« October 2007 | Main | December 2007 »
November 29, 2007
Agile China Yahoo Group
Just in case there is anyone out there in China who is looking for a community of people doing agile, this Yahoo group, Scrum China, might be a good place to sign up! Make yourself visible, and find other people. Also, for what it's worth, I'm running a course in Beijing in February: check the course listing for Scrum Training in Beijing.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:40 PM | |
Team Size and Productivity
Here is a great article on InfoQ about team size and productivity. The basic idea is that a small team, supported by excellent tools and techniques will always do better than a large team. One aspect of this that isn't mentioned in the article, but which figures prominently in "The Mythical Man-Month" is the idea of communication overhead. It is impossible to house a large team in a team room and therefore communication cycle times, effectiveness and frequency also become a substantial factor.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 12:26 AM | |
November 26, 2007
Writing Project
Hi everyone! I'm currently extremely busy with a Scrum-related writing project. The lack of new articles here is mostly due to that fact. I should be done with the project in a few weeks, but it might take me to the end of the year. I will try to continue to post interesting links or small articles until the new year, but I won't be posting substantial articles until I am done this other writing project. Sorry for the lighter content, but I hope you will all be patient. I will, of course, make an announcement about my other writing project once it is ready! Thanks!
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:00 PM | |
November 16, 2007
Scrum for Meetings
This is a nice little encapsulation of the Scrum process and the daily Scrum meeting: http://www.effectivemeetings.com/teams/teamwork/scrum.asp. It is described in completely non-technical language and the example used is that of a marketing team. Basically, what is described is the Agile Skeleton plus the daily status meeting without any of the other project management aspects of Scrum.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 07:09 AM | |
November 13, 2007
Trust - Presentation by Diana Larsen
This is a great presentation on the importance of trust: http://www.agile2007.org/agile2007/downloads/presentations/Larsen_613_613.pdf. I love this sort of thing since it is, to me, so important to building effective teams. I often prefer to talk about truthfulness since that is the attribute or capacity that people need to develop, but the result of truthfulness is trust, so in many ways they are one and the same.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:33 PM | |
November 10, 2007
Agile Project Management Blog - Sanjiv Augustine
Sanjiv Augustine, agile coach and consultant at LitheSpeed, has a great blog: LitheBlog. Focus on agile project management topics. Good writing and good reading!
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:07 AM | |
November 09, 2007
Joke: Consulting or...
(mature readers only) http://www.lotsofjokes.com/cat_332.htm
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:08 AM | |
Agile Contracts
One of the Certified Scrum Trainers, Chris Sterling from SolutionsIQ, recently posted a good set of links on Agile Contracts. Hopefully these links will help you understand how to "sell", set up and execute on agile contracts. Here are the links:
Chris wrote:
Mary and Tom Poppendieck have great presentations and a workshop on this topic. Here is a URL to a Powerpoint presentation from them:http://www.poppendieck.com/pdfs/AgileContracts.pdf
Also, here is some data from a workshop:
http://www.poppendieck.com/agilecontracts.htm
And Alistair Cockburn has a great page on Agile Contracts here:
http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Agile_contracts
Martin Fowler has a page on “Scope Limbering” here:
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ScopeLimbering.html
Hope these help.
Thanks Chris! Here are a couple more links:
Leading Answers - Agile Contracts - blog entry with some good references.
Contracting Agile Projects - by the Cutter Consortium
I'm not an expert on agile contracts myself. I would be interested in hearing from people if they have any stories about actually using (or failing to use) contracts in an agile environment.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 07:17 AM | |
November 08, 2007
Why I'm Moving to FaceBook and Giving Up on LinkedIn
I don't often write non-agile entries on this blog. Nevertheless, I thought this would be an appropriate change. A couple days ago I invited all 454 of my LinkedIn contacts to re-connect with me on FaceBook. I'm going to stop using LinkedIn after over two years of building up my network there. Here are my reasons:
Many more people are on FaceBook
For a networking site of any kind, this is an obvious and substantial advantage! Many people I know are already on FaceBook. Probably, many people with whom I have professional relationships are on it. It's extremely popular, and there are some people who are actually adverse to popular things, but FaceBook is popular for a reason: it's good as a social networking site.
FaceBook has more flexible settings for relationships
LinkedIn is great for purely professional relationships that have exactly one type. FaceBook allows you to specify multiple types of relationship between your friends/acquaintances and yourself. For example, you can specify that you worked together, that you met in a Bar in 1998, and that you are now related by marriage.
It has an open API
This is a bit more geeky, but this allows the feature set to expand quickly as new apps are developed... including ones that allow FaceBook users to work with their LinkedIn profiles and contacts. Of course, there are many other apps including, unfortunately, some really dumb games. The trick here, is to just decline/ignore the things that you aren't interested in.
It has excellent on-site discussion systems
FaceBook has groups for common interests, notes you can use for blogging, public messaging on peoples "walls", private messaging (like InMail except free), multimedia including urls, audio, video, images and drawings.
De-emphasis on # of Contacts, Emphasis on Communication
LinkedIn feels too much like an individual popularity contest: get lots of contacts and you are a better person. I know that this is my own perception and it certainly says something about me! But I know that quite a few other people also feel this way too. This is the wrong reason to be using a networking site. Basically, if you really care about networking, as opposed to collecting large numbers of contacts, FaceBook is just better. All the different discussion systems make it so that almost any conceivable type of discussion can take place.... and...
Birthday Reminders, Photo Sharing, etc.
These are things that work for personal as well as professional networking. Just the simple little thing that I don't have to worry about remembering birthdays is great for networking. Sharing photos is also really important. It's good for your professional contacts to be able to learn about your family, and for you to learn about the families of your professional contacts.
This is not to say that FaceBook is perfect. There are concerns about privacy, there is a growing level of noise. It remains to be seen if FaceBook will continue to improve or if it will somehow fall apart in the end.
As much as possible, I would prefer to have one spot take care of all my networking needs. So really, the bottom line has become: I no longer even remember to invite people to LinkedIn, and I never visit it anymore now that I have used FaceBook for several months. I probably won't ever remove my LinkedIn profile, but I sure won't be maintaining it like I maintain my FaceBook profile.
The more I use FaceBook, the more certain I am that it will "win". I believe FaceBook is "most likely to last" of all the social networking sites I have tried. I often compare it to Google: Google succeeds because it is incredibly good at connecting us with the right information at the right time. FaceBook succeeds because it is incredibly good at connecting us with the right people at the right time. LinkedIn just doesn't compare.
If you are connected with me in LinkedIn, or even if you would just like to connect with me for the first time, please use FaceBook. You can find me by name there.
Thanks, Mishkin Berteig.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:04 AM | |
November 02, 2007
Dynamic Strategic Planning
I ran across this idea of Dynamic Strategic Planning [pdf] a couple nights ago at a meeting where a friend and I were talking about agile applied to non-technology work. He told me about Richard de Neufville who had come up with this concept of making strategic plans that were adaptable. It involves the use of Real Options, negotiation and other aspects of planning. I don't know anything more than what is written in the paper I have linked to... do any of you have experience with Dynamic Strategic Planning that you could tell us about? Are there any good books about this that you would recommend?
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:26 AM | |
November 01, 2007
Learning Collaboration
How do we teach people to work in a collaborative manner? How do we help individuals, in our incredibly individualist and competitive society, to learn the skills needed for agile teamwork?
Start with the Kids
Our school system, here in the West, is strongly oriented to individual grading, work, and even competition. We throw our kids into age-limited classrooms where they are inevitably compared to one another and learn to make the comparisons themselves. There are private schools which don't do this: no grading, mixed-age classrooms, but they are the exception by far.
It seems reasonable to me that if we could help our kids learn collaborative skills, they would at least have a foundation to build upon and minds that were more open to the possibilities.
In my mind, the best way to do this consists of two aspects: collective efforts and human capacity development.
Collective Efforts
Kids are amazing at learning. If they have experiences, they naturally learn to cope with those experiences. It follows then, that even if children start out with little or no skill in collective, collaborative work, then simply by putting them into situations where that type of work is required, they will learn at least some of the necessary skills.
I had two experiences in my childhood that helped me learn those skills. In my faith community, as a Baha'i, we had children's classes (kinda like Sunday school) where we played many collaborative games and learned about the Baha'i concept of consultation. I didn't particularly like the games, but nevertheless, they made an impression on my young mind. I even remember at one point when I was a little older learning to help out with these games. The things I learned about group decision making through consultation made a big impact on me and have become more and more important as I progressed through school and professional life.
The second experience was in my public school where I was streamed into a program for academically talented children. I think the idea was that if you had an IQ of 120 or over you were eligible for the program. I remember doing an IQ test in grade four. Anyway, the program was excellent in many ways. In grades seven and eight we started to learn Edward deBono's CoRT thinking skills program. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but many of the exercises were small group exercises where two or three or four of us had to work together. Again, I learned a great deal about the value of working with people with different skills and ideas, and how to do this in a systematic way. Many of the exercises and techniques that I use as a coach and trainer are based on or inspired by these exercises I did as a child.
Human Capacity Development
I recently wrote here about truthfulness. Aside from the obvious implications for agile methods that I have written about, there is another level to this concept.
Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues - Baha'u'llah.
There is no doubt in my mind that some of the basic virtues or moral ideas that we are supposed to learn in childhood are critical to effective collaboration. For example, the "Golden Rule": "And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbour that which thou choosest for thyself." Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, p30.
The trouble is, you can't do the Golden Rule effectively without being truthful. How so? Well, if you can't be truthful about what you really want for yourself, deep, deep down, then chances are you aren't going to do to others what they truly want. Knowing your own self at the deepest level is a pre-condition to following the Golden Rule effectively. And knowing your own self deeply requires a level of truthfulness that most of us are not accustomed to.
The same could be said about almost any other virtue or capacity required for collaboration: courage, humility, assertiveness, compassion, etc.
Of course, developing these capacities is something that doesn't happen overnight. The starting point is to look at what we can be truthful about, and building on that. As we practice these capacities in our relationships with other people, they will strengthen and we will set out on a path of improvement. It is helpful to have other people working with us; to support us, encourage us, and to help us honestly face up to our failures and learn from them. It also helps to have guidance that can be trusted. Searching for these sources of guidance is an important part of developing professionally as well as personally, whether it is a mentor, an author or some other figure.
These capacities are essential to our ability to work well together. The root cause of most of our failures to work together can be traced back to a lack of or failure to exercise these human capacities. For example, a lack of courage can lead to a failure to experiment. A lack of humility can lead to a failure to ask for help.
Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 07:26 AM | |