File Buz

Other Sessions I liked at XP2010

Apart from the sessions Ive written exclusively about, here a quick synopsis of the other sessions I really liked. Im going to be quick about it, so let me just jot down the high level notes from each session.

Mary Poppendieck - The Five Habits of Successful Lean Development

Mary distilled down five characteristics of typically lean organisations with the mnemonic of 5Ps - Purpose, Passion, Professionalism, Pride and Profit. Here are some of the subcharacteristics of the 5Ps.

Purpose

• The reason why we work.
• Solving real problems.
• Connecting developers to customers to solve their state of pain.

Passion

• An undying fanaticism for results.
• Clean code comes from someone who cares about results.
• Altruistic motivation for great quality products.

Professionalism

• The drive to build the right thing 
• "Theres nothing as useless as to do something efficiently, that which should not have been done at all."
  
• Building the thing right.
• Test automation.
• A state of correctness at any given time.
  
• Simplicity of design - decoupled architecture, set-based design.
• Feedback
• Diversity of perspectives and heuristics.
• The right vision coupled with the right leadership and focus.
• Eliminating waste of all kinds:
• unevenness;
• non value adding tasks;
• overburdened teams

Pride

• Doing things gains respect.
• Being fast and sloppy
• Its ok to fail - "If you havent failed ever, it means you havent tried hard enough."
• Little documentation aids communication - find the balance.
• Communication fanaticsm - its at the heart of all we do.
• Principles trump processes and practices.
• Value people as professionals not resources.
• Hire exceptional people.
• Planning is everything, but plan to deliver not deliver to plan. So "planning is everything, but plans are nothing".
  

Profit

• Employees that are dedicated to success.
• Profitability is the underlying measure for success - without this, theres no business measure for what you do.
• Value people - valued people make decisions and are engaged to achieve real outcomes.

Though a bit fluffy, I guess the 5Ps are an excellent mnemonic to remind yourself of the behaviours you want to encourage as a leader if you wish to institutionalise Lean Thinking in your company.

Padraig Brennan - What Agile teams can learn from Sports Coaching

Padraig Brennan was talking about his experiences with Agile coaching at Ericsson and his view is that teamwork and collaboration are crucial to achieving success. He made an interesting analogy of how sports coaches work to build effective teams. His talk was about the characteristics sports coaches deem fundamental to success with a lot of inspiration from John Wooden (TED talk above). These are rough notes from Padraigs session.

Does Agile foster teamwork or require team work? Similar teams have varying results? How is that so? Why is that so? The secret is team work. Teamwork leads to good results. There are several characteristics to Agile:

• collaboration;
• feedback;
• shared workspaces or colocation;
• pairing/ helping each other;
• and heaps more

The fact is that just making all of this happen doesnt work always.
Click here for a larger picture.
Padraig then went onto to introduce Woodens pyramid of success (above) and urged teams to start from scratch, by establishing the foundations first before moving to other steps. He proceeded to talk about his interpretation of the science of coaching:

• people self-organise, but within parameters;
• teams bond with leadership;
• theres an external stimulus to aid correction;
• servant leadership comes into place only after the blocks are all in place;
• the coach details the system of play;
• the coach helps people learn through exercises of show and tell;
• the coach directs and leads until the team gets to be a well oiled unit

Brennans made some modifications to Woodens pyramid for Agile teams and I guess there are likely to be other modifications depending on the context, but I guess the focus of the talk was that before we can get to the aspirational goals of Agile Leadership, Agile coaches need to adopt a sports coach role to first emphasise the importance of teams and teamwork and focus on the fundamentals. Like Marys 5Ps for Lean organisation, Brennan had 5Cs for coaching:

• Character based: "Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are."
• Committed
• Competent
• Communicative
• Consistent
  

As a short talk, I think this was fairly meaningful and aroused the right kind of interest for me. For more stuff on this chain of thought, take a look at John Woodens website.

Marcus Ahnve - Done considered harmful

This was a lightning talk and Marcus basically challenged the notion of the fluffy Done state on Agile card walls because:

• the definition varies;
• the context is unclear;
• it means different things to different people;
• it doesnt necessarily capture a true done state (done may not mean business value delivered or feature in deployment for eg.)
• encourages local optimization because people mark as done only what they control

So the simple solution Marcus encouraged after having effectively made done the bad word in the conference was as follows:

• Instead of done, capture the real state of the card (eg: in production).
• Treat the fluffy done as inventory unless it reflects the real state.
• Capture the handoffs to visualise where work is piling up in the value stream.
• Discourage any local optimisations that create a false sense of effectiveness.

Kjetil Moløkken-Østvold - Who killed the digital nomad?

Not much to say about this, because Kjetil pretty much echoed my thoughts from one of my old posts - No Collaboration without Colocation? Maybe youre not Agile enough! Kjetils a hard nut and seemed very practical and was basically asking the question of our modern workforce, equipped with powerful laptops, hi speed wireless, etc  -- why do we still have to travel, show up each day in designated workplaces, in designated time slots? This is an unnecessary waste, because we travel like stuffed sardines, often in hot humid weather (tell me about that).

Kjetil dismissed the notion of colocation by challenging engineers who build communication platforms but are reluctant to use them. The culprits are:

• old managers;
• immature and oversold collaboration technology;
• and agile fanatics who wont budge from the stand of "colocation is the only way to collaborate".

There are obvious benefits to high quality communication and collaboration technology to the individual, business and environment so Kjetils point was that we need to be mindful of that and try harder to revive the digital nomad! Kjetil works for Conceptos and is proud to be a digital nomad.

Other stuff to be aware of

While that ends the list of talks I want to write home about, the conference itself was a great experience with the amount of networking that we were privileged to, the open spaces, the cultural experience (see here and here for the Jazz performance). I facilitated an open space on "How Agile teams learn" and Ive had some interesting insights about the topic which Ill share sometime in the future.

Something I particularly want to draw your attention to, is the Diversity in Agile initiative, particularly aiming to introduce more women to the Agile world. Theres a nomination system thats open for everyone to nominate an awesome woman. Check out the nomination criteria and nominate an awesome woman here.

Ive thoroughly enjoyed this conference and been privileged to meet some great people - I hope to see you all again, next year!

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other voices other rooms

In recent whispers about which of us might embark on a passionate affair for the readerly edification of all, Kodachrome suggested that I might " release "Wild Blue" to seek her own passions." The relevant background here, dear readers, is that while my nom-de-keyboard is "Twilight Blue," the Crayola color to which this hue corresponds is "Wild Blue Yonder." Thus, simply by virtue of not first looking at the Crayola Crayons colors, I seem to have established a bit of a spilt personality for myself here on Academic Secret.

What intrigues me about this (even beyond the delightful myriad of words that describe shades of blue) is my choice of Academic Secret identities, Id already begun to unfurl the fingers of the hand in which I hold one of my academic secrets. This is, of course, that I do have a bit of a split personality. By "split personality" I refer to nothing clinically significant, nothing remotely worthy of an afterschool special, horror film, or psychotropic medication. Rather, Im thinking of all of the aspects of oneself that are never expressed or acknowledged in the academy, included in a NIH biosketch, or announced in a departmental newsletter.

To be sure, these "other selves" need not be Wild. For example, recent posts about all the unacknowledged-in-academia work we do as partners, parents, washers of dishes, doers of laundry, mowers of lawns, payers of bills, buyers of groceries, etc. also allude to these other, often invisible selves. Moreover, many folks who come to academia from backgrounds which are different than many of our peers feel "split," say, when we go home to visit our parents in places that seem worlds away from the locations we now inhabit (one imagines the voice over, "sorry son, your cultural capital is no good here").

However, I think that the other selves that are wild may pose particular challenges. I recall a Monday morning walk to campus, when I was in graduate school, after a weekend that had been filled with dancing til dawn, sleeping outside, and having an amazing time just being a human being, alive, in this world, in this body. I was so sad, then, as I walked towards a place where the body is seen mostly as transport system for the brain, a place where I would do well to put that other self away for the week. I have also had moments of intense dissonance when the memory of some embodied experience or another (lack of specificity deliberate - use your imaginations, its fun!) flits across my consciousness even as I am being my most serious and scholarly self.

I do seek out and enjoy small acts of Wild Blue expression. Whenever I have to wear a suit (and especially whenever I will be giving a talk about which I am nervous while wearing that suit), I wear also the slinkiest lingerie I own. In my very respectable office are beautiful photographs of places Ive gone backpacking (and skinny dipping).
I could go on... in the coming months, I probably will.

However, more interesting would be to hear from you all, my colorful friends -
Who are your other selves?
And how do they get expressed while you walk the halls of the ivory tower?

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Other Movies

If you find any numerical evidence similar to what I believe Stanley Kubrick has done here in other movies, or in life in general, post so everyone can see it. Even if you have you’re own special numbers, dream about special numbers, or see special numbers in your cereal. Let us know, maybe someone will chose to write a blog about you.


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