| Home | My Account | Directories |
Normailzed Perspectives
Published on 2012-05-22 09:00:00
As software professionals, our beliefs about what qualifies as "best practices" often depends on our experience and our expertise. This is one of the reasons that it is so very difficult to run the self-organizing software teams, frequently described in agile literature. The fact is, teams cannot be self-organizing, until the members share mental maps of both problem and solution domains. Until these maps are truly shared by the team, an external organizing force is required to ensure consist [..] > read more
Helping the Team
Published on 2012-05-15 09:00:00
Perhaps you have experienced the struggles of on-boarding new developers into an already large team in the middle of a project. Everybody who comes wants to have a say in how things are done, no matter how late in the process they get involved. Here is a litany of the types of commentary that I hear in this situation: On my last project we used and it worked great. We should certainly use that here. We don't need its too . Why don't you just . The code-base is in a bad state because . [..] > read more
Fixed Feature Bids
Published on 2012-05-08 09:00:00
I have worked with a lot of teams made up primarily of contract developers. Not teams from consulting firms, but teams of "assorted" contractors from assorted staff augmentation firms. Folks that have been doing "short term" staff aug work for a while - (by my definition not longer than a year) - have an hourly mindset. That is, they get paid by the hour. They know that they are the last to show and the first to go - meaning they are only hired when needed, and are rolled off as soon as t [..] > read more
Stretch Role
Published on 2012-05-01 09:00:00
Hiring has some words that we use to describe what we are looking for: 1) Been There, Done That - you want someone who can do this job with their eyes closed. 2) New Blood - you want someone who will never say, "that is not the way we do it here". 3) Fresh Meat - you want someone who isn't already burned out. 4) Youthful Optimism - you want someone who will not stop trying when things get ugly. 5) Hands - you want someone who cranks out work. 6) Brains - you want someone who can show us how to d [..] > read more
Mechanics Building a Car
Published on 2012-04-24 09:00:00
Sometimes building software is ugly. There, I said it. Sometimes, especially at the beginning of a project that will result in a new system, especially when you are working with a new (to you) software paradigm, especially when you are working with a new team, building software is ugly. I recently was part of a project which took an existing piece of software on one platform, with the intention of re-implementing it on a new platform. Perhaps the biggest challenge came from the fact that the [..] > read more
Agile Delivery Manager vs. Project Manager
Published on 2012-04-17 09:00:00
When you adopt agile practices, especially agile life cycle plans - it is really simple to have your project manager become the scrum-master, right? Isn't that what everybody does? After all, it's just swapping a gantt chart for a burn down chart, right? It certainly is what all of the project managers do when their companies start to adopt agile life cycles - but is it the best thing, or even a good thing? Since I don't believe that the dogmatic Scrum = Agile equation is true, I will a [..] > read more
Heard in the Aisle
Published on 2012-04-10 09:00:00
Over the last few weeks I have overheard a couple of things that really tickled me, because of their brutal portrayal of some business truism, and because of the skill of the speaker in articulating: Heard in reference to a cowboy-ish developer struggling to learn a new paradigm: > read more
R.A.T.S. Delegation
Published on 2012-04-03 09:00:00
In writing a recent post for my other blog about planning and delegation, I fell into a set of 4 principles that define how to delegate successfully. The principles are Responsibility, Accountability, Trust, Success or RATS. Here is the excerpt from that post: > read more
Software Engineering
Published on 2012-03-27 09:00:00
I am not a fan of software methodologies, third party libraries, hyper-generalized frameworks or other so called productivity enhancers within the software development process. At the same time, I abhor the idea of a thousand developers at a thousand keyboards creating a thousand screens, features, pages and trying somehow to stitch them together into a cohesive software product. What do I like? Small teams of smart developers who understand how to build small re-usable frameworks to solve pro [..] > read more
Starting Green
Published on 2012-03-20 09:00:00
One of the most useless project management conventions I have ever worked with is the status stoplight or RAG status. From a simplicity perspective, it is designed to convey a general state of the project. Green means things are "OK". Amber means things aren't that OK. Red means things are not OK at all. The convention is to get the attention of stakeholders when the status changes from green to amber to red. It is a beacon, or warning signal that something needs to change. Meaningless, [..] > read more
When Task Estimates Fail
Published on 2012-03-13 09:00:00
Of course, the only valid reason for estimation is prediction. We want to predict the cost and duration of delivery for some set of working software capabilities. If we didn't care about time and cost, we wouldn't waste our time trying to predict. We realize that software task estimates alone are insufficient for this prediction. But at the heart, the task estimates being predictable; correctly representing the work that the team needs to do within some finite predictable variance is [..] > read more
Fail Fast Furiously
Published on 2012-03-12 20:58:00
The other day, I read a tweet by @gnat (nat torkington), saying that fail fast as a mantra was misleading - because the objective was to learn, not to fail. Actually when I exhort people to fail fast, the objective is to retire a risk. Sure, learning is important, but what is really important to the delivery of software is retiring risk. Either we know something will work, or we know it won't work. Risk retired, the rest is just work. What is necessary to fail is a set of success criteria. [..] > read more
Weaponized Metrics
Published on 2012-03-06 09:00:00
Software teams hate metrics. They don't like to estimate work. They don't like to tell you how much progress they have made. I remember my first "team" project. PM asked me to estimate how long it would take me to finish a task I had never done before on a platform I was new to. I replied that I thought it would take me about 1 week. PM was furious, ya know, Jack over there could have that done before noon. You software developers are all alike, padding your estimates. And so it went the [..] > read more
Project Portfolio Management
Published on 2012-02-28 09:00:00
Projects are not assets, they are liabilities. Like a future obligation, or a goal. When you manage a portfolio of liabilities, they have to be offset by assets. The process of project portfolio management is simply the management of flow of expenditure projected by each project, in time, compared with the projected flow of funding from defined sources. When the projected funding is sufficient to cover the projected flow of project expenditure for all projects, no worries. When the projected [..] > read more
Product Management
Published on 2012-02-20 09:00:00
Product Management is something that should be easy to understand. The highest level goals of product management should be easy to articulate. 1) build a valuable product 2) maintain the value of a product relative to its customer community 3) manage the investment in the product, to ensure the best possible return I believe that these goals are universal to product management across all domains, and all situations. I don't know that I can add anything that is not a derivative of one of these [..] > read more
When Firing Is Better
Published on 2012-02-13 09:00:00
Sometimes it would just be easier, and better for all parties if we were honest and just "Fired their sorry asses!" It would be easier for management, because there is less corporate drama around firing and hiring than around a reorg, or implementing alternative staffing models, and RIF's are either good (when the economy is going down) or bad (when it is going up), from a market analysts perspective - but firing ineffective employees and hiring new talent is always good. Being fired car [..] > read more
Product Centric
Published on 2012-02-06 09:00:00
I work in an environment that is somewhat dominated by a project governance mentality. What does this mean? What it means to me is this - that our diligence is focused on spending rather than on asset creation. Why is this significant? Because it changes how we focus the decisions in the process of software development. I work in a software development function, within a large financial enterprise. We create software assets with a life between 5 and 20 years. The capital investment in that [..] > read more
What I Have Done
Published on 2012-02-04 08:34:00
Recently I have had to look back on my career and remind myself what I have done. I am leading a challenging project, and at times it feels like I have team members and customers projecting their expectations for how the work will be executed. Sometimes amid the cacophony of voices, I have to remind myself that I am capable of bringing the team to consensus around strategic decisions. I have to remind myself that while everyone has an opinion, not all have an equal appreciation for the busine [..] > read more
Product Portfolio Management
Published on 2012-01-31 11:50:25
Product Portfolio If you want to manage a portfolio of software products, it is necessary to understand the organizational goals that are met by those software products. The product portfolio is a vehicle for understanding the ongoing investment in development or deployment of software assets. It requires an ability to measure the value of software assets separate from their cost (rarely done in industry today), and an ability to measure the cost of ongoing support and maintenance of software [..] > read more
Agile Is Not For Everyone
Published on 2012-01-24 09:00:00
OH: (on twitter) "Convinced. Everyone that says "agile doesn't work" or even "agile doesn't work for us" just doesn't know what it means to be agile." I read this on Twitter over the weekend (12/17/11). It really got me fired up. Mind you, I am an avid agilist. The point is, that some situations are not particularly suited to derive benefit from agile practices. Some organizations and managers are culturally not aligned to receive benefit from agile practices. They will support some ad h [..] > read more
Why are we doing that?
Published on 2012-01-17 09:00:00
Take anything. Any activity. Any Practice. Any Standard. Any Method. Ask the question "why?" - with fresh eyes, take a long hard look at why we are doing it. Now, ask yourself if the "why" is being accomplished. Ask yourself if you even know how to measure the benefits you originally sought. Ask yourself if all the acitivities, practices, standards, methods and other things we do make sense together. Dogma is powerful. Questioning is more powerful. Dogma is required like training wheel [..] > read more
Take Your Team to a Drag Race
Published on 2012-01-10 12:00:00
One thing that I have noticed at the beginning of a project is that there almost always appears to be confusion. Confusion about mission. Confusion about terminology. Confusion about what is important. Confusion about roles and responsiblilities. It feels bad, it looks bad and it smells bad. It's like what drag racers do before a run. They used to pour bleach on the tires and spin the drive wheels, creating massive amounts of foul smelling smoke. The purpose of this exercise is to heat up [..] > read more
Project Pork Prevention
Published on 2012-01-03 09:00:00
Why is it that the customer in corporate software projects seems to want to pack the scope of every project with capabilities of dubious value, in the same way that our congressional leaders try to pack important bills with "pork"? Why do organizational leaders try to take a well funded project or initiative and use it as a means of funding their personal management agenda? Because like congress, if they can construe their agenda as essential to the completion of some important project - they [..] > read more
Real World Developer Manifesto
Published on 2011-12-20 09:32:00
Real World developers prefer: Getting things done over sitting in meetings, but understand that communication is important. Working code over extensive documentation, but understand that government regulations, and product sustainability require a rational approach to documentation. Requirements that describe business value over requirements that prescribe implementation vectors, but understand that the customer often can only express requirements in concrete examples based on his or her experi [..] > read more
Is It Me?
Published on 2011-12-13 09:00:00
Occasionally - I will get into a conflict with someone, and I don't know why. When I look back at the conversation, what I remember, it becomes apparent that either I baited someone into an argument, or vice versa. Sometimes this happens because I attach connotative meaning to something someone says because I think I know what he or she means. Other times I have some history that comes to bear, so I project that history on top of something. In either case, the conversation becomes broken, and [..] > read more
Vendor Capability Requirements
Published on 2011-07-05 08:36:00
When contemplating acquiring software from a vendor, it is important to understand how the capabilities of the organization that you are purchasing from add value to the project, and to the product and your business process over the life of the syste > read more
Planning Sequencing Elaboration
Published on 2011-06-25 08:22:40
In its simplest form, planning is nothing more than sequencing and elaboration; that is, deciding what order to get things done, and then determining a more detailed manifest of work items required to produce each deliverable. Sequencing: determini > read more
Units of Work
Published on 2011-06-20 20:14:00
In the prior post, Units Of Value, I said that defining the units of value is key to understanding and delivering what your customer needs. In order to create a delivery plan, you need to construct a repeatable process for converting units of value t > read more
Units of Value
Published on 2011-06-18 09:14:30
Planning a software development project is difficult. There are the typical issues: the changing face of technology, abstractions and generalizations, process maturity and resource competency. But none of this gets to the heart of why planning a soft > read more
Emergent Requirements
Published on 2011-06-11 18:38:00
Glen Alleman in his Herding Cats blog, asks some really good questions about emergent requirements. Since Glen is always and forever explaining that domain has everything do do with process, this appears to be another example, where the domain > read more
Leading by Naming
Published on 2011-06-11 08:32:57
There is power in a name. Primitive cultures often believed that to know the name of something or someone is to have power over it. Much superstition, and "magic" or spell casting has been based in this principle. It fact, even in more mode > read more
Leading by Asking
Published on 2011-06-07 19:58:56
Sometimes we need to learn to lead by asking. As a leader, we need to correctly frame the question, so that those we are leading will get the answer themselves. By asking questions, we are helping those we are leading to draw their own conclusions. > read more
Design Assumptions
Published on 2011-06-06 21:35:46
Pragmatism - design assumptions are about pragmatism. Pragmatism is the easiest path to good enough. If I already have tools available that will allow me to do the job "good enough", why would I go buy and learn new tools? If I already have > read more
Scope or Generality
Published on 2011-06-03 17:20:31
In a discussion with a colleague this week, I was trying to articulate how writing business capability requirements can help guide both development and software acquisition processes. My explanation apparently was not very good, because he definite > read more
When Scope Is Variable
Published on 2011-06-03 07:26:50
I have been working on an "Agile" product with our IT Project Standards and Governance group at work. When analyzing the values and principles that are espoused in our "gated" product, I realize that the difference between agile a > read more
Software Capability Requirements
Published on 2011-05-15 09:11:00
As stated in Business Capability Requirements, software capability requirements are correlated with a business capability requirement that answers the key questions why and how much. Systems designers, architects, and developers are better equipped t > read more