tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54974722208323133542024-03-05T09:24:41.972-05:00'LeytonC' Program & Project Managementla·ten·cy (noun) ~ or is that 'Ley-ton-C' (my name) ~ yes, a bit of wordplay, <b>and</b> the period of time required to locate the first spark of an optimal inspiration or idea <i><b>that actually works!</b></i> Filling that gap is what this site is all about. Reducing the time required to get from project management impasse to answer.PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-1467899512050458242018-07-26T22:31:00.000-04:002018-07-26T22:31:13.378-04:00Seeing the forest for the treesSome people based on their aptitude for project management and level of experience intuitively see the things others don't see or recognize are even factors of (or for) consideration.<br />
<br />
For example, there are critical and chaotic situations where an existing team member, lead or manager that for one reason or another wants or feels the need to do something before they know if that action will make the situation no better and sometimes make things worse. This is the scenario of being busy for the sake of being busy, and is analogous to why doctors hate patients that go on-line and prescribe for / diagnose themselves using some web site (e.g. WebMD).<br />
<br />
Now there is a subtle difference between crisis and chaos that sometimes gets blurred in the heat of the moment. Crisis in the context here meaning that there is a real or imagined urgency and need for immediate action. Chaos may or may not come about as the result of a crisis. Chaos in contrast is when people are attempting to do something ... anything to avert further disorder or confusion (sometimes insistently and with great fervor and determination), and it can be made better or worse by actions taken. Thus, I believe likewise that a difference exist between reacting and responding to a certain stimuli -- e.g. an angry customer call. I'll leave that for another post though.<br />
<br />
In either case, you need to decide whether you have a crisis or chaos. That might also mean you need to go first to where they are mentally and emotionally and prod them along with you to enable them to see the forest for the trees. Also recognizing some people have gotten themselves deeper into those proverbial woods than others by the time you get to them. Thus, it will require more time and effort on your part to get them to where they need to be.<br />
<br />
In all interactions with others (to paraphrase the Dalai Lama) it is important to 'seek to understand before offering one's understanding' and provide a level of respect you would most certainly expect for yourself. Because they didn't understand the question or the situation does not preclude you from doing the same. I recently witnessed a public interaction where I thought one of the two people was about to say "no, duh!" and even though neither did it wouldn't have surprised me if that happened.<br />
<br />PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-11780856313316322062017-01-27T16:55:00.002-05:002017-01-28T14:04:34.574-05:00Comply v. CommitA leader with a vision they absolutely believe in and understand themselves is most evident through how they communicate it to those they need to rely on to convert it from dream to concept to implemented reality. They have the ability to talk about that future, that vision, with such clarity it is as if they are talking about the past. That's where the difference between commitment or compliance begins.<br />
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We all know there are times when there is a high level of urgency or some crisis and compliance is needed; where the need to get people started and a solution implemented. These are the exceptions.<br />
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We also all know at some level the value and benefits of getting people to commit to something and yet it's never too far away until I see another example of "because I said so", ego-driven politics. The following is my short rant of sorts to just get this out there in the hope it does someone good.<br />
<br />
The differences between compliance and commitment is regardless of whatever or how much passion you have for whatever you're trying to achieve. Here is a brief list of those differences.<br />
<br />
<b>Compliance ---</b><br />
<ul>
<li>People may comply but you still can't force anyone to do anything -- you will fail to fully achieve your vision / objectives ... no matter how much your response to this is "oh yeah, I'll show you!"</li>
<li>Whatever you're actually able to achieve -- it'll cost more to get there. Maybe through money, time, bad blood, whatever, ... you can be assured it will cost more.</li>
<li>It'll also cost more to maintain if for no other reason than those who do not agree or believe in your vision (because you didn't get their buy in) will do what they want when they think they can get away with it ... guaranteed.</li>
<li>... or maybe they just don't care because you already showed them you don't care.</li>
<li>Drivers try to enforce their vision by introducing a down side / threats; negative reinforcement</li>
</ul>
<b>Commitment --- </b><br />
<ul>
<li>Decisions are made and communicated based on objective, critical reasoning (not subjective -- yes, yes, we already know your mommy said you were wonderful and perfect. She's probably the only one and maybe a few others that think so), and so ...</li>
<ul>
<li>people understand why</li>
<li>they appreciate it's importance and impact</li>
<li>there is a WIIFM for them that isn't based on a threat</li>
<li>enforcement is mostly self-perpetual through positive reinforcement</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<br />
So much easier.<br />
<br />
A mentor of mine once told me they focus on sharing what they are for rather than what they are against, because what you put out comes back to you; what you sow is what you reap. Good advice. Wish more people knew it.PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-65814205443643622892016-07-17T16:30:00.002-04:002016-07-17T16:30:14.293-04:00We Tried Agile and got Nothin’<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Open Sans","sans-serif";">Anyone
who knows me first hand in or from the corporate world knows I’m first and
foremost an Agilist. Whatever my title is, at my core I’m an Agilist. That
means I live and breathe the principles of what it means to be Agile, and I’ve
done so for quite some time now. Sure, I can do and follow traditional
practices when it’s called for, but when it isn’t it tears my heart out. When I
write ‘Agile’ it’s not a typo either; anyone can be ‘agile’ without being ‘Agile’
and some companies out there may still be doing it very well. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Open Sans","sans-serif";">A
conversation I recently had with a senior R&D manager included her saying “there
are a thousand ways” to be agile. And while that is true there are just as many
or more ways to pretend to be agile and not reap any of the benefits that exist
by truly being Agile. The following platitudes are a few examples to highlight
why some companies have ‘adopted’ or ‘embraced’ agile practices and are still barely
or no further along in enhancing productivity, quality or engaged teams.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Open Sans","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Open Sans","sans-serif";">The
companies and teams who say they’re taking a ‘blended’, ‘modified’ or ‘hybrid’
approach to Agile have most certainly adopted something out of a book or
webinar on Agile but at their core they’re still 100 percent pure waterfall. I’ve
lost track of the number of examples I’ve witnessed or read about that show how
much this is the case, and how many billions of corporate dollars are lost
every year as a result. It’s enough to almost make a grown businessman cry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Open Sans","sans-serif";">A very
wise uncle of mine a long time ago shared with me Mark Twain’s definition of an
expert, “someone from out of town.” I’ve always remembered that and been
saddened within my career that so many others did not have access to uncles
like mine. How that applies here is when companies choose preferred employees
with strong influencing skills to attend a conference or something on Agile.
That in and of itself can be very good, but only if those same employees are personally
interested in the topic have something to lose if they don’t adapt to and adopt
to what they learn. Similarly, if you’re going to spend budget money to send
those people somewhere, please, please, please make sure it’s from someone who is
actually qualified and certified to do that. For example, someone with <a href="https://www.scrumalliance.org/certifications/trainers/cst-certification">CST</a>
after their name would be good. About a year ago I was speaking with someone in
a team lead role at a company who went with the lowest bid. That trainer told
the attendees that testers should “go for coffee” while the developers plan the
backlog. That company has been adopting agile for about six years now and still
hasn’t seen one quantifiable improvement in how they manage projects or
products.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgklvfn8cQS5HjA0ZSvyLw9INnSDdPXrYbYIEifivIGmvcnybMJEanrF8ahq60GjHWHgSSpcQVR3iJJK_5LrgaZX6TuSDoO1_N3OiDT83Tpv3p-kpBsZXNDAUx2mPVyIxpA3VeoHxshvy8/s1600/forward.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgklvfn8cQS5HjA0ZSvyLw9INnSDdPXrYbYIEifivIGmvcnybMJEanrF8ahq60GjHWHgSSpcQVR3iJJK_5LrgaZX6TuSDoO1_N3OiDT83Tpv3p-kpBsZXNDAUx2mPVyIxpA3VeoHxshvy8/s320/forward.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "Open Sans","sans-serif";">Too many
times I’ve heard executives and senior managers talk how important this all is
to them and in the next breath say the equivalent of ‘find me something I can
call agile that means I don’t have to change anything but gets me all the
benefits’. Too many times I missed the chance to say ‘you need to go <a href="https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=go%20big%20or%20go%20home%20meaning">big
or go home</a>’ even if you go in small steps. After all, <a href="https://www.gymglish.com/en/english-translation/crawl-before-you-walk">you
must learn to crawl before you can walk</a>, and you must learn to walk before
you can run. </span><span style="font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;">I
seriously doubt they would’ve listened anyway. Speaking to those people any
more than I have is like spitting into the wind, and has earned me and many
others the label and back-handed compliment of being a “purist” among those
same people. I don’t take the insults or suggestions that I’m immature in the
business world too seriously though, and I hope those others feel likewise. I’ve
already empirically proven time and time again that doing Agile as intended
will reap the benefits many once though impossible. And to offer some
inspiration for some of those others who are only now becoming inspired by
Agile, even </span><a href="http://www.dictionary.com/browse/out-of-the-mouths-of-babes" style="font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;">out of the mouths
of babes</a><span style="font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;"> comes wisdom. Those other naysayers and </span><a href="https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=active&q=smart+people+talk+about+ideas" style="font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;">belittlers</a><span style="font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif;">
on the other hand will never envision let alone earn the ability to achieve
anything close to the benefits reaped by other companies who do embrace Agile
for all its worth. They and their companies may even lament one day ‘if only we
had known!’ Sad thing is for them and all the others they were supposed to lead,
they did.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Open Sans","sans-serif";">Finally,
like any activity, being Agile takes practice to get good at it. Some would
even say 10,000 hours of practice. So send people on courses, attend
conferences, hire a consultant, whatever you need to do to grab that ‘Agile’
brass ring. Just don’t keep doing what you’ve always been doing except now with
some agile term on it that sounds good. You won’t reap the promised benefits
(no matter how many excuses are forthcoming) and it tears the heart out of us
who really care about this stuff.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-24987390430117105182015-11-09T19:29:00.000-05:002015-11-09T19:29:04.337-05:00The definition of a LeaderI re-watched the Peter Mansbridge open access interview of Justin Trudeau last Wednesday, November 4.<br />
<br />
What was perhaps the most inspirational for me was when they were recording him on a teleconference with grade school students. Part of his response to one student was, "A good teacher is not someone who stands up in the front of the class and gives out all the answers. A good teacher is someone who knows the challenges their students are facing and helps them solve all those challenges and get the answers."<br />
<br />
When asked about it afterwards he replied, "Being a teacher is what I am."<br />
<br />
What speaks to me most about this is that it would be very easy to replace the word 'teacher' with the word 'leader'. This is more than leadership, this is the heart of servant leadership. Time will tell for sure. At this rate; however, I may be witnessing the first politician I will ever believe in.<br />
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PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-85682441022771850182015-07-25T23:42:00.001-04:002015-07-25T23:42:22.671-04:00Kanban’s jump onto the Agile bandwagon<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As an agilist with a love of knowledge one of the things that irritates me to no end are when someone modifies the definition of something to suit their own marketing or other agenda. Thus, let's first create a framework for what is to follow.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <br />
<h3><b><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">History</span></b></h3><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Kanban at its most basic level is a </span><b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Japanese word</b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> that means visual token or instruction card, or yes, there are as many ‘roughly translated …’ definitions out there for ‘kanban’ as there are kanban web sites and product solutions out there on the interweb. :-) </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"></span><br />
<div><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Many years ago and even some sailing vessels today use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_maritime_signal_flags">signal flags</a>. These flags were introduced at some people’s estimates approximately 300 years ago. And they are part of the maritime standards and laws still today; although I would hazard to guess at the percentage of people today with boats that could read them. The point here is not to suggest signal flags are Agile. They are nevertheless ‘instruction cards’. As such, the message below could mean “AGILE” or “I have a diver down and you need to stay clear unless you’re a pilot at which you should approach at low speed while I alter my course to port (the right) because the ship is quarantined so when I said ‘port’ before I actually meant starboard.” You decide. :-) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgYXRGFu_MvyOwRdLh8jj2vfWqMP_ngJo3EHtJYIyKEkVROoiT2EEajQFjDXAQhf2oxTMdXy2lQOv_EISoG4aCIzJg7Ha0v7-BdixjBSiUXWwSrwvtPH_Xy4-vTbPo-omIC7C2kkujrm0/s1600/AGILE-flag.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="71" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgYXRGFu_MvyOwRdLh8jj2vfWqMP_ngJo3EHtJYIyKEkVROoiT2EEajQFjDXAQhf2oxTMdXy2lQOv_EISoG4aCIzJg7Ha0v7-BdixjBSiUXWwSrwvtPH_Xy4-vTbPo-omIC7C2kkujrm0/s320/AGILE-flag.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Eventually Toyota started using the principles of kanban for manufacturing in the 1950s. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And seriously, at none of these times within any of a multitude of this or other examples anywhere across the decades or centuries ago was anyone thinking "Agile" project management. They weren’t even thinking about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-Time_Manufacturing" target="_blank">JIT</a> either for that matter until the 1960s in Japan and the 1980s in North America. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The word, the principles of kanban and signal or instruction cards existed all the same.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <h3><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Skip forward to the Present </b></span></h3><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The popularity of Agile gaining as much momentum as there are people abusing it to serve whatever agenda they have, and for that matter people and companies applying it as intended and gaining huge benefits as a result.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There are also an incredible number of people and companies <a href="https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1AFAB_enCA478CA478&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=schlock" target="_blank">schlocking</a> the next best mouse trap. Intermingled among them are some really awesome products that can support and enhance the effectiveness of teams within companies to achieve results unimaginable until they actually see it for themselves. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So here are some general good practices in no particular order you may just wish to follow if you’re going to use ‘kanban” and “Agile” in the same breath. </span><br />
<br />
<ul><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Unless you're a team of 3 or less and the project isn't that complicated or complex, it needs to be so much more than three columns of states of work encompassing To Do, In progress, Done or some variety of those labels. If that describes your team and the project, sure use kanban; you might just love it! Just don’t call it Agile … at least just not right away.</span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The principles of Lean and Limited WIP are important. Create distinct rows for features and priority.</span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">No tool is Agile if neither it nor those using it are adhering to the principles behind Agile. And in the context of this article in particular, the first value statement in the </span><a href="http://www.agilemanifesto.org/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">Agile Manifesto</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> itself … “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. That leads me to another factor all too many take undue liberties with; the word is ‘over’, not in place of, or instead of … but that’s another article for another day.</span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Whatever tool you plan to leverage, a tool with a Personal Kanban and work by person views so you can see who is overloaded (or overloaded themselves) and is blocking or blocked by others will very likely at one time or another be great a feature to have available to you. Some tools address this by creating Done columns in between functional group columns, or colour-code the story cards.</span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">If you've got multiple cards that someone says they all have together in their own personal kanban you really should be asking yourself why. Seriously, I've seen project teams of about 20 people with 3-month development windows where they've created over a thousand story cards. Now that's an example of where those deconstructing stories should be checked for OCD! :-) In all seriousness, any team that does this has with very high certainty eliminated any scheduling benefits available from taking an Agile approach to what they are doing.</span></li>
</ul><ul><li><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The point at which some process manager or anyone else over-complicates how a kanban approach is used that is also the point you are no longer following the principles of kanban -- as I believe is described so very well in the video attached to <a href="http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/kanban">http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/kanban</a> as a good example. </span></li>
</ul><br />
<h3><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Conclusion</span></h3><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Kanban can be an incredibly awesome and effective way to manage projects. Kanban is not Agile on its own unless the specific guiding principles also applied to it. For that matter, no tool on its own is Agile.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span> <h3><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">References</span></h3><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://www.crisp.se/file-uploads/kanban-kick-start.pdf" target="_blank">https://www.crisp.se/file-uploads/kanban-kick-start.pdf </a></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://kanbanery.com/ebook/GettingStartedWithKanban.pdf" target="_blank">https://kanbanery.com/ebook/GettingStartedWithKanban.pdf</a></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html" target="_blank">http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html</a> </span><br />
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</span></div>PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-42944221461250052472014-09-13T17:50:00.000-04:002014-09-13T17:52:20.221-04:00You're Agile ... really?!<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">One really easy way to determine if you are doing Agile or not is to ask if part way through the project, the company could release what you've done so far and start making money from it. Not whether the business <b>will</b>; whether it <b>could</b>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">And as those who know me personally have heard me say many times, ... </span><i style="color: #444444; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">There is a big difference between big-A Agile and little-a agile. You can be 'agile' without being Agile, but you can't be Agile without being agile.</i><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">That for me is what is at the heart of a lot overly complicated answers I see on the web. As apparently said by Albert Einstein, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." And based on what I've read about Al in the past, 'simple' refers to how complicated something is, not how complex it is, and being able to</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> describe something so everyone can understand it at some depth.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">If you want to be truly, over the top successful in business these days you need to understand and build towards the MVPs (minimally viable products) from your customers' perspectives; not yours. Customers' needs change over time so adaptability built into your development practices whether you're creating software or anything else. That said ...</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> remembering all the while that your customers may not know what exactly it is that they want. That's why you're here. (see / Google Henry Ford and Steve Jobs quotes)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Want change because your company doesn't do that well? Adopt new habits and eliminate old routines. Meaning that if all you do is slap agile labels on the way you've always done things, or worse, apply the parts of Agile that align to how you currently think and ignore the rest you might as well be teaching a pig to sing. As the idiom goes "it's a waste of time and all it does is annoy the pig". </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">That's my rant for today ... maybe I'll have the where-with-all to read some more 'Agile' (or is that 'agile') spam in my inbox after I take the dogs for a walk. :-) </span><br />
<br />
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<div style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-7494931552491259862014-07-18T11:28:00.001-04:002014-07-18T11:28:25.895-04:00<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">This post is is inspired by <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=15131132&goback=%2Egde_118003_member_5894058249237311491" rel="author" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #7b539d; font-weight: bold; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Tim Rahschulte">Tim Rahschulte</a> and his <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=118003&type=member&item=5894058249237311491&commentID=5895920684047048704&report%2Esuccess=8ULbKyXO6NDvmoK7o030UNOYGZKrvdhBhypZ_w8EpQrrQI-BBjkmxwkEOwBjLE28YyDIxcyEO7_TA_giuRN#commentID_5895920684047048704" target="_blank">LinkedIn discussion</a> in the Program Management Academy group.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Some of the practices that have worked best for me are:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">1) Educate people early to appreciate (if not understand) that a big project and a program are two different things. There should be at least some delta in the benefits metrics you're measuring because of that. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">2) Do it, whatever it is, only if the benefit can be described in tangible, non-political terms. If "because it sounds good (ego)" is the only reason to do it, it probably should not be done.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">3) Recognize the mole hills that will become mountains and deal with (perhaps even laud) them as successful learning opportunities.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">4) Appreciate the current speed at which you are traveling. There is an optimal point between managing to the "dumbest common denominator" and the soldier's creed of 'leave no man behind'. It's important to regularly assess whether it is still optimal.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">These four things won't guarantee success but ignoring them will almost certainly refute the opportunity to achieve it. I (like many a reader here I'm sure) have seen way too many really good strategic initiatives become question-marks and dogs from stars and cash cows by sponsors and other clouted stakeholders who make it about personal egos rather than corporate benefits. </span>PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-88828470148836210672014-07-06T09:05:00.002-04:002014-07-06T09:14:00.709-04:00How safe really is SAFe?<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I've been hearing a lot more about the SAFe framework these days. A lot it sounds like business people (excluding actual Agilists) who have yet to learn the lesson of the trojan horse -- the original one from that war a few millennia ago. Either that or at least believe that it applies to them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">SAFe can work but only if one remembers two things.</span><br />
<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">what the </span><a href="http://agilemanifesto.org/" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;" target="_blank">Agile Manifesto</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> says -- the first line in particular, and</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">it's always about People --> Process --> Tech/Tools ... in that order.And as I spoke about at the Ignite Waterloo 14 event, people need to remember that to achieve successful results tha</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">t order never changes.</span></li>
</ol>
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Want further evidence to this? See . . . </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As <a href="http://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/unsafe-at-any-speed/" target="_blank">KenSchwaber wrote on his blog</a> "we cannot buy our way to a better future", it takes hard work. Sadly, as even I have seen all too often, there are way to many armchair quarterbacks out there who think reading a book, a few articles, and attending a 2 or 3 day course will make them experts. The rescue project management contracting I did for a few years about a decade ago proved that is not the case.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Another author <a href="http://www.agilerescue.de/is-safe-unsafe-my-thoughts/" target="_blank">posted</a> "While SAFe is about alignment, transparency, program execution and (code) quality it’s about how YOU are going to implement the ideas, principles and practices in YOUR environment. In the end it’s the implementation that matters: It’s you, your colleagues, your shared goals/values and the business value you produce."</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://xprogramming.com/articles/safe-good-but-not-good-enough/" target="_blank">Ron Jefferies wrote</a> "SAFe wraps those ideas in a package ... to appeal to today’s managers and executives who do not understand Agile, but who know they have a problem to which Agile may be the solution."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The short answer is that SAFe can be a safe and effective tool if the tool is used to supplement the concepts of an Agile approach and have them applied by true professionals who truly understand and appreciate the concepts behind being big-A "Agile". </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A little over a century ago practically anyone could call themselves an engineer. It took the failing of several bridges and one in particular that caused a huge loss of lives for business people, governments, and society at large to appreciate the gravity of the errors in that belief system. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">True professional engineers</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> wear an iron ring to remind themselves of that. Hopefully one day in the not too distant future </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">business people, governments, and society at large</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> will stop wasting billions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours of people's lives on an </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">annual basis, and they will also appreciate what true professionalism is as it applies to project, program, and portfolio management.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> </span>PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-31146888712767375942014-05-27T12:06:00.000-04:002014-05-27T12:06:50.685-04:00The Agile Vacation<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #292f33; line-height: 18px;">My 5 min talk on why Agile can be used for anything is now posted </span><a class="twitter-timeline-link" href="http://youtu.be/Gp73bhssPUs" role="presentation" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: #0084b4; line-height: 18px; text-decoration: none !important;">http://youtu.be/Gp73bhssPUs</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #292f33; line-height: 18px;"> -- not bad for first time in front of 300+ people if I do say so myself. :-) </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #292f33; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #292f33; line-height: 18px;">See all the slides on-line at </span><span style="color: #292f33;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">http://www.slideshare.net/Leyts/ignite-waterloo-agile-vacation?utm_source=slideshow03&utm_medium=ssemail&utm_campaign=iupload_share_slideshow </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #292f33; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #292f33; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-3326331105637300132014-05-25T22:25:00.002-04:002014-05-25T22:27:26.730-04:00When you Hire Smarter do you Really?<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 10pt;">An article --</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #222222; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><a href="http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/231911" style="font-size: 10pt;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;">http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/231911</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space" style="color: #222222; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 10pt;">-- I was reading on the '</span><a href="http://www.entrepreneur.com/" style="font-size: 10pt;">Entrepreneur</a><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 10pt;">' web site read a great
quote, "The best investment you can make is to hire people you can trust
to take things off your plate." That is so true, and especially with
experience as a people manger, it amazes me the attitude of some people.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">The reason companies hire is because there is
already have too much work for the person doing the hiring with existing
resources. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone but surprisingly all too
often it is. The following examples are some of the surprises I’ve heard or
overheard in the last 30+ years. And yes, in the examples I overheard, I did
appropriately challenge the speaker. I can’t guarantee that it helped; just
that it happened.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Employees (prospective or otherwise):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">“You're here to help me be successful.” No,
it's actually the other way around. You’re here to help everyone be successful
do doing to the best of your ability the role you were hired to perform. As a
direct report to someone, your manager will in turn help you help them be
successful by using the skills you espoused as within your possession during
the interview process. You must sow before you can reap anything. BTW, everyone
in a company of two or more people is a direct report to someone else; even if
you’re the President and CEO.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">“I lied to you because I didn't think I could
trust you, and when I was fired that proved I was right.” No, you were fired
because you lied to my face and proved I couldn't trust you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">“I'll work with you but I won't work for you.”
No, if you're a new hire with relatively few years of post college work
experience and someone is going to take a chance at giving you a job, damn
right you're going to work <b>for them</b>.
A smart business is not an autocracy but it ain't no f@#king democracy either.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Managers:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">“I gave you the job; now you're on your own.”
No, if you're going to be a people manager, manage your people. You don't want
to do that? Okay, maybe it's you that's in the wrong position.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">“I was here first, I know better.” No, because
if you're the smartest person in the room about everything that needs to be
done then you're hiring idiots .... or maybe it's somebody else that's the
idiot.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">“I expect people to leave their outside lives
at the door, and behave in a professional manner while in the office.”
Professional (aka 'ethical')? Certainly. Leave their lives at the door?!
Really?! You do know you're actually hiring people not robots; right? Sure, to
the best of a person's ability they should manage their emotions rather than
the other way around. Empathy is a critical factor in leading and managing ...
bear with me here ... P E O P L E.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 10.0pt;">All these people and many others haven’t a
clue when the term “servant leadership” is used. It does not mean the leader
becomes the servant. It means the leader provides a service in their role as a
leader to create something bigger than themselves. And from yet another
article “</span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Learning from and acknowledging mistakes requires the
humility that Level 5 Leaders display. Level 5 Leadership, according to Jim
Collins (no relation), is what separates exceptional leaders from all others.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Knowing all of this perhaps I was then
somewhat overly surprised when I read another article -- <a href="http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232914" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;">http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232914</span></a>. This
article labels flexibility and drive as personality (78%), cultural alignment
(53%), and then skills (39%) as the areas for job opportunities in the future. This
actually scares, yes 'scares', me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Yet from reading this article I further
appreciate what I've been hearing some senior economists say over the last year
- "there will never again be a company that lasts for over 100
years". I hope the article is a misinterpretation of the study. If
charisma and group think are valued more that skill and respecting each others'
individual differences then the probability is a whole lot smaller towards ever
creating in the future innovations like the iPhone, object oriented
programming, or a flexible process that will leave Agile in the dust the way
Agile has waterfall.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">I listened to a Sr. VP at Google tell a crowd
of wannabe employees about a year ago that he didn't care if somebody was the
best programmer in the world if they didn't have the skills to get along with
those they needed to work with. There is a lot more damage that one developer
can create that would more than offset them writing code day in and out. And
everyone deserves to feel good about going into work every day they go. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Okay, not everyone, not those who have the
perspective that it's all about them and anyone else left can have whatever
scraps are left-over.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">Not those to manage to what I call the
"dumbest common denominator". The perversion of the 'no kid left
behind' strategy in the 70s and 80s created class agendas where mediocrity
flourished. This was 'easier' than empowering the best and the brightest to go
as far as they could, to leverage their own innate talents to go beyond on
their own, and use that extra bandwidth available to the teacher to help the
stragglers get over the hump. This is the premise of apprenticeships that have
worked the world over for hundreds of years. This also opposes the
short-sighted mediocrity of unpaid internships. Now of course anyone who can
afford to do this may actually be the most qualified for the role, however,
those who cannot are never even given the opportunity for those people or
companies to ever find out. And as my statistics professor said, “you can’t
prove a negative.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">I still have some hope that some of today’s
leaders and those into the future are seeking principles over popularity
(personality) but if this second article is correct that is not the case. And
if that is truly indeed the case, all I have to say is "may god help us
all". History has given us examples with companies like Nortel, Enron, MCI
Worldcom, NCR, and many too numerous to mention that when popularity and
charisma become paramount the company doesn’t last long. Certainly each of
those companies thought they were making the best decisions when they started
hiring charismatic individuals over those with more valuable ‘skills’. No one
intentionally makes business decisions to proverbially slit their own economic
throats, but when they do make decisions that do just that then everyone suffers
from stockholders to the least skilled laborer to some degree.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">So this is
where we come back full circle to where I started this post. Hopefully you are
hiring smart rather than mediocrity. Hopefully they can do things you can’t or
better than you. And if not that, hopefully you are hiring apprentices who are
willing and able to learn. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What does
this all have to do with project and program management? Well, the same as any
other management role; to get things done through other people. Hopefully, most
of those people are smarter than you in what they were hired to do. And
hopefully they equally recognize that you are smarter than them in what you do
as well.</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-38411349169652536072014-05-11T21:58:00.000-04:002014-05-11T21:58:13.033-04:00Status reports versus Progress updates<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The difference between a status report and a progress update.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As much as the uninformed would have some people believe, no it's not semantics.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For example, a team member has a series of tasks to complete a user story; a requirement. Let's say those tasks are to load and stage the latest development build, and then execute a series of tests to determine if what is new in that build 1) does the functionality that was added, 2) has not broken anything that used to work, and 3) does all of that with the same or better system throughput performance. Let's also say that the original estimate for that work is three-and-a-half days. Further, let's say that equates to 7 story points.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A status report is "I've got the build and I'm continuing to stage the software." A status report or update is focused on the past up to that point in time. And until somebody invents a time machine where people can go back in time to to change things, this is a waste of people's time; including the person giving the update.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A progress update is "I've got the build, I started to stage the build this morning, and I ran into one small problem, so I spoke with Julio and he was able to help me out right away. He discovered there was an error in a default setting for our test environment. So all things considered, I believe the work will still be finished as planned on Friday." A progress update or report is future focused. It focuses on where things are headed and gives people a proactive opportunity to avoid risks while that work is ongoing or for the next time such a set of similar tasks is being performed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the status report, there is no way to know whether the work is on, ahead, or behind schedule, or worse, completely roadblocked. It does not support clear visibility into the progress of the work being done. No one knows to offer help if the tester is roadblocked, and for all anyone knows what is occuring with these series of tasks could be the first indication that the project could be completely riding off the rails.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I've heard some people say "well, that's the project manager's job to ask questions to clarify that." And for me, that is completely and utterly obtuse for two reasons.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One, if the project manager has enough time to remember to stay that on top of every task then either the project isn't very complex or the project manager is being under-utilized. Either way the company is wasting money.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The second reason is that I suspect in a lot of situations those same team members would probably next be screaming about being micromanaged if that was happening. And if they aren't, hopefully the project manager is thinking something like "my god, what am I doing here?! Isn't there something better I could be doing with my life?!" In short, the project and the organization in actuality are circling the drain.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In summary, a progress update creates value-added visibility with opportunities to create even more value beyond that specific point in time. A status update takes people away from the value-add they are doing in their individual jobs so they can hear each other ramble on for probably longer than necessary, add just another layer of distraction that further reduces their value and productivity in each of their roles, and creates unnecessary overhead.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Think I'm wrong? Listen to the updates from yourself and other team members in your next scrum session, stand-up meeting, or whatever you want to call it.</span>PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-89637068260187137192014-05-10T14:34:00.003-04:002014-05-10T14:34:30.986-04:00Paying back ... or at least forward<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I may remember. Involve me and I learn (or I will understand)." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For me, this is a great quote, that I believe has been around in various forms since the days of ancient China.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The challenge though is how rarely it seems to be applied. Perhaps being the least in the last decade compared to ever in history.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What I mean is ...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To 'tell' someone something they must be listening closely enough to ask questions if you are being vague; or at least for you to clarify for them so they understand you.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To 'teach', one must be willing to be taught. This applies to the student and the teacher, and I remain astounded by the number of people who consider themselves no longer a student as soon as they graduated out of school. As stated by an old proverb, "Only a fool knows all."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To 'involve' is no more of an isolated category than the previous two. And like the other two categories it is a relationship of sorts between the provider and the receiver. It is also a more involved or deeper relationship because it requires more effort to complete. It also creates more value for the short and the long term. As in the movie "Mr Holland's Opus" this teacher learned at the end of his career when he was feeling at his lowest the true impact of his efforts. Most teachers have their students for a few months and then are never seen again. The truly great teachers have students who stay in touch, make the effort to say hello on the street, or attend show their appreciation in other ways with a positive impact that lasts a very long time. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The question that remains is whether you want to be average or mediocre in the things that only the unique you can do. I'm also neither saying do this for free. Part of the value measurement of any effort is based on what people are willing to pay for it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That said, over the last couple of years especially it seems there are more and more greedy and unethical businesses who have been discreetly re-implementing indentured servitude or slavery, and some I'm sure believing themselves wonderful human beings for doing so. They tell themselves they are offering an education that those students would otherwise be excluded from. Their slaves are given labels like intern or football scholarship recipient and that's supposed to make it okay. Back when I was young and for hundreds of years before that when people did a job where they were also learning something it was called being an apprentice or in a co-op program through the institute of higher learning; and we all got paid.</span>PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-39042058993966385042014-04-04T10:52:00.000-04:002014-04-04T10:52:15.067-04:00So you think you're a leader . . . <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">I get a lot of my inspirations from
others' articles and blogs. Bruce Kasanoff and his article '<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140403123114-36792-how-do-you-bring-out-talent-in-others?trk=eml-ced-b-art-M-0&midToken=AQERntoQMUVNTQ&ut=3q6QpUxPGvbmc1" target="_blank">How Do YOU Bring Out Talent in Others</a>' on LinkedIn is no
exception. After all, one of the greatest pieces of advice I ever received is
'to read'. So when I read this article and Bruce asked his readers how we lead
I had to contribute.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">For me,
leadership is about establishing clear accountabilities, boundaries, and
letting them know I am there to care about (protect) them. And doing that as
concisely as possible. For me, these are the ABC's of leadership.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">The
accountability part; I think that's the obvious part - I hope so anyway. Just
in case I need to clarify; my expectation is always for people to<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>make commitments and then adhere to
them</b>. Yes, this must be done in a way that is commensurate to the level of
maturity and skills of each individual. And yes, people either know or learn
that if they don't hold themselves accountable, I will. To clarify perhaps a
bit further, two of the US Marines mottos are also two of my favorites. 'Semper
fi', short for semper fidelis, latin for 'always faithful. And 'Adapt -
Improvise - Overcome'. Life whether in business or elsewhere will introduce
hurdles we'd rather not have to deal with. Omission to make a decision (or
commitment) is still a decision.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">Boundaries -
for me it's<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>never ever okay</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>for anyone to deflect responsibility
for their own decisions onto others people, or hold onto critical information
that impacts other people and their commitments. You know something is up and
coming that other people will care about? Figure out who those people are and
get that information to them ASAP in a clear and concise way. Part two of that,
only make decisions within your realm of authority and responsibility. An
in-the-weeds individual contributor should<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>never
presume<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></b>to know more about
the business than a Director or VP on the leadership team.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">Protection - I
expect everyone to '<b>man/woman up</b>' when they screw up; admit you messed
up, honestly apologize to those you impacted, make a commitment to not repeat
the behavior, and then move on. If someone wants to lord over you that error;
that's when the very pointed, gorilla-in-the-closet, in-your-face me comes out
towards that person. In short,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>don't
mess with my team; period</b>. I will eat you alive. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">That's the
launch pad. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">The execution</span></b><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;"> is for me to be consistent with
myself and everyone else in applying that. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">Accountability
-- something I've noticed a lot of over the years is that a lot of very smart
people are very dumb when it comes to the cost of doing certain things. I'll
offer a couple of examples because this is so important. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">1)<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">Everyone at the
company where you work is there because someone higher up in the chain of
command (relative to you) believes the role is needed and that person has the
skills needed for that role. I've witnessed people who regularly step on the
proverbial toes of others and then loudly complain (sometimes back stab) when
others do the same to them. I always set expectations right out of the Ontario
Labour Code and a lot of very good books to minimize the occurrences of this
happening -- i.e.:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l1 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">a.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">speak to the other person(s) about the concern; and do it
respectfully because<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>sometimes<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></b>some people just didn't realize
what they were doing,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l1 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">b.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">if you are not comfortable doing that on your own for some reason;
come see me and I will assist you, and finally <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l1 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">c.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">if you've already tried a) and b) more than once and it is still
happening, we will all sit down together -- NOTE: this does not mean I will
carry your burden (see more below).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<h1 style="margin-left: .25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; font-size: 11.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Trebuchet MS";">2)<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; font-size: 11.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">I've seen groups of 8 people
spend 2 weeks developing huge, detailed, documented plans that other than them,
no one will ever look at. And think themselves oh so wonderful for doing it.
The cost: $40,000. Now, if you were writing the cheque for that document, would
you think it's worth $40k? We all need to be good stewards of not only our own
wallets but of our company's wallets too. That is, If we really want the
company to be successful.</span><o:p></o:p></h1>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">Boundaries --
in the high tech realms, thinking outside the box in a lot of cases is a really
good idea. There is rarely if ever the case when only one right way exists to
do a task. That said, if it's not part of your role, collaborate with someone
you trust whose responsibility it is to do that. If there is no one who does
that (and you've actually checked to confirm) and you're not putting your own
job on the proverbial back burner to do that task it may just be a good idea to
proceed.</span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">Protection -- I
will protect you in public but I will also punish you in private. Sadly in my
travels I have encountered some people who define integrity as "it's okay
if we can get away with it" and "lying is a valid negotiation
tactic". To me, outright lying is just plain disrespectful, and will
hasten the severity of that punishment. If Harry or Sally keeps repeating the
behavior they've been told to stop, it'll become public when they are no longer
present. NOTE: we will go straight to DEFCON 1 in instances where the law has
been broken -- e.g.: workplace harassment or bullying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">The results:
the teams I mange are filled with a lot of highly motivated people that do a
lot of very good and productive work. And yes, over the years, I've also had to
fire some people and ignore others. I've also had many different people I
haven't worked with in years stop me in the street and in stores to say hello.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11pt;">Everything else
is filling in the cracks; the details that pop up here and there that are just
parts of reality because you're dealing with people - not machines. Remember
two things -- 1) "because I said so" is<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>always</b><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>the weakest form of leadership (even if
it is sometimes necessary -- usually only in a crisis), and 2) you can't be a
leader if no one is willing to follow you. They may follow you because they
have to, but that's a boss; a manager, and always temporary. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-59294018240343652522014-01-26T17:34:00.000-05:002014-01-26T17:35:11.461-05:00Perspective is everything<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The other day I was speaking with a group of people who thought it was so horrible that their executives look at the contents of the project tracking system. And worse, that they challenge the project managers when their status updates and the contents of the tracking system don't appear to match.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My first response to them was to ask "How so?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">They elaborated about their belief that they should just be trusted to deliver to what is described in the project plan at the start of the project.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I countered saying my perspective is actually the complete opposite of that. A couple of people just walked away. The smarter people looked at me like I was nuts, and the even smarter people ask "How so?". I elaborated with the following justifications.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">1) Want to know whether or your project is really important to the bottom line? Listen to see whether or not they are talking and asking about it. Seriously, if they're not, it's not.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">2) Executives have people they have to report to too. Executives seriously do not have time to ask about the minutea of your project. However, if they can't get the information they need AND the project is important don't expect them not to. And if they don't, it doesn't really matter -- re: see point 1 above. That's one of the great things about burndown charts that are embedded apps within the tracking system being used. It gives a snapshot view of what the status is at any point in time, if it's embedded well, the extra effort to create those charts is somewhere between negligable and nil.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">3) It's NOT micromanaging if all they're asking for is progress updates and quantifiable information to substantiate what you are saying. It's called 'trust but verify' and any manager that doesn't do that is either incompetent, a fool, or both. From a financial perspective it's also a SOX compliance issue. To you, it's an 'oops'. To them, it's a potential legal matter and in the most serious cases possible jail time. Blind trust is a fool's overture.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">4) EVERYONE wants to go home at night and into the office in the morning with the warm and fuzzies. Executives are no different. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So reminder to smile, say thank you, and offer a concise and direct answer the next time you get asked what </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">is going on.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Oh, BTW, those people that stayed engaged in the conversation? We all learned something those who left figuring they already knew everything that mattered. We're all further ahead in the game than them. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now also recognize that these are all start people; some of them wise. Yes, there is a difference, but that's for another post.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And when it comes to career management it tends to be those who know the most and work the best with others who tend to start in the game the longest. ... of course there are exceptions. And the companies where those expectations tend to apply also tend to be the companies on the way out.</span>PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-9725036458395392182013-09-15T08:35:00.002-04:002013-09-15T08:35:10.879-04:00Like riding a bike<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Eric Barker's blog is on my weekly must read list for what I do during my Sunday morning coffee and before the household gets too active. This blog holds incredible wisdom and insight, and has the ability to get that communicated without the purple prose of similar blogs.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">This week's post I thought was a great reminder about how great leaders remain great leaders and riding a bicycle are quite analogous. Remember when you were first learning to ride a bike? Pushing the pedals forward to move forward; esay. Push back to brake; cinch. Balance? Well that something else entirely.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">It's easy for us to believe at some point that we've mastered riding a bicycle and we don't have to think about it any more. The reality though is that the task has just become rote. We're still thinking about it; just not consciously. And when we stop doing that? That's when gravity kicks in and shows us who the real boss is.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Managing or leading people is in many ways the same thing. It means keeping everything in balance, making well found decisions without waiting too long to make them, and making sure you don't allow yourself to get carried away on the shoulders of the sycophants.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A few quotes from this week's article:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"Egos expand faster than waistlines."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"The irony of leadership is you need to speak with certainty to be taken seriously. But if you take yourself too seriously, you end up in the hubris trap."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">This week's must read article sums up with a statement that "denial, ego and hubris are all parts of human nature. They are like gravity. We don’t defeat them. To move forward we must actively resist them every day."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Want to see the whole article or subscribe yourself? . . . </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/09/strategic-leadership/?utm_source=%22Barking+Up+The+Wrong+Tree%22+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a23f4e90aa-9_15_139_15_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_78d4c08a64-a23f4e90aa-46174749</span><br />
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PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-34008597654731678652013-03-29T12:48:00.002-04:002013-03-29T12:48:52.071-04:00Soft skills -- Vision – having one … to a detailed level<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Having
and being able to share a clear vision; being strategic in your purpose. I
believe this is what people are talking about when they refer to needing
someone who is “details oriented”. It’s also widely recognized that having one
is important. I did a Google search just a minute ago and it responded with
about 57,300,000 results in 0.17 seconds. And yet having a vision is rarely
listed when people are asked what the most important characteristics are for
being effective. For example, it was listed only once in a recent LinkedIn PM
Community group <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/groups/What-type-PM-are-You-35313.S.221953713?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=35313&item=221953713&type=member&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_pd-ttl-hdp&ut=3ohE2E-I-ZTRE1">post</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Now,
before I go any further, I’d like to repeat and clarify that the following is
focused on those in the project management profession. I and many others have
been inspired by leaders over the years. JFK’s vision of landing a man on the
moon and safely returning him the Earth by the end of the 1960s. Martin Luther
King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. Those and many other leaders had a very
clear vision of what they wanted to see happen. They did not, however, have the
skills to technically know how to achieve it. Still, both these and other
visions were achieved and the world is a better place for them being achieved.
Would they have made great project managers? Probably. JFK was the captain of a
PT boat during WWII. Do all great project managers possess the skills to become
leaders of industry, government, and causes that will change the course of
history? Probably not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Now, with
that out of the way, the clarity of a PM’s / PgM’s vision and level of detail
that can be discussed are very much inter-related in my opinion. It is the ability
of this person to:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<ul style="margin-top: 0cm;" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">get into the weeds with the
team if and when needed <b>and</b> <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">commensurate to their role <b>and</b> <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">for the teams they are
managing <b>and</b><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">for whom they are reporting
into. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Where
this seems to go off balance in many cases is where people (both individual
contributors and those already in leadership roles) sometimes have a perception
that you must be able to do to lead. This, depending on how extreme this
position is taken, can be a promotion of individualism over teamwork. It is
also the downfall of many people new to management roles. That lesson being to
learn to delegate rather than do. <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Toyota</st1:place></st1:city>
and many other companies almost always promote from within. And this makes a
lot of sense in most cases. A project or program manager really should understand
what a group of computer science professionals need to do and why to develop
and deploy a complex software application. Do they need to hold a B.Sc from a
prestigious university to be effective as a PM/PgM? I doubt it. I don’t have
that degree and I’ve really done quite well over my career. By the same token
though, I equally believe my hands on understanding and experience of software
development and the IT infrastructures that software needs to be deployed on
has contributed to that success. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">It’s also
those “<b>and</b>”s that really make a
difference. As systems theories seek to promote, it’s not so much the
individual components as the interrelationships among them that really make the
difference. They are very important because the vision needs to be shared at
the level of your audience, and as a PM/PgM I believe we all know that your
audience consists of management teams, vendors, customers, and other
stakeholders in addition to your core team. Making anyone feel stupid at any
time at any place is just plain wrong. It may be immediately satisfying to put
a bully in their place in a public way; and I admit that in the past I have
been guilty of doing that myself. However, the loss experienced doing that also
meant losing the skills that other person had to offer. Yes, sometimes it’s
worth it but that should never be the first option. </span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">U.S. President<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>Theodore
Roosevelt’s famous foreign policy statement to ‘speak
softly and carry a big stick’ can equally be applied today. And as he also said
during his presidency, the objective should always be to never have to use that
big stick. On a lighter note, even in the Bugs Bunny – Yosemite Sam cartoons of
my youth Bugs never sought out to humiliate Sam. I think that was a good life
lesson.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Finally,
if people perceive you as making it up as you go you’ll very likely be
perceived as flaky, insincere, not credible, whatever; and that’s regardless of
how clearly, concisely, … you communicate. And they won’t follow you. As the
old adage goes, you can’t be a leader if no one wants to follow. Someone once
said to me a few years ago in a moment of frustration, “It’s not about you! And
what makes you think you’ve got all the answers anyway?!” My response was
simply, One, I don’t think I have all the answers. That’s why I’ve built a
strong team around me. And two, I was put in that position because of the
vision I had and communicated to the executives; on what we needed to do to both resolve
existing limitations/gaps, achieve stated strategic objectives, and how and
what we should do to go about doing that. If you think I’m completely wrong and
the wrong person for the job, take that up with our executives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">I never
did find out if I was the source or just the target of that person’s
frustration. I do know thought that person was able to convince our executives
that the gloss and polish they offered actually made them the right person for
the job (not me). I wouldn’t take too much stock in their decision making
skills though. I got a call from a recruiter about 18 months later telling me
who had been ‘let go’ and asking me if I would consider coming back because the
project still needed to be completed. This was a project that should have and
could have been completed in less than a year. Yes, karma does exist. A
favorite analogy of mine for this event is a beloved children’s game, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Hill_(game)">King of the Castle</a>.
The specific analogy being that others may and will knock you off that heap
(out of your position) but without possessing the depth of your vision they
won’t stay there too long themselves either.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">In
closing, I’ll offer to you the request and hope I have for you, and why I am
writing this post. If you’re going to have a vision, share it. If you want to
take over someone else’s vision, I hope you actually have the depth of
understanding to actually carry out that vision through to fruition. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-30092477175329346452013-03-27T20:43:00.003-04:002013-03-27T20:43:22.688-04:00Soft skills -- Honesty and Integrity<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">A senior
manager I had a few years back introduced me to a very successful salesman. In
that encounter he suggested to me that if I wanted to be really successful I
needed to start following the platinum rule instead of the golden rule. He
defined the ‘platinum rule’ as treating others as <b>they</b> wanted to be treated <u>regardless</u> of how they treat you
or anyone else. I’ve never been really able to apply the platinum rule perhaps
in no small part due to the fact that I am a very big believer in karma. What
goes around eventually and always comes around. I have learned though (the hard
way) that viewpoint makes many of the more politically motivated individuals
out there very nervous. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">And when
it comes to motivating people . . . well lets just say I’m of the school you
can’t actually motivate anyone. You can only leverage the motivations people
already possess. The other half of this picture that tends to get lost on a lot
of people after they’ve been doing a certain job for a long period of time is
humility, and offering credit where credit is due is part of that. And yet some
people want to receive kudos just for showing up. Still others’ have
perspectives that taking the credit as the leader is just how things are
supposed to work. If you don’t do that yourself, they see you as weak and not a
leader. As the old adage says “provide goes before the fall.” One person said
to me in my travels that “it’s only arrogance if you can’t back up what you’re
saying with results.” That never really sat that well with me that well either.
It seems contrary to sincerity and self-respect / confidence / efficacy. That
said, I also know that I’ve been accused of being arrogant. Luckily (for me)
there’s been some one else close by in most cases to challenge that accusation.
And yes, I can fight my own battles. It’s just that this is one of those
situations where the more you protest your innocence the more it looks like you’re
not innocent at all. It’s like being called a guru. It’s great if others give
you that label and much less so when you do it yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-27877015593371137592013-03-26T19:47:00.000-04:002013-03-26T19:48:53.318-04:00Soft skills -- Communication skills (or BLOT)<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">For
today’s post, a big thanks to one of my readers who suggested I follow the
BLOT (Bottom Line On Top) principle on this topic since ‘communication skills’
is so widely viewed as <u>the</u> paramount skill required of all people who are in
leadership roles. And I agree; so with that some of you may be asking ‘so what
gives?!’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Communication
skills in and of themselves are subjective to the environment, and thus generally
not a personal characteristic on that basis. If you take any individual and
change their environment that person may do equally as well communicating with
those they interact with, or they could do better, or they could do worse. It’s
the same person, only their environment and the audience has changed. Likewise,
you could take a poll at any public speaking event and find people that span
the bell curve regarding their perception of the speaker and their topic. Let’s
use TEDx as an example. I generally look forward to hearing about the latest
speech available on-line because I thoroughly enjoy most of them. You may feel
the same way but TEDx, some other speeches, or disagree with me entirely. Now
in any of these examples if you had a negative perception of the speaker’s
communicative skills and mine was positive the speaker’s skills are not
lessened just because your perception is more negative than mine; or vice-versa
for that matter. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Saying
that, some of you may say “yes, but if they were a truly great speaker then
everyone would think they were wonderful.” And again I would agree with you,
and I would offer that rising to the level of Gandhi, Churchill, Lincoln,
Mandela, and others may be desirable and yet unattainable for the vast majority
of us. Does that mean the rest of us are then poor communicators? Of course
not, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Across my
career I can come up with multiple examples of people who perceived my
communication skills as abhorrent, average or exceptional. It’s like a bell
curve like anything else in life. If everyone you meet tells you you’re an
exceptional communicator then you’re either a very unique individual on par
with the examples above. Either that or they are blowing smoke up your tailpipe
because they perceive value in doing so because of your status or position
relative to theirs in whatever situation that discourse took place. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Okay,
time to wrap this up. Possessing cultural awareness, being perceived as an
honest person with a high standard of moral integrity, having a vision you want
to share, and being self-aware are all factors that play into how any of us are
perceived regarding our individual
communication skills. And that, my friends, is why I have listed ‘communication
skills in 5<sup>th</sup> place out of 5.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Oh yes,
and those on-line discussions that started all of this? I’ve posted the links
to a couple of them below.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/groups/What-type-PM-are-You-35313.S.221953713?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=35313&item=221953713&type=member&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_pd-ttl-hdp&ut=3ohE2E-I-ZTRE1">http://www.linkedin.com/groups/What-type-PM-are-You-35313.S.221953713?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=35313&item=221953713&type=member&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_pd-ttl-hdp&ut=3ohE2E-I-ZTRE1</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Is-arrogant-PM-better-project-35313.S.218477783?qid=5aec2a81-242b-4d90-95f1-e0e0c232dfa3&trk=group_items_see_more-0-b-ttl">http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Is-arrogant-PM-better-project-35313.S.218477783?qid=5aec2a81-242b-4d90-95f1-e0e0c232dfa3&trk=group_items_see_more-0-b-ttl</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-78006661351272189512013-03-25T18:00:00.002-04:002013-03-25T18:01:29.745-04:00Soft skills -- Cultural awareness<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">I believe
this characteristic is very high on the list of required characteristics if not
in the number one spot.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">One of
the benefits I’ve received from being a contractor and working in numerous
businesses is the awareness that one size definitely does <u>not</u> fit all.
What I mean by that is that having a keen awareness of both the personal
cultures of the people you work with and the corporate culture in place will do
more than anything else to determine where you and your projects will
ultimately sit on the ‘over the top wildly successful’ – ‘absolute failure’
performance scale. This is especially important when there is already a
dichotomy between management and worker views on the value of a particular
strategy, communication needs, readiness for change, risk tolerances, etc. Depending
on your perspective, the same situation or even a single conversation could be
positive, neutral or negative. Of course, this also presumes you’re coming into
the position with at least a minimum baseline of technical skills. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">The most
valuable piece of concise advice that comes to mind at this moment is ‘Go slow
to go fast’. This tidbit of wisdom is one of the things I think that took me a relatively
long time to truly appreciate. Personally, for me, it says so much more than the
expression of ‘a bull in a china shop’. Sure, for those of us who have been
around for even a while have all seen this situation play out at one time or
another, and it’s not pretty. Some newbie PM or high priced consulting firm
that should really know better comes riding in like the cavalry to the rescue
and the smart ones of us sit back and watch until they either smarten up or
fall on their faces. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">This is
why I truly love the workplaces that have already done some kind of True Colors
exercise and everyone has their primary colors posted at their desks. They may
as well have a sign up that says “Hi, I’m so-and-so, you can best interact with
me by . . .” and you fill in the blank part of that line. Of course, if they
appear to be stressed for whatever reason (most of us are at some point or
another) you’d probably do best to be observant (aware) and proceed with the
color that person has when they’re stressed. By then collectively leveraging
and offsetting each other’s weaknesses <b>and</b>
strengths and enabling your team with this awareness you then create synergies.
And that synergy of awareness to cut a long story short then creates highly
productive project teams.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-84873784007845671142013-03-24T09:20:00.002-04:002013-03-24T09:20:35.931-04:00Project Management Soft Skills<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">I’ve seen
what seems like a lot of on-line discussions lately about the level of arrogance
of people who choose project management as a profession, soft v. hard skills
required to be effective, what qualities make a good program/project manager,
etc.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Using Dictionary.com
definitions as my premise, … <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">‘Quality’
is a</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">n essential or distinctive or distinguishing characteristic
or attribute with respect to level of excellence in personality and traits. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">‘Character’
is t</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">he aggregate of features and traits that form the
individual <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nature"><span style="color: #333333;">nature</span></a> of a person and the</span><span class="dnindex1"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> </span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">moral and ethical qualities and reputation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">These
factors are the two sides of the same coin that help me differentiate between
Bob, Mary and Bill. Just to be clear; these are made up names referring to no
one in particular.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">Arrogance,
however, is the </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">offensive display of superiority or
self-importance; including overbearing pride.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">The following
five factors listed in order of importance I believe are deterministic for predicting
the level of success achievable for a program/project manager; or for any
leader for that matter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 35.7pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt; text-indent: -17.85pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></b><!--[endif]--><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">Cultural awareness<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 35.7pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt; text-indent: -17.85pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></b><!--[endif]--><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">Honesty and Integrity<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 35.7pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt; text-indent: -17.85pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">3.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></b><!--[endif]--><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">Vision – having one … to a detailed
level<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 35.7pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt; text-indent: -17.85pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">4.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></b><!--[endif]--><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">Self-awareness / wisdom / insight <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 3.0pt; margin-left: 35.7pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 36.0pt; text-indent: -17.85pt;">
<b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">5. </span></b><b style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Communication
skills</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">I will
elaborate on each of the above points over the coming days.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt;">I will
also say at this point that this list may differ from yours. That’s okay. It’s
our unique perspectives that make this world an exciting and enjoyable place to
live. And yes, I’m very much aware and excluding the more negative issues that
exist in this world; there’s enough of that on the news already.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-54606536269642680412013-03-16T13:02:00.002-04:002013-03-16T13:04:03.183-04:00Story Points are Quantitative ... well kind of<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">One of
the most fervent, ongoing dichotomies I continue to hear about is that of
defining <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Story</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Points</st1:placename></st1:place>; SPs for the remainder of this
post. This includes a Q&A discussion on a recent webinar I attended. The
frustrating part of me is that this dichotomy is a justification in some
people’s minds on why Agile is an immature methodology. Thus, the reason for
this post.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">As
fervent as both sides of this debate are about whether or not <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Story</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Points</st1:placename></st1:place>
(SPs) translate into time / effort / duration tangible numbers. The reality is
that they're both correct. I can hear the gasps, gfaws, angry mind squirrels
seeking the comment area now! What! How ridiculous! To that, I say
"LOL". :D<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Seriously,
the whole point of story points is not to have just another way of saying how
much work there is to do! Yup, you heard me! It's not some conspiracy to create
even more and new overhead. It's about creating visibility of scale to get
people moving forward on something that will create something tangible and of
benefit to customers, users, and yes even the company who hired people to
develop, test, document, release, market and sell it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Okay,
let's get into the weeds of this debate shall we?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Dichotomy side 1:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>SPs Have No Time Correlations<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Let's
start with the side that say SPs are qualitative numbers and have no
correlation to time. In this camp, it's all about T-shirt sizes, H / M / L
categories, etc. The SP cards might as well be colors as Fibonacci numbers.
These are the people who prefer to say "I'll tell you how long it's going
to take when I'm done." or at least "I can't tell you until I've
burned through 2 to 4 sprints and have an average of how many SPs we can get to
'Done" in a typical cycle / sprint / iteration.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">The down
side with this approach, that I've found anyway, is that it presumes everyone
estimating (playing planning poker) has a similar scale of how much effort will
be required to get the work done. I've actually seen scenarios where everyone
agreed a story was a size of '1', told the guy in the room saying "hey,
wait a minute ..." that he was just wasting their time, and then the
testers asking the developers the next day if they'd have the build (that's
right kiddies '<b><i>the</i></b>' build, not 'a' build, 'the' build) for them
by the end of the day. That was the point where the communications regressed
into something less than respectful because the developers meant "one
sprint" when they said '1'. Of course, this cascaded into problems where
the testers had put something else on the back burner, wouldn't be available at
the end sprint (in 3 weeks), and couldn't be expected to just sit around until
then! You see the picture, right? :-) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">This
hasn't ever happened to you; you say? Great! Congratulations! Could you perhaps
add a "yet" onto the end of that sentence? Okay, enough of this
side. Let's move over to the camp of people who say "everything must be
quantifiable to mean anything; otherwise it's just a waste of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>their<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></b>time!" <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Dichotomy side 2:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>SPs Correlate to Effort<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">These are
the people who typically have tight budgets, are in consulting, professional
services groups, etc. Because quite frankly, nobody is interested in working
for free. Not even the junior engineers in the other camp who want to tell you
how long it will take when they're done. Let's look at this a little more
closely shall we? The fact is, quantifiable numbers enable people to think
about how long (when it will be ready), how much $$$ so they can pay bills,
wages, etc to be around for the next contract. Ever run into a scenario where
somebody delivered something 6 weeks late and was incredulous when nobody
cared? The fact is they missed the boat and this is what exists a lot of the
time in business. It's about both realistic and ideal costs and durations /
days required to get something to 'done'. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">The Rule of 1.x<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">S</span><span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ometimes telling someone that a story point equals a day will just
get them thinking 'Agile' is 'a Guile' and BS and waterfall just using
different words. That’s why I prefer to get the team thinking about the work
involved rather than how much effort it will take. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">On really unclear, breaking new ground
types of initiatives you may well just need to start off with high, medium and
low sizing; very small, small, ... XXL T-shirt size estimates. And yet no one
in their right mind is going to give you a budget based on that. No one will
ever go in front of a group of executives to say please give me a million
dollars, we believe the project is 22 Medium t shirts big. Amazingly
though I’ve had experiences in my career where some people thought that was
exactly what we should. This is only your first step to get to some focus on
some subset of your backlog to get some quantitative numbers. A break down of the
work into its component subsets (or some smaller, manageable chunk) until you
get to a point where you've got a list of tasks so you can say if Bob does
this, Mary does that, and Pat does this other thing we'll be able to demo for
you our version of the newest product with this subset of specific
capabilities.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">If your
team has a velocity of 10 SPs in sprint 1, 8 SPs in sprint 2, and 12 SPs and
the team worked the same way, same number of days, etc it doesn’t mean you did
anything wrong. It means you can expect to burndown 10 SPs per sprint on
average. It may also mean that some of the estimates were off by 20% and just
like in a bell curve everything just averages out, and that instead of planning
out everything over a mind-numbing 3 to 6 weeks to the n-th degree of detail
you have enough information after just a couple of days to tell the business
when they’ll get their software, and the developers, testers and tech writers,
etc can get onto what they do and love best.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">The above
is why I like to say SPs follow the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><b>rule
of 1.x</b>. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A Word of Caution <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Sometimes to people getting it their
heads that “oh well, it was just a estimate”; “I can come up with any number off
the top of my head and say oops later”. No skin off my back; right? No, not
right. Think about it in terms of an example that I think most of us can relate
to, and maybe even some have experienced themselves. If you went to a garage to
get your car fixed, they called you will an estimate of $200 and when you got
there they handed a bill for $1150 and said “Oh well, was just an estimate”
you'd probably either go ballistic or vow to never go there again. Now, when
your estimates to develop a new feature are way off, this is what they’re
thinking about you. This is what I'm talking about when it comes to holding
a planning poker exercise. For me, if I didn't expect you to take the work
seriously, I could more easily just come up with the numbers myself using a
random number generator and then blame you when you couldn't hit those probably
ridiculous estimates. Of course, if that was the case you wouldn't want to work
with me either. This is what is meant by mutual respect in the workplace. I
take what you do seriously and vice-versa. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Sometimes coming up with accurate estimates
is just not possible, or as one manager I know put it, "the only thing
that is clear is that everything is unclear."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">So ..... what are we ever to do?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">That's easy, if you (and the team) have
come up with story points estimates for everything in your backlog -- pick
something small but not too small, something with an obvious solution but not
too obvious, something of one or a few SPs. If people new to SPs and planning
poker are more comfortable equating 1 SP to a day-ish of total effort among everyone
involved to get <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whatever</i> to 'done'
try it and see what happens! Seriously, it’s really that simple. If it turns
out to be about a day of work then you probably have some good estimates for
the rest of your backlog. If it turns out to be a week when the team decomposes
the work, you may just want to try this again with something else, expand out
your estimates for everything else by a factor of 3 or 5, or some combination
of these two things and perhaps something else just for good measure. If you’ve
got a team with people who have worked well with each other a lot in the past
and have been involved in the development of the project’s requirements you may
just want to dive right in to your planning poker and estimate your stories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">The above
is certainly not all encompassing on this. That’s why companies need to
formally train existing employees and hire qualified ones. And please excuse me
for saying so if this contrasts with your perspective but quite frankly I’m
going to listen to the original Agilists and those who and widely published
authors over highly charismatic webinar hosts. The following links may help you
get to your next threshold in the use of SPs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Mike
Cohn’s blog -- <a href="http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/how-do-story-points-relate-to-hours"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/how-do-story-points-relate-to-hours</span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Jeff
Sutherland -- <a href="http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2010/04/story-points-why-are-they-better-than.html"><span style="color: blue;">http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2010/04/story-points-why-are-they-better-than.html</span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-64096765302613074552013-03-04T20:31:00.003-05:002013-03-16T13:04:29.443-04:00It’s People then Process then Tools/Tech<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">. . . in that order!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">A recent linkedin.com
group discussion and one poster’s experience about people who just don’t seem
to ‘get’ this and others who blame the tool has kicked up
my ire. And equally from a humorous perspective is reminding me of the joke
about a guy who throws his clubs in a lake after having a bad round of golf.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">For me, having
Ishikawa diagrams, 5-whys, reality trees, etc in my toolbox to do RCAs,
ensuring plans are comprehensive, etc are great but that's just it. They are
tools to visually represent how well we've analyzed what needs to be addressed.
And like any tool, it can be misused. Ever seen anyone try to use a screwdriver
as a hammer? How about a wrench as a hammer? :-)<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">I'm a visual learner myself, know others are too,
and appreciate that not everyone else is. As an example, the fishbone diagram (when
appropriate) I find is something best used to record what was discussed. Thus,
early in the process, I've historically found it's best used as a mental tool
and left at that. Pulling it out too early sometimes causes people just go
through the motions of populating the bones rather than thinking about what
should be populated on them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Now, anyone who turns
the People --> Process --> Tools/Tech workflow on it's head and makes the
tool or the process paramount is doing something that is at its very least
"counter intuitive." And at this point, some may say “Hey, you’re
pretty much constrained to HTML, Javascript and CSS to create a website. And
they’re all tools/tech!” And to that I would say “yes, yes they are.” And then
I’d ask those people what websites they know of that were designed to serve
another website.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">The tool/tech cannot ever be paramount to the people
or the process it is there to serve; whether or not the problem is open-ended
or not. Procedures to help share knowledge to less experienced others creates progress and as such are typically very good. Procedures used to constrain thought in any ethical problem solving paradigm into predefined boxes will only serve to create mental RSIs (Repetitive Strain Injuries) and tend to be very bad at creating value-added solutions. Again, let's note that in such cases it is the people creating the problem; not the process or the tool. </span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">At the risk of heading down a rat hole, picking up
a gauntlet, whatever, ...<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">
Yes, I too ha</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">ve encountered a lot of useless
tools over the path of my professional career, but they were all people. :-)
LOL </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="background: white;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="background: white;">The overwhelmingly vast majority of people I’ve
worked with over the last 30+ years, went to school with, or had as professors
could <b>in no way</b> be considered blind
lemmings who’d follow a process just because it exists and it’s easier than
thinking. Anyone who is living with this reality I would suggest has a very
depressing reality. I can honestly and thankfully say that does not
apply where I am, nor I suspect do the vast majority of other people either.</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Oh, BTW,
the article that drove all of this …. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;"><a href="http://www.bulsuk.com/2009/08/using-fishbone-diagram-to-perform-5-why.html?sthash.gaBUvRA2.mjjo&goback=%2Egde_1801885_member_219060123">http://www.bulsuk.com/2009/08/using-fishbone-diagram-to-perform-5-why.html?sthash.gaBUvRA2.mjjo&goback=%2Egde_1801885_member_219060123</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-78437140966289661702013-03-02T10:44:00.000-05:002013-03-16T13:04:54.102-04:00History is the best predictor of the future<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">I had a
brief conversation this past week with someone who used this statement.
Something about this bothered me, something just seemed off; wrong about this,
but I wasn’t sure what so I just smiled politely and when on with my work. Then
this morning, while I was busy doing something else, it hit me – ‘broken
telephone!’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Somewhere
along the line, that person on their own or through another imparting this
little tidbit of non-wisdom dumbed down “past performance and behavior is a
predictor of future performance and behavior” into one all encompassing factor
of reality. Well, in their mind anyway. In essence, they played the game of broken
telephone with a nice, concise piece of wisdom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">That got
me thinking. I wonder what else that person and how many others in and out of
their places of business play that game on a regular basis due to some
combination of misunderstanding and misinformation? I wonder how many variables
and constraints were completely forgotten or discarded to further cloud that
tidbit of wisdom?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">This
statement is most accurate when no variables change. When one or more variables
in the equation start to shift and depending on how dramatically they shift
this black & white equation becomes more and more gray to the point where
there is no relevance or correlation at all. These variables include things
like changing jobs, companies, company culture, people working there, new laws
(well enforced ones), and the manager(s) taking a new training course, etc. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">I suspect
the graying of this change becomes more exponential with the number of
variables changed. I suspect that last specific example has a more significant
impact than others. The behaviors and perceptions of those in leadership roles
whether it’s someone that’s a SME, team lead, resource manager, or yes, even a
program or project manager can have a significant positive or negative impact
on others’ motivations, performance, and work and personal habits. My basis for
this is remembering some research on self-efficacy. In one such study (in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> mind you) grade
school students’ IQs scores were replaced with their locker numbers and giving
those numbers to their teachers at the start of the year. The smarter kids were
generally assigned lower locker numbers and vice-versa. The results were
significant. Students who were top performers were now getting B- and lower
grades. Students who in previous years had average and below average grades now
had slightly to significantly above average grades. And the only school where the
results were not statistically significant was at a school where a teacher
happened to mention something in the teachers’ lounge and they all got to
talking. Still, let’s not pick on teachers shall we? The fact is a lot people
in all business fields behave this way. Even today. I’ve personally lost count
of how many times over just the past month I’ve heard people say things in and
out of my own workplace that make me want to just shake my head and say
“What!?” Things like, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<ul style="margin-top: 0cm;" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Oh, he must know, he’s a VP / a doctor / a .... !<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">She couldn’t possibly know.
She’s just a secretary / .... .<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">It’s important for us to
teach children about democracy and standing up for one’s rights (by
neither showing children that adults can behave well (ahem) like adults
nor allowing individual teachers to decide if they want to support
extracurricular student activities on their own). Oh, BTW, don’t get me
started on the ‘might equals right’ strategy of <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Ontario</st1:place></st1:state> politicians!<o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">This was also
a driving factor (of many) when ITIL as of version 3 changed from a set of
‘best practices’ to ‘good practices’ perhaps realizing this.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">I’ll look
for an opportunity to have another chat this week at the coffee machine with
that person.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11pt;">Oh, one
other thing, history can be a very good predictor of the future. Wars, bigotry,
overspending, listening to and sharing gossip just to name a few. It all
depends on how open or closed one’s mind is to continually learning new things.
When behaviors like I’m too busy to talk with so-and-so; oh, I already know. I
….; and so on are commonplace in any setting these broken telephones will also
be rampant. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-60993051934478863832012-12-09T12:45:00.006-05:002012-12-09T12:46:31.710-05:00Introducing Innovation Story WallsAn excellent and inexpensive tool for developing innovations where you work is using Innovation Story Walls. The scope of this blog topic is to offer some ideas on how you could and should implement these story walls. Many of us already know innovation makes a difference. It’s the:<br />
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• Key to survival and growth for all companies around the world, <br />
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• One of the highest sources of value creation,<br />
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• Diversity of ideas and sources of ideas that makes this so valuable, and it’s<br />
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• Typically a bottom-up phenomenon.<br />
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This has been proven over and over again in published research journals over the years, and this is our opportunity to expand on the innovations already identified via the Eureka portal.<br />
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No one, just because their role or has the market cornered on innovative ideas. The reality is that innovative ideas can come from anywhere and a lot of companies are recognizing that. It’s all about collaboration to crate new ideas because:<br />
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• Sometimes somebody has a great concept idea but no idea how to get from ‘here’ to ‘there’,<br />
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• Sometimes somebody has an idea to contribute that will help take a good idea and make it a better one but isn’t necessarily certain how to offer or contribute that idea,<br />
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• Sometimes somebody is shy about the concept idea they have or adding their 2¢, and<br />
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• Sometimes somebody has an idea how to get from ‘here’ to ‘there’ and just wants to open it up to others to make it more complete by offering any ideas they haven’t though of yet.<br />
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Now to the meat of this post --- <br />
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1) The objective of this tool is to (at a concept overview level): <br />
<br />
• Publicizing what you’ve done , and<br />
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• Publicizing what you’d like to get done<br />
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It’s the latter of these two we’re interested in this post.<br />
<br />
~ AND ~<br />
<br />
2) Determine:<br />
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• What prerequisites people believe need to exist to implement the above and make it successful . . . .<br />
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• From and for managers and the leadership team(s) and<br />
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• From and for everyone else too<br />
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• What governing rules or constraints do you want in place? – i.e.<br />
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• Are anonymous story cards acceptable?<br />
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• Can people move or remove story cards that already exist?<br />
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• Do people want to use thread or strings to tie strong cards together or how will you string story cards together into a complete story?<br />
<br />
• etc<br />
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• Where should innovation idea themes come from or should we have any at all?<br />
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• Should there be a maximum number of innovation ideas on the board at any one time?<br />
<br />
• How do innovation opportunities can be added? – i.e.<br />
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• Should there be a spot on the wall for ideas in queue?<br />
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• What is the maximum time an innovation opportunity will remain up on the board and active . . . . <br />
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• Before it’s nullified / rejected,<br />
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• Before it’s formalized, or <br />
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• Before it’s removed due to inactivity<br />
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• Do you want to score ideas based on interest factor or some other criteria?<br />
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• Where the physical placement of the story boards should be in the workplace<br />
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• Which group(s) should govern this activity – i.e. who do people go to if they have questions?<br />
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• Who transposes the story cards into some on-line form or whatever before they are removed from the wall?<br />
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• Etc.<br />
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Need more convincing?<br />
<br />
Two good, on-line articles on this topic are available at:<br />
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• http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2011/04/01/how-to-tear-down-the-walls-to-business-innovation/ <br />
<br />
• http://www.cognizant.com/business-consulting/Site%20Documents/fourwalls%20exec-sum.pdf <br />
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<br />PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497472220832313354.post-51405240053528007412012-12-09T12:00:00.000-05:002012-12-09T12:01:28.546-05:00Classes or Categories of User Stories<span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: sans-serif;">Please see below. I couldn't easily find a site that has all of these definitions together in one spot.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: sans-serif;"><b><u>Epics</u></b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: sans-serif;">Epics are large user stories, typically ones which are too big to implement in a single iteration and therefore need to be chunked into smaller user stories at some point before the effort required to complete them can be reasonably estimated.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: sans-serif;"><b><u>Themes</u></b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: sans-serif;">A theme is a collection of related user stories. For example, for a university registration system there might be themes around students, course management, transcript generation, grade administration, financial processing.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: sans-serif;">Themes are often used to organize stories into releases or to organize them so that various subteams can work on them. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: sans-serif;"><b><u>Spikes</u></b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: sans-serif;">The purpose of a spike is “to figure out answers to tough technical or design problems”. Spikes are considered useful when a more accurate time (and cost) estimate is required for an upcoming piece of work. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: sans-serif;">Foundation development, investigation work and the set-up of a lab environment so it's ready for use when a software build becomes available for testing are all good examples of spikes.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: sans-serif;"><b><u>User Stories</u></b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: sans-serif;">A user story is a high-level definition of a requirement, containing just enough information so that the developers and testers can produce a reasonable estimate of the effort, potential risks, key complexities, etc that need to be considered and are required to implement it.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: sans-serif;"><b><u>Tasks</u></b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: sans-serif;">Tasks are single units of work such as checking out a code branch or installing a build in a test lab.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><br style="background-color: white; color: #454545; font-size: 12px;" /><b><i>Would you like this elaborated upon further? Just let me know. </i></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>PM Philosophieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01402077128246748747noreply@blogger.com0