Tuesday, March 07, 2006

The Real Agile CMMI Guy

I bumped into Hillel Glazer at SEPG on Monday. My paper on agile and CMMI from last year’s Agile 2005 conference has been pretty popular - about 21,000 downloads and growing at 700 every week - that’s given me a reputation as the agile CMMI guy but it is undeserved. Hillel is the real agile CMMI guy. He’s a lead appraiser specializing in agile appraisals. There needs to be more like him. I’ve added his new blog to my blog roll. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, CMMI, SEPG

CMMI+ITIL why it makes sense?

We’ve been getting a lot of customer requests to integrate ITIL support into a future version of MSF. Others are thinking the same way. There were three CMMI+ITIL presentations at SEPG this week including one from MSF partner Bill Phifer from EDS. [Bill’s buddie on our MSF GSI council, Charlie Bess is an avid blogger on the EDS Next Big Thing blog that has been on my blogroll for a while.] The reason people are thinking about this is simple - the constraint is no longer ability to write applications. Companies are recognizing that they must understand the full lifecycle including the deployed application and its maintenance and operations costs. The focus has therefore become one of minimizing costs in operation through use of techniques already included in MSF such as design for deployment. Integration with ITIL and a process for the full lifecycle of applications through development, deployment and operations is an active focus for us on the MSF team for a future release of the methodology. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, CMMI, SEPG, EDS, Bill+Phifer, ITIL

Monday, March 06, 2006

SEPG Tribal Markings

This is a picture of my chest (oh, yeah) taken yesterday (Monday) at the SEPG conference.

Note the security badge is a wireless device and the brown surround is primarily a security device that communicates that I have access to the exhibition area as well as the conference. However, there is a subconscious tribal communication on the badge. It says - “I’m one of the exhibitor tribe” and one of the “SEPG conference super tribe” and “one of the Microsoft tribe”. My polo shirt re-iterates that. I’m a Microsoftie! But note the pins stuck to my shirt below the Microsoft logo. These are tribal markings - stripes of individual value in the SEPG tribe. I’m a “presenter” and my employer is an “SEI Partner.” I’m not sure why they gave me the “Reviewer” pin - I don’t think I deserved it. So today, Tuesday, I didn’t wear it. All of this communicates that I’ve arrived in the SEPG tribe. [For any of you reading this and also attending the event, I look forward to seeing you in my session at 3.30pm on Thursday.] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, CMMI, SEPG

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Off to Nashville

I’m off to Nashville in the morning for the SEPG conference. If you are going to be there, be sure to stop by the Microsoft booth and ask for me. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, CMMI, SEPG

Friday, March 03, 2006

What’s Your Email Blood Pressure?

About 2 weeks ago I cracked. I couldn’t take it any more and I just had to clear out my email inbox. I took it down from 2200 items to just 0 but it took me all morning. I’ve decided to Take Back My Life and in doing so, I’m managing my email blood pressure. This past two weeks I’ve managed to keep the underlying level (let’s call it the diastolic level) at no more than 20 items. These are my work-in-progress and each one is marked with a colored “follow up” flag - prioritized form hot to cold colors. Meanwhile, the new items arrive in a pulse. If I had to measure my systolic level (the level of email sampled ever hour at the end of meetings), it is around 40. That’s right, if I go away for an hour I get about 20 new emails. Most of them are noise and I’ve become ruthless with the delete button. Everything else I read quickly and file in a person folder by topic or sender.

So consider this, I probably need 30% of my day just to manage my email blood pressure and keep it under control. If the incoming rate gets above 20 an hour, I crack and can’t keep up with the pace, or if the signal to noise ratio rises and I get more mail that I need to deal with, then same thing. The result is a growing inbox of unprocessed and often unread email. During the Beta 3 period of Team Foundation Server, I was getting 400 emails a day. My inbox can get to 2000 items in a week with a resultant half day productivity loss trying to fix it. The result is that I sit in the evening with mindless TV on TiVo and clean my inbox. If you want to get your mail read, you need to learn How to Communicate with Me or your note might be in the bit bucket.

This leads me to thinking that there must be a better way. So when, I wonder will the Outlook team discover the concepts of Drum-Buffer-Rope and Kanban and start applying them to the email system? Now my friends at Personify Design have made TeamLook an Outlook UI for Team Foundation Server. Imagine that, all those emails about developer tasks and bugs and all that stuff can go away, simply a TeamLook view on the work item history. Now imagine if we could start to marry my ideas and create a different kind of email system? I wish! Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Outlook, Team+System, Visual+Studio