Sunday, September 23, 2007

APLN Seattle - Monday October 1st

At this month’s meeting Jim Benson will describe the distributed Scrum method they use at Gray Hill Solutions to deliver transportation software projects using a geagraphically spread team, mostly made up of temporary contractors.

As usual the meeting will be held at Avanade, 2211 Elliott Ave, Seattle, 98121, between 5.30pm and 7.30pm. Hope to see you there.

The talk will be divided into three parts: 

1. EDUCATION getting your team of hired guns and clueless clients to embrace agile collaboration,
2. EPIPHANY (includes the subsection “OMG! This s*&t really works!”), and
3. EXECUTION - Dancing’s better with the same music.

Each of these sections will describe our experiences, tools, techniques, procedures, pain points, and victories.  Most of the presentation will describe a project from Q4 2006, during which not only was our team distributed, but management was also spread between three continents. 

It’ll be similar to this abstract written for Agile 2007 (below), but this presentation was aimed more at the spec-based approach vs. a more agile approach - my APLN talk will be more about long-distance scrumming and what needed to happen in order to make it successful.

In December of 2005, Gray Hill Solutions won a large contract from a major transportation hardware company.  The one-year project was supposed to start on January 1, 2006.  There was a four month delay, but the major delivery deadline of January 15, 2007 did not change.  We intended to use a rapid-release agile process and to begin coding right away.  The client, however, wanted a detailed spec.  We showed them that a spec would take more time than the project could afford.    Instead, we wrote a project plan and a release plan using agile practices.  The clients saw the documents as they were being written and commented in real-time.  In the end, the documents won the  love of the client and served several internal needs beyond merely showing a spec.  At the end of that process, we had 4 months to do 12 months’ of coding.  Our team had members  in Seattle, British Columbia, Ontario, Colorado and Paris.  The project architect was in a Paris cafe working on his laptop for more than half the coding time. In the middle of the project, the UI lead ended up working in a Hong Kong cafe.  Utilizing a strong set of development tools, agile coding principles, and constant communication, the development team was able to deliver more than the client expected by the deadline with a very aggressive schedule.

I think what’s most important to APLN is the philosophical education, epiphanies, and execution that had to occur in order to take what was certainly a doomed project and achieve a successful outcome. Technorati tag: Agile, Scrum, APLN+Seattle, Avanade, Project+Management

Thursday, September 20, 2007

TOC In Color

Adail Retamal has introduced a variant of the TOC Thinking Processes using a color scheme to color the trees, TOC in Color. He’s derived this work on his experience with Feature Driven Development and Coad’s Color Modeling. Adail believes that adding color to trees has enabled him to communicate the content of a tree more quickly, to form the tree initially more quickly and that the quality of the information contained in the tree is higher. These are very similar findings to our original use of color in UML domain modeling, where we found that color enhanced the model, helped it communicate better, improved the quality of models particularly with novice and journeyman level modelers, and enabled as much as a 10x speed improvement in generating the models initially. If you are a fan of the TOC Thinking Process, check out Adail’s work and consider adding color to your CRT, FRT, Cloud, PRT, NBR, and TT. Technorati tag: Theory+Constraints, Adail+Retamal, UML+color, Peter+Coad, FDD, Feature+Driven+Development

Kanban at Javapolis

I’ve been invited to speak at Javapolis in Antwerp, Belgium this December. I’ll be giving a main conference session plus a half day tutorial session at the “university” on the first two days. [Update Sep 27] The organizers have confirmed that my UNI Kanban Tutorial will be held on Tuesday 11th December from 13:30 - 16.30 and my main conference presentation on Friday 14th December from 09:30 to 10:30.

The tutorial will be an opportunity to learn first hand how to implement a kanban system for software development. It’s the best opportunity this year for you to learn this material from me first hand. I’m really excited to be going back to Belgium for the first time in over a decade. I hope to see some of you there. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Javapolis, Kanban, Software+Engineering

Operations Review

Every second Friday of the month, my team holds our Operations Review meeting. Ops Review has been a key element in the cultural change that I’ve been leading at Corbis. It’s a key element in building a high trust culture based on transparency and in driving towards a kaizen culture of continuous improvement by providing an organization level opportunity to reflect on our performance as a team and our ability to deliver on our goals.

I modeled our Ops Review after the Sprintpcs.com version started by John Yuzdepski which I described in Chapter 14 of my book. Chapter 14 is available as a download in PDF.

Our Ops Review is a little different. We hold it as a breakfast meeting at an offsite venue close to our office in downtown Seattle. We’ve found that free food helps attendance. Also by setting the meeting at 8am for an 8.30am start we don’t impinge on the typical geek working day of 10am through 6pm. So there is very little productivity lost. Our meeting is also an “all hands” meeting including all my full time and contract employees and all of those in my colleague Erik Arnold’s organization.

By making it an all hands meeting, it provides the whole team with an opportunity to observe how the management team uses the objective data we gather on quality, productivity (throughput), lead time, and variation, to inform management decisions and interventions. It also gives team members a chance to reflect on team performance and suggest ways we can improve.

We also invite value chain partners from other parts of IT and from the rest of the business and some senior management. This month, for our August review, we had our CEO attend. He got to see first hand how transparent we are, and how open we are about discussing what we do well and where we have challenges. He was particularly impressed with how the team is prepared to challenge the data and ask questions to understand the root causes behind blips in the numbers.

Ops Review also gives us an opportunity to celebrate success and build a tribal pride in our performance and achievement. When our SQA manager announces yet another month with zero escaped defects to production, there is a cheer and a loud clapping.

Equally when we have poor performance data to show people will discuss it openly. When we showed some poor data highlighting that project issues had been lying for up to 11 days untriaged, a project manager put up her hand, admitted full responsibility and observed that she’d been distracted, as she was multi-tasking supporting another project while that project’s PM was on leave. This showed a number of things. Firstly, that we have a culture of personal safety where people can courageously speak up without fear of loss of face. Indeed the opposite is true. The team respects someone even more when they will admit responsibility and speak up. And this incident acted as a lesson to all of us on the impact of multi-tasking and over-stretching individuals.

While agile methods have always included the idea of project and iteration retrospectives, Operations Review provides an organization level opportunity to build trust, demonstrate transparency and drive continuous improvement. It’s an element of the culture required to institutionalize the changes in culture and working practices we’ve been implementing as a management team. Organization level focus is essential to drive a high maturity organization where capabilities are institutionalized and transfer across teams and projects.

I’ll be saying more about Ops Review and what it is doing to change perceptions inside and outside Corbis over the next few blog posts… Technorati tag: Agile, David+Andeerson, Lean, Kaizen, Organizational+Maturity, Agile+Management

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Agile Scotland Monday 17th December

Perhaps it’s a mid-life crisis but after 3 years plus years away, I have a hankering to go back to Scotland. I’m going to be in Edinburgh for 3 days in December. I just agreed with Clarke Ching to spend one of those evenings speaking to the Agile Scotland group in Edinburgh, on Monday 17th December. More details will follow from Clarke via the Agile Scotland web site. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Agile+Scotland, Clarke+Ching