Scrum Methodology

Scrum based funding model – 20 percent

Posted by ewok_bbq under Agile and Scrum, Scrum Basics

Sorry for the long pause between blog posts.  I’ve been traveling way too much lately.  This week I was excited to participate in the Scrum Gathering in Las Vegas (you can search through twitter utilizing this hashtag #sglas).

What is Agile ALM

Posted by ewok_bbq under Agile and Scrum, Agile Assessment, Agile Principles, Scrum Basics

I was asked to speak recently on a panel at the EclipseCon 2013 event in Boston.  The panel included the Co-Creator of Scrum, Ken Schwaber as well as Forrester Analyst Tom Grant. The link to the panel discussion is here

In preparation for the event I wanted to articulate to myself what does “Agile ALM” mean to me today. I wrote about Agile ALM a few years ago here but the definition and the article seemed a bit stale.  So here’s my new definition,

Agile ALM is the ability to build and deconstruct intelligent and actionable traceability through the life and retirement of an application leveraging the ethos of learning.

 

What do you think?

The Next Big Idea

Posted by ewok_bbq under transformation, Uncategorized

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On Being Available

Posted by ewok_bbq under transformation, Uncategorized

One of the things I am thinking about and working on is the concept of being more available.

Emmanuel Lévinas[1] (French pronunciation: ​[emanɥɛl levinas];[2] 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher and Talmudic commentator of Lithuanian Jewish origin.

Happiness Metrics

Posted by ewok_bbq under Agile Principles

Happiness Metrics were all the rage (no pun intended) in 2012.  While it sounds really ‘squishy’ and non-empirical, I see this metric coming up again and again with customers I am visiting.

One of my favorite thinkers is Shawn Achor of Good Think.  Shawn spent over 10 years traveling the globe studying people and their behaviors.  Here’s what he found:

Success does not make you happy

1. Achieving your goals can simply result in  moving the goal posts
2. If happiness is on the  other side of that goal post – you are delaying your happiness indefinitely.
3. The field research shows Happiness = Successful

You can re-wire your brain in about 21 Days – The Ripple effect will be amazing  (try it on your teams)

1. Do Random Acts of Kindness
2. Journal about positive business interactions
3. Send  unsolicited positive emails to coworkers
4. Do physical Exercise and Meditation

Watch him in his own words here at his TED Talk:

If you are struggling to get started – pick three or four of the 12 listed to the left and start journaling about it.  After three weeks, come back and leave a comment for me on where you’re at.

Comfort Zone

Posted by ewok_bbq under transformation

What can this picture tell us about getting outside of our comfort zone?

 

This picture is of Todd Carmichael.  According to the source of all that is true in this world [wikipedia.org] Todd is the first American to cross the Antarctic to the South Pole unassisted, unaided and solo and is now the world recorded holder in terms of speed by an America. The picture above was taken of him shortly after he finished.  #LikeaBoss his official finishing time is now grained in ink across his bicep.  According to his own video journal the distance was 700 miles.  Why would he do this?  According to the documentary that filmed him he did this to emulate his adventure seeking hero’s of yesteryear.

In reading about Todd, and watching his new TV program I  can only think that this man doesn’t live inside his comfort zone.  Its clear that he’s really pushing the envelope everyday and driving himself to be better.

So as you think about getting going in 2013, take time to think about something really really big.  What will you build? How can you transform yourself? How will you innovate a new solution to delight a customer? What will drive you to be the best you can be?

I love to follow folks like Todd.  Anytime I feel like slacking off or giving up, I just think – what would Todd do?

Interested in learning more about Todd’s trip to the South Pole?  Check out the video previews below from Nat Geo.

Upwards and Onwards…. Go! Fight! Win!

Transformation Strategies – Seth vs. Randy

Posted by ewok_bbq under Scrum Transitions, Uncategorized

It’s New Years Eve and personal and professional transformation seem to be top of mind for most everyone around this time a la (a) goal setting exercises and (b) the obligatory New Years resolutions.

I wanted to offer two different takes on transformation, one is a bottom up and one is top down.  In the bottom up interview the #1 blogger in the world talks about how to make incremental changes through experimentation when you don’t have the authority to change the entire system.  In the top-down interview we hear from a professional CIO how to transform a failing business to be more data driven and innovative.

The first take on transformation is from Seth Godin, the #1 blogger in the world. Here’s Seth Godin’s interview on transformation.  Have a watch. Do you agree or is this characterization oversimplified?

Next – have a watch of Uber-CIO Randy Mott. Randy Mott was the CIO of Wal-Mart, Dell as well as HP and is now CIO of GM). In this interview with Information Week where he talks through his transformation playbook:
*Data Driven Decisions
*The Speed Merchant – bringing cycle times down
*Efficiency vs. Effectiveness
*How to move money around to be more around innovation and less around keeping the lights on

He will be in-housing over 8,000 IT jobs to innovation centers to hot tech markets like Austin, Texas or Silicon Valley.

Do you agree with Randy or Seth? What are your guiding goals in 2013? Looking forward to reading your comments.

Discretionary Energy and Paul O’Neill

Posted by ewok_bbq under Agile and Scrum

A few days ago I watched a CNN special produced by Fareed Zakaria Editor-at-Large of TIME Magazine which featured an interview with the 72^nd US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.  For those who missed the program I wanted to offer a summary of the piece as well as some follow on analysis.  As usual, I encourage all of the readers to submit comments in the comments section below.

Before becoming the 72^nd US Treasury Secretary Mr. O’Neill was the CEO of Alcoa.  When he came into the organization, by all accounts Alcoa was lagging behind in terms of both employee morale and revenues and not delighting users.  Instead of focusing on increasing revenues, Mr. O’Neill zeroed in on safety.   At first glance it seemed like a very curious choice and one that did get immediate negative feedback from his management team and some of the long time tenured employees at Alcoa.

So why would a new CEO spend most of his time on an initiative focused on safety?  Really, how would that lead to profit and revenue growth?  The answer is the concept of Discretionary Energy.

Discretionary energy is the amount of attention you are getting from your employees and it speaks to their willingness to be “checked-in” vs. their willingness to be “checked-out” during work hours.  What Mr. O’Neill recognized was that there was a correlation between his employees’ safety violations decreasing and discretionary energy increasing. Amazingly, even with his internal detractors, his theory played out.  What he saw was a huge decrease in safety violations and a huge increase in discretionary energy.

Once the employee base discretionary energy was at a heightened level, Mr. O’Neill could begin leveraging his successful experiment by rolling out additional top-down initiatives that would spur additional activities / yielding results that he wanted.  With employees already going the extra mile and sending additional energy around safety it wouldn’t be a stretch to ask them to do the same around other tasks.

When you go back to work after the first of the year, ask yourself –how much discretionary energy are you spending at work? How much is being asked of you (are you allowing yourself to be checked out)?  And if you are a manager ask yourself, what you can ask your team to focus on that would heighten their discretionary energy levels.

Do People Matter?

Posted by ewok_bbq under Agile and Scrum, Agile Manifesto, Agile Principles

Hopefully the title of this blog post got your attention.  Culture seems to be at the core of what is important these days.  Many authors like Dan Pink, Steve Denning and Jurgen Appelo are making strong cases for the import of recruiting and retention programs as a means of building ground-up innovative companies.  Many of the arguments from these thought leaders have been built on shoulders of the top management thinkers of yesteryear.  Folks like Tom DeMarco who claimed that workers were different than say machines because of humans’ non-fungible characteristics.  If you haven’t read Slack yet, please do go out and buy it.  It’s well worth the money and time and would make a perfect stocking stuffer.

When you do recruiting for your team, what are the criteria’s you choose your candidates by? How highly ranked is culture versus say competence? See what Brad Feld of WSJ has to say here.  Do you agree?

While I was the President and Co-Founder of Danube, I did a lot of the recruiting.  But, really, I only looked at three things.  Here they are in order of priority:

• Culture Fit.  Our office in Portland was tough.  There were a lot of very strong women working in a collaborative sales environment.  This was very intimidating to many of the salesmen I interviewed who were used to individual quotas and goals [incentive structures are a topic for another blog post I am sure].
• Type-A personality or a Willingness to make decisions.  Was the person a slacker or a go getter? Really – I have nothing against slackers but I can’t work with them in the business world.  I am simply not interested.   Moreover, I hate it when employees don’t feel empowered to make decisions – big or small.  As I always told employees, I may be temporarily angry with you for a decision you’ve made that I didn’t agree with, but I’ll terminate your employment contract for not making a decision when a decision was called for. I can’t be everywhere always – so the groups I manage need to think for themselves given the nature of the information in front of them and act.
• Intellectually curious.     I want people who have a thirst and desire to learn new things every moment of every day.  If you’re not having rigorous debates and learning through exploration –you wouldn’t have been a fit at Danube.

You will see that I simply didn’t evaluate based on keyword experiences.  Sure – it matters, but ultimately you can learn just about anything (Salesforce, QuickBooks, Ruby, Scrum, etc).  So – to me, culture is way more important than competence.  Do you agree or do you think that culture isn’t material when building a business? I would love to hear from the readership in the comments section below.