands building something for someone. This is the point of the product owner and the close engagement with the customer. Without it, you have an inefficient team.

I've missed the obvious stuff like - daily stand ups, show & tells, fixed time-boxed iterations, retrospectives, etc. only because these things are perhaps easier to achieve. They are important, though, and should be happening also.

I'll let you know when all my teams pass the tests ..