Tuesday, April 03, 2007

April Fool with Meaning

I played an April Fool prank on my team yesterday with the assistance of our HelpDesk and Mark Grotte, one of my management team. We scheduled an outage for our kanban white board to take place across the morning standup meeting. Our Global HelpDesk sent out the following message in their standard format…

There will be a Whiteboard outage this morning for the Daily Standup Whiteboard.  The Whiteboard will be down for approximately 15 minutes beginning at 9:45am while the hardware is upgraded.  Please to refrain from looking at or speaking about the Daily Standup Whiteboard during this outage.  Once Whiteboard functionality has been restored, Mark Grotte will test the system.  We will then notify you when it is safe to look at the whiteboard again.  Please contact Help Desk with any questions.  thanks

Next came the standup where in Mark’s own words, “There were a lot of confused faces this morning as I “demolished” the board, and updated it.” It seems that everyone did turn up as usual. Which shows they don’t pay as much attention to these high severity messages as one might hope. But I had anticipated this. The point of the exercise was well made. As Mark continued in his email to me,“I think the point was made that we have come to rely on our daily-standup as a valuable check-in on our daily work.”

Sometimes you need to do something a little off-the-wall to help people reflect on how the culture is changing. And if you can’t have a little fun at work doing it, then what is the point, really? Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Ideas In Manufacturing Matter

I thought I’d point out a couple of new articles that are worthy of your time. Alistair Cockburn argues in Crosstalk that software engineering has aspects in common with manufacturing and why it is important that we learn from them. Meanwhile, over at CM Crossroads Brad Appleton lists off his Lean Metrics for an Agile CM Environment.

Cockburn’s article is particularly interesting and innovative as he chooses to think of “decisions” in knowledge work as “parts” (or inventory) in manufacturing. In Agile Management I defined invnetory as the collection of customer-valued functions (or ideas) that were in-progress in the system. In MSF, the team at Microsoft, defined it as “knowledge” - the concept that 100% knowledge equated to releasable code, while 0.001% would represent the glint in the eye of the business owner when a concept for a new piece of software is first born. Cockburn’s definition is a refinement on the MSF notion and a significant innovation that will allow further work on the topic. I fully agree with Alistair’s observation that every line of code represents a “decision.” I’ve stated this before when I observed that every developer is an executive in reference to Peter Drucker’s writings on knowledge work.  Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lean, Alistair+Cockburn, Brad+Appleton