Agile for any organization – a guide

Posted on 16. Jun, 2011 by ger in Guides, New Ways to Work

Agile management techniques have been used successfully in software and development in recent years, but can they be used to run other kinds of business? I believe they can. If you want to transform your business into an empowered, self-organizing machine that performs better, read on.

In this guide to agile I will, tell you three stories which will hopefully:
- Outline the benefits Agile
- Point out some tips and pitfalls
- Suggest some further reading

It’s about 13 years since I first encountered agile management. At the time I realized we were already naturally using some agile ideas, we just didn’t know they had a label. As you read this guide you might say “We already do that.” If you do, congratulations, you’re some way down the agile road already. Learning a little more will help you see the bigger picture and get even more out of agile.

Agile before we’d heard of Agile

Around 20 years ago (I’m really dating myself now) I worked for a US multinational building software for managing networks of telecom equipment (for a new standard called GSM). The project had run for a number of years with a large team and we had little working code to show but lots of specifications and elaborate plans.

A number of us felt a growing sense of unease so we put together a small team of five engineers and decided to rapidly build a simplified version of the overall system. Our small project was going to be a backup plan for the main team – risk mitigation. The other seventy engineers kept working on the existing plan. Can you guess what happened?

Our small team didn’t put any big plan in place. We commandeered a small meeting room and drew a list on a big whiteboard of the phases of the project. Each engineer owned a specific area of the product. We didn’t work in our regular cubes, we worked together in the meeting room. We lived and breathed that project. In effect the product was built during an extended ten-month meeting.

When the big team tried to put all their pieces of software together, they wouldn’t fit. Then we demoed our simplified product. It was fast, elegant but most importantly – it worked. The simplified product, built by five engineers in a small meeting room, became the basis of future products by that company for many years.

How did we do it? We had a simple goal, a simple plan, a deadline not too far away & we continuously reviewed progress and made many small adjustments. Management didn’t interfere but more crucially provided air cover for our small team. We were agile but didn’t know it.

First successes with Scrum

A number of years later I was working on another project that hit a problem. We realized a crucial software subsystem was more complex than we had estimated, the subsystem was underresourced. Our reputation was on the line. We had five months to turn it around. In a previous company I had been experimenting with two new management techniques, one called Episodes and one called Scrum. To my eye they looked very similar. Episodes went on to become Extreme Planning and Scrum went on to become er Scrum.

Again we put a small team together, this time four engineers. We split the overall project into a series of five month-long sprints. We then focussed only on the current sprint. We held daily meetings and everyone planned their own tasks each day. For each task we put post-it notes on a big A2 sheet of paper on a table in the middle of our work area.

We built the crucial subsystem in five months and three days, which for a software project is remarkably close to the deadline.

Our next project, spanning 15 months with 30 engineers (6 teams of 5) mostly used Scrum. This project we completed one week early (which is very rare in software projects). Other teams in the organization started using A2 sheets and daily meetings. The company’s post-it note bill skyrocketed. Projects hit their deadlines.

I think there were a number of key factors in these successes:

  • Everyone on each team had a sense of ownership both of the project and their own destiny.
  • We didn’t spend time building intricate and brittle long-term plans.
  • Everyone was focussed on a tangible milestone, at most a month away. We didn’t have time to delude ourselves into a false sense of being-on-track. We didn’t change plans during each sprint.
  • We met almost daily and made many small adjustments.
  • We created a simple visualization of the project and progress.
  • Everyone, even the graduate engineers, became a project manager of their part of the project.
  • We held retrospectives at the end of each sprint to decide what went well and what went badly. We saw genuine organizational learning.

Scrum to manage marketing campaigns

Recently Goshido began working with another multinational product company, but this time instead of building products this team was managing retail marketing projects in 13 countries. The team was running well and getting results, but each quarter-end they seemed to have an increasing backlog of open issues dragging into the next quarter.

They decided to look at their projects as sprints. Deciding what needed to be done in the first sprint (month) led to interesting and surprising debates about priorities. They quickly realised they were not all pulling in the same direction, they were being unrealistic and putting themselves under unconstructive pressure.

Today they’ve mapped out their projects at sprints. They’re not looking too far down the road. Instead of post-it notes, they’re using Goshido and their distributed team (some of whom are outside the company) have an always-up-to-date picture of what’s happening on the project. They spend less time in meetings, more time making progress.

We would wholeheartedly recommend the agile approach to running projects. The key challenges are not technological but sociological – resistance to change. Agile is a new way of thinking, but when your team starts thinking in that new way, they feel more empowered, more engaged and will improve your business performance.

Learn more

Kirsten Knipp’s blog post show’s you how to run a marketing team like an agile startup.

Read Mike Cohn’s blog post on how to decide if Scrum is right for your project.

The wikipedia article on Scrum will give you a good primer on the terminology.

Joe Little has written a short but great blog post about getting started with agile and Scrum.

Kelly Waters has written a series of blog posts outlining 10 easy steps to implement Scrum.

A recent HBR article by Eric T. Anderson and Duncan Simester suggests running a business as a series of experiments. Short test-learn cycles sound like the short iteration cycles of Agile.

Stephen Denning’s book The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management applies agile techniques to the organization as a whole, not just a single team or even a product development group.

Update 12-Jul-2011: Steve Denning has also published an excellent introduction to Scrum from a general management perspective.

Jurgen Appelo’s Management 3.0 is a tour-de-force showing how businesses are complex adaptive systems and how this theory can be applied to bring greater agility to any organization, team, or project.

Jurgen Appelo has put together a list of the top 100 agile books. Many of these books are specific to software engineering. I really liked Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn.

Try Goshido, a new cloud-platform, which helps people: focus, communicate, and do their best work. Goshido applies new principles for how work can be organized; the perfect blend of Agile, Lean, Productivity and Attention Management.

Personal Productivity – a guide (FTF and GTD)

Posted on 04. Jun, 2011 by ger in Guides, New Ways to Work

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of the tasks and projects you have, then some personal productivity techniques might help. Maybe the five minutes you spend reading this post might save many hours of procrastination in the future.

I’ve experimented with a number of techniques in my time and two in particular made a big impact on me. In this post I’ll give you a quick guide to Stephen Covey’s First-Things-First (FTF) and David Allen’s Getting Things Done® (GTD®).

Getting Things Done (GTD)

Getting Things Done (GTD) helps you capture all of the tasks and projects bouncing around in your head into a system you can trust. It’s a bit different from other time management methods because it doesn’t focus on priorities. I’ve used GTD for a number of years and it is an excellent way to get and stay organized, calm and productive.

GTD – key concepts

Actions, are indivisible chunks of work. An action is something that needs to be done.

Contexts, are the situation in which an action can be completed. For example, an action that can only be completed in the office, would have a context of office.

Projects are activities that will take more than one action to complete. Each project has a desired outcome, a simple description of what success looks like. One of the key benefits of GTD is the idea that you should always identify the next action for a project. For example, if the project is renew insurance, the next action might be “get insurance company phone number”.

GTD has a simple workflow. You have a number of collections – notebooks, inboxes (electronic and real paper), voice recorders. You regularly process these collections and capture the actions. You can make a simple triage decision on each item in a collection:

  • Is it actionable?
  • If yes, and it will take less than two minutes, do it now.
  • If actionable, and it will take longer, defer it.
  • If not, bin it or store it for reference.

There’s a number of stages of the GTD “workflow”:

  • collect- gather possible actionable items
  • process – all the items and decide if they are actionable or not
  • organize & review – review your existing projects and actions, make sure every project has a next action
  • do – don’t forget to get things done

GTD Benefits

There’s more to GTD, but that’s the rudiments. When I’ve managed to apply myself for a consistent period of time I’ve found it excellent, felt calmer and more in control of my work. It does take some time though.

Getting the most out of GTD

The danger with GTD is you spend lots of time feeding the system, you could if you’re not careful, spend more time organizing than doing.

You really do need to do the weekly review every week – not every so often. The hard thing is stopping long enough to do the weekly review. I’ve let it lapse for a time and if you haven’t done a weekly review in more than a week you do start to feel harried and start to mistrust the system and feel like things are “getting a bit out of control” (instead of “getting done”).

The total number of projects starts to rise quickly. This is good and bad. It’s good because you become more conscious of the number of projects you’re involved in, they were all there in the back of your mind anyway. I found within a few weeks I was up to nearly 70 projects which is a lot to review weekly in just an hour. In the end I had to review only part of the project list. I used my “areas of responsibility” to prioritize my projects.

If you do read David Allen’s book and you’re not quite sure about GTD, try reading the book a second time at least a month later. I found the concepts made much more sense on the second read.

Tools for GTD

You don’t need any tools for GTD. You can do everything with a notebook and a simple physical filing system.

However, a number of excellent tools have emerged in recent years. On the Mac (and iPhone / iPad) you’ll find both Omnifocus and Things. Things is a very elegant and simple application. Omnifocus is more complex but more powerful. ThinkingRock is a java GTD application that runs on Windows (as well as Mac and Linux). All of these tools are for a single individual.

Our product Goshido is a platform for managing work. It runs on the cloud and any web browser. Goshido allows you to capture, organize and do: actions and projects. Goshido enables you to implement GTD either on your own or within a team.

GTD summary

One of the refreshingly different things about GTD is a lack of emphasis on priorities. The main idea is to select a next action based on context, on the day and in the moment.

If you’re finding you are harried in your day to day work and starting to feel out of control, give GTD a try, it could leave you feeling like you have a “mind like water”, a calm awareness.

Prioritizing work with FTF

A number of years ago I also tried using the productivity system outlined by Stephen Covey in his book, 7 habits of highly effective people. Habit #3 is “First Things First”. Covey recommends you decide the importance and urgency of each task.

This means each task can be categorized in one of four quadrants:

  1. Important & Urgent
  2. Important & Not Urgent
  3. Not Important & Urgent
  4. Not Important & Not Urgent

Many people spend too much time in quadrant 3 and not enough time in quadrant 2. Covey recommends intentionally tipping the balance toward quadrant 2, saying no or delaying tasks that arrive that are part of quadrant 3.

Years ago a US multinational I worked for sent us all on time management training. They recommended prioritizing tasks on a scale of 1-5. When I started using the Covey technique I found it much more effective.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower once said “Most things which are urgent are not important, and most things which are important are not urgent.”

Next Actions

Legalese

Goshido is not licensed, certified, approved, or endorsed by or otherwise affiliated with David Allen or the David Allen Company which is the creator of the Getting Things Done® system for personal productivity. GTD® and Getting Things Done® are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company. For more information on the David Allen Company’s products, please visit their website: www.davidco.com.

Speaking on Cloud Software Development – ICS / University of Limerick

Posted on 16. May, 2011 by ger in Events

Do you want to learn more about developing software for the cloud? Are you going to be somewhere near Limerick (Ireland) on Thursday 19-May-2011? If so, come along to the event organized by the Irish Computer Society (ICS) in the University of Limerick (6-8pm).

Richie Bowden of Cloud Consulting will be speaking about all of the options out there for cloud software development. I’ve seen Richie speak before and this is a great opportunity to catch him in Limerick. Besides consulting on all things cloud, Richie is also a ScrumMaster and PMI certified project manager.

I will be speaking about our experiences developing Goshido using Ruby-on-Rails on Amazon web-services.

Next steps:

Try Goshido (free trial)



Five Degrees of Online Project Collaboration – Common Pitfalls

Posted on 26. Apr, 2011 by ger in New Ways to Work

Businesses like yours waste valuable time and money on a bewildering array of communication and project management systems. This overview will make you aware of some of the common pitfalls encountered by Lisa, Michael, Andrea, Pauline and Donald.

Most people now realize email is a huge waste of time and attention. Researchers are discovering email can even affect your physical and mental health.

If you search for alternatives to email you’ll find so many products they’ll make your head spin. However, if you squint hard enough, most fall into one of these categories.

  • Online Task Lists
  • Online Project Management Systems
  • Domain Specific Workflow
  • Social Software for Enterprise
  • Email Fixer-Uppers

Online Task Lists

Lisa manages four small teams of software developers. They started using a popular project management and task tracking tool and found some immediate benefits. They were able to create projects and tasks online and share and assign them to other people on the team. They moved all their tasks from post-it-notes and spreadsheets to a system that gave everyone visibility of what was happening whether they were in the office or working from another location.

While they saw short term gains, they quickly hit the limitations of these systems. One team, five engineers working on short projects (one-month iterations of the software) suddenly had lists with 250 tasks. No one could see who was doing what next. Even worse, everyone on the project was getting email notifications of all task completions, generating a lot of noise.

The system had a fixed structure; projects contained milestones which contained tasks. When the team wanted to sub-divide tasks they started sending emails. Suddenly, some of the project information went invisible again – black market tasks.

Simple task and project management systems hit limitations even for small teams.

Project Management and Domain Specific Workflow

Michael is a game producer managing a 120 person multi-disciplinary team. Michael started the project, created the initial plan on a Gannt chart. But he realized the Gannt chart was really just good for planning and wasn’t so useful for the day-to-day running of the project.

The software developers on the game used specialized tools, an agile project tracking system & a bug tracker. The QA group used the bug tracker but not the agile system. The art & animation teams didn’t like the agile system or the bug tracker and used neither properly. The marketing team didn’t like any of the tools, so they just used email and spreadsheets.

The agile project management system helped the team leaders allocate work to different releases and track the progress as a project was ongoing, but the individual engineers felt they were just feeding data into the system and seeing very little value in return.

Everyone on the project wrote a progress report at the end of the week. This was then filtered by their team leads and sent to Andrea an associate producer. She collated and summarized everything into a single 9-page email that’s was circulated and reviewed by all the producers once a week.

Andrea spent most of her time doing clerical work, chasing people for late status reports, cross checking everything and reconciling it back to the original project plan. Everyone spent time writing status reports and sitting in meetings. By the time the executive team analyzed and acted on the 9-page email, the information was watered down and a week out of date.

When tools are complex and specialist you won’t get broad adoption in a multi-disciplinary project. Critical project information gets scattered into a number of information silos.

Email & Enterprise Social

Pauline runs a European sales and marketing team for a multinational corporation. Each quarter they start 40 different projects in 13 countries in Europe. Some projects involve external sub-contract companies.

They tried a popular internal collaboration system but it became cumbersome to track a large number of projects. They could never convince their IT team to make the system accessible to the external sub-contractors. Everyone reverted to email and a weekly three-hour status meeting.

Now Pauline receives on average 104 emails a day. 11 of them are actionable – things she needs to do. But she has to read all 104 emails, just in case an action she’s expected to take, is nestled in the third-last paragraph.

The IT team installed an enterprise social platform. Initially it was popular with a number of internal blogs being published. Interesting dialogs happened but great ideas in posts and comments were never acted on (or if they were, the results never connected back to the posts or comments).

The enterprise social platform made it easier to share information, but it didn’t help people do their day to day jobs; it didn’t help them orchestrate action within the organization.

Email Fixer-Uppers

Donald works for a creative agency. At any one time he’s working on six different projects, some in early concept stage others in execution phase. The IT team recently installed an enhanced email system that filters emails automatically and helps him organize the emails in smart folders. Donald likes the system even though it really slows down his computer. The big problem though is he’s alone. Everyone else he works with, tinkered with the system but didn’t change their email practices and just drifted back to email as usual. They didn’t think differently, so they didn’t act differently.

To paraphrase Ted Nelson – fixing email is like trying to graft arms and legs onto a hamburger.

Conclusion

With the right product you can save money, time and stop some of those business opportunities from slipping through the cracks.

  • Make sure you have a business problem to solve
  • If you’re evaluating a specific product match it with a category above and be aware of the possible pitfalls
  • Make sure the product you select is something that you and your colleagues will want to use
  • Pick a product that will grow to meet the needs of your organization

Try Goshido (free trial)

Why we built Goshido

Posted on 07. Apr, 2011 by ger in New Ways to Work, Product

Goshido is a labour of love that was born of frustration – a frustration that many people share.

Juggling Projects in Intel

I was a software architect working on a large project in Intel and our new chip was just spluttering into life. Engineers in Ireland, USA (Massachusetts & Arizona) and India were working day and night to keep the project moving. I arrived into the office one morning, picked up a tea in the canteen and headed for my desk. As my laptop woke, I sipped some tea. As Outlook synced new emails from the server, I checked the share price on Yahoo Finance, +15c. I wondered how the testing had gone in Phoenix over the weekend.

My mood imploded. 253 unread emails in my inbox. Groan.

Inbox Zero

At the time, I was trying Merlin Mann’s excellent inbox zero technique, so I set to work triaging my emails.

Inbox zero suggests you skim each email and decide if it’s an action, information or noise. If it’s actionable and easy to do – do it. If it’s actionable and takes a bit longer, mark it for later processing. If it’s not actionable, delete it or archive it.

Sometimes it can be hard to categorize an email. Some emails drag on and on with the action is hidden in the third last paragraph. To be honest, I wandered off track, spent at least 20 minutes writing a reply to an email about another project before I remembered inbox zero. 2 hours, 8 minutes later I was at inbox zero and I had 16 emails marked as actionable. The good news: the testing had gone well in Phoenix. The bad news: my brain was fried by all of the context switches as I lurched from one email to the next. I needed another cup of tea.

A Universal Problem

This tale of woe is repeated in offices and workplaces around the world every day. Email is really just a symptom of the problem. Most people are juggling many chunks of work at the same time, don’t communicate about them effectively, get distracted by the urgent stuff, and veer away from the important. Tension escalates. Groups try to remedy this by spending time in meetings or writing status reports or crafting even more emails.

Over the years I’ve worked in big companies and tiny companies and the problem affects both in different ways. While big companies might have many people on a project, small companies tend to have many small informal projects.

What about tool X?

Over the years I’d tried many many tools: web-based collaboration, enterprise social, wikis, project management, and bug-trackers. The web-collaboration tools worked well for projects of moderate size (and small numbers of them). The wikis and enterprise social tools worked well for sharing information, not so good for coordinating action. The project management and bug trackers worked well for engineers but saw low adoption in cross-disciplinary teams.

For one reason or another, the teams I worked with, abandoned the new tool and drifted back to emails and shared documents/spreadsheets.

Techniques that work

Despite these tools issues, I’ve tried interesting techniques like Scrum (a form of agile project management), GTD (a brilliant personal productivity technique by David Allen), and mindfulness. However the tools for these techniques are either specific to a domain (like software development), for individuals (not teams), or non-existent. Some of the projects I worked on achieved significant successes with Scrum, using nothing more than a truck-load of post-its and a sense of humor.

So that’s why we’ve built Goshido – a cloud platform that can help you (and the people you work with):

  • Focus on doing the things that matter
  • Communicate with clarity about actions
  • Complete massive projects (or 100s of informal ones)

Next steps

So if you feel overwhelmed by all the work coming at you, and you’ve tried lots of other tools and found them wanting, try something different:
Try Goshido (free trial)

We hope you find Goshido as useful as we do, and if you do, be sure to let us know.

Speaking about Agile at PMI Event in Dublin

Posted on 28. Mar, 2011 by ger in Events

If you want to learn more about Agile & Scrum and you’re in Dublin on the 29th of March, I am one of the speakers at an event organized by the Ireland Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI).

The event is billed as “Agile Scrum – Everything you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask”. It promises to be a lively session.

Colm Ó hEocha will introduce Agile and the benefits. Ger Hartnett will be talking about what Scrum is and how it works with plenty of examples from Intel and Goshido. Richard Bowden will discussing some practical lessons learned from the use of Scrum on a number of different projects.

When: 2pm to 6pm on Tuesday 29 March 2011.
Where: Hilton Hotel, Charlemont Place, Dublin, IRELAND.

The event is free but you should register in advance on the PMI website.

9+2 things successful people do differently

Posted on 23. Mar, 2011 by ger in New Ways to Work

I’m usually wary of blog posts like “N tips to accomplish your goals”. All too often they’re filled with reheated motivational cliches. Heidi Grant Halvorson’s recent post on the Harvard Business Review Blog is different. Heidi recommends “9 things successful people do differently”. I’m going to add two more to her list.

First, here are some examples from Heidi.

Seize the moment to act on your goals

“… decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance … Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.”

Know exactly how far you have left to go

“Check your progress frequently – weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.”

Be a realistic optimist

“Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.”

Focus on getting better, rather than being good

“Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed … As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.”

Mitch McCrimmon, one of the commenters on Heidi’s post, added a 10th recommendation.

Review and celebrate successes

“We need a sense of making progress, not just a feeling that there is so much more to do.”

Finally, to turn the volume up to 11, I’ll add another related recommendation.

Break a goal or project down into bite-size chunks

Richard Wiseman conducted a large-scale scientific study a few years ago into the psychology of motivation. The more successful participants broke down their high-level goals into a series of sub-goals. If you use this technique you’ll achieve small successes that build up to audacious accomplishments.

Learn more

  • Read Heidi’s blog post or check out her new book Succeed, which is getting great reviews on Amazon
  • Read Richard Wiseman’s book 59 Seconds
  • Try Goshido, a new cloud-platform, which helps people: focus, communicate, and do their best work.

Can you recommend other good ideas?

Seminar in Edinburgh SCOTLAND cancelled due to weather

Posted on 29. Nov, 2010 by ger in Events

Due to severe weather conditions we’ve cancelled the event scheduled for 30-Nov in Edinburgh Scotland.

Slides from the Cork seminar Oct 2010

Posted on 28. Oct, 2010 by ger in Events

You can view the slides from our recent seminar in Cork, Ireland.

Here are some followup ideas:

Slides from our recent breakfast seminar

Posted on 23. Sep, 2010 by ger in Uncategorized

You can view the slides from our recent seminar.

Here are some followup ideas:

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