Eventyr

Leadership on Agile Projects

"Leadership that moves the emphasis from doing-things-right to doing-the-right-things is a better complement to agile methods than the detail oriented task management popularized by modern project management. Interestingly, project management (emphasising achieving things through task control) is a relatively new phenomenon based on Fredrick Taylor’s Transformation View of task decomposition (1900). Whereas Leadership (emphasising achieving things through collaboration and shared vision) is as old as human collaboration itself. "When the best leader's work is done, the people say, We did it ourselves." - Lao-Tzu (604 BC)"

The True Role of a PM on Agile Projects.

Swearing at work

"Regular swearing at work can help boost team spirit among staff, allowing them to express better their feelings as well as develop social relationships, according to a study by researchers.  Yehuda Baruch, a professor of management at the University of East Anglia, and graduate Stuart Jenkins studied the use of profanity in the workplace and assessed its implications for managers."
Swearing at work boosts team spirit (Yahoo! News) (Via Tom).

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From the paper 'Swearing at work and permissive leadership culture: When anti-social becomes social and incivility is acceptable' by Yehuda Baruch and Stuart Jenkins (published in Leadership & Organization Development Journal):

"Social swearing provides stress release for individuals, and helps to develop group
norms and cohesion. This subsequently improves both individual and group well
being. Conversely, annoyance swearing tends to increase stress for individuals, and
hinders positive group norms and cohesion, hampering both individuals’ and groups’
well being."

I'm very curious to look through my data for examples of these two.  I suspect I'll find some more lovely examples. 

I'm looking forward to reading this paper thoroughly, and hope I find time to follow up this reference:

"Taking this point to the extreme, Wajnryb (2003) offers advice for executives who
have to make staff redundant: “If you’re worried about which laid-off employee is
going to show up with a semi-automatic and shoot up the office, be wary of the
non-swearers”."

Intrapreneurship

Intrapreneurism is working from within; "internalising the mission of an organization, absorbing your customer's problem, and driving a creative solution that matters."

• Organisations rely on intrapreneurism and always have.
• No one tells you to do it but they appreciate the results.
• Create an energy and feeling that it will happen and it will.
• When you hear people articulate the mission then momentum has caught on.
• Sell, sell, sell.
  

Her advice was to show that you are competent and deliver so that people trust you. Do this above all.  She ran through a further series of lessons:

Lesson 1: Understand the organisational landscape and politics.
Lesson 2: You can make something GREAT happen.
Lesson 3: Don't assume anything... what appears obvious may not be.
Lesson 4: Make your stakeholders look good.
Lesson 5: Don't be intimidated... and don't give up.
Lesson 6: Bigger effects require teams... but with bigger results.
Lesson 7: Be fearless and keep the faith.

Nina gave a really interesting talk about her work at HP developing a way to use mms camera phone pictures to help girls select the right shades of make-up.  I was fascinated to learn about image processing and colour correction and calibration on camera phones for this project, and the work -arounds that they created to get this to work as a fully functioning prototype.

In her case, being a girl helped her to innovate and push for a project that the male engineers just did not understand.

It was a lovely, interesting, relevant and stimulating talk with which to end my time at GHC.

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Johanna Hunt
Official GHC 2007 Blogger
You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum

Lacking Initiative but Inventing the Future

6. Give the female employee a definite daylong schedule of duties so that they will keep busy without bothering the management for instructions every few minutes. Numerous properties say that women make excellent workers when they have their jobs cut out for them, but that they lack initiative in finding work themselves.

11 Tips on How to Handle Women Employees taken from the 1943 issue of Transportation Magazine (Via The Presurfer)

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I'm getting quite excited in the run up to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.  I am so glad I got a full scholarship to attend.  I admit I'm a bit nervous about being one of their official bloggers, but that just means it is tIme to polish my words, develop some opinions and confirm my daylong schedule of duties so I can do some thinking in advance. (Although I may lack the initiative for the latter, or so I understand from the above.)   

Human Resources

While in Washington DC for Agile 2007 a group of us visited the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.

The line "No Country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources" quoted on one of the inscriptions entertained us.

The use of the phrase 'human resources' had attracted our attention.  The concept of developers often being treated as nothing but resources to be swapped about had been raised many times during the conference.

From Wikipedia:

In the very narrow context of corporate "human resources", there is a contrasting pull to reflect and require workplace diversity that echoes the diversity of a global customer base. Foreign language and culture skills, ingenuity, humor, and careful listening, are examples of traits that such programs typically require. It would appear that these evidence a general shift to the human capital point of view, and an acknowledgment that human beings do contribute much more to a productive enterprise than "work": they bring their character, their ethics, their creativity, their social connections, and in some cases even their pets and children, and alter the character of a workplace. The term corporate culture is used to characterize such processes.
The traditional but extremely narrow context of hiring, firing, and job description is considered a 20th century anachronism. Most corporate organizations that compete in the modern global economy have adopted a view of human capital that mirrors the modern consensus as above. Some of these, in turn, deprecate the term "human resources" as useless.

I have yet to work out why the phrase "No Country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human capital" would be any more preferable.

Situational Management

Try to think of it as an escalator, moving downwards [The only logical direction for things to move, no matter what the other side say]. At the bottom end is the Directed form of management, where individuals are taken by the hand and told how to do each and every task. At the other end is Delegation, where experienced, knowledgeable staff members are told to perform tasks and expected to complete them on their own. In between is Coaching, where the manager sets tasks and priorities but is interested in feedback from employees. And Support, where staff set their own timescales and solutions for tasks set by the manager, with regular evaluation.

Screwpole teaches situational management... | Reg Developer.

Leadership Issues Reading

Leadership issues reading.  (Perhaps something for the coming weekend.)

Leadership Reading List (From the Scrum Alliance)

Project Management and Scrum – A Side by Side Comparison

World of Warcraft and Project Management

Presentation given by Joi Ito at the 23rd Chaos Communications Congress on World of Warcraft here.

Note to self, watch.  Ignore the pretty blood elves, focus on the project management issues raised.

Visualization Methods

Prototype members of this category of elaborate visualization tools are, in our view, methods (from realms as diverse as education, requirements engineering and argumentation theory) such as concept mapping, evocative knowledge diagrams, argumentation diagrams, or rich visual metaphors. In this paper, however, we only focus on methods with potential applicability in the realm of management. In management the key for better execution is to engage employees. To succeed the communicator not only needs to convey the message, but also needs to tailor it to the recipient’s context, so that he can re-construct the knowledge, integrate it and put it to meaningful action.

Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management [pdf] and the engaging Periodic Table of Visualization Methods (via Boing Boing)

Mmm, must find the time tomorrow to properly look at this.

Queen Bee

The study found that when presented with applications for promotion, women were more likely than men to assess the female candidate as less qualified than the male one.

They were also prone to mark down women’s prospects for promotion and to assess them as more controlling than men in their management style.

The findings, based on experiments carried out among more than 700 people, suggest that the “queen bee syndrome” of female rivalry in the workplace may sometimes be as important as sexism in holding back women’s careers.

Office queen bees hold back women’s careers

Interesting.  I wonder how, and if, that plays out in the new media industry.

Gender Decline

Carrie Hartnell, private sector programme manager at Intellect, comments: “The continuing drop in the number of women in the IT industry, though an international phenomenon, continues to have serious and far reaching implications for the UK economy and can no longer be regarded as just a diversity issue.

“There are good initiatives but these have clearly not been pervasive enough or resulted in the necessary improvements. As an industry we must begin by tackling the cultural barriers, which have prevented the effective recruitment and retention of women. If this is achieved the presence of women in the high-end sectors of the economy will benefit both the industry and the UK.”

UK IT sector losing women

Another article on the decline of women in IT.  I find it odd that it never occurred to me that there may be a meaningful gender divide, i.e. that there was more to the issue than just a lack of diversity.  The decline is intriguing.  It has certainly piqued my interest into gender in the workplace.

Female Designs

But generally there has been a "massive global failure to address this critical issue", Ms Bernhardt says. "To me the real issue is in the harder IT areas (of) programming and design. We have desperate shortages and a rapidly declining rate of girls taking up studies in this area.

"If more females were involved in designing and creating technology, we may see a world with different designs and one that takes into account an inclusive set of perspectives. We may even see technology that is simpler to use and more attractive. Technology designed without female input can be critically one-dimensional."

IT Women in the industry

Curious thought.

Project Management Notes

"When you work in IT, you deal with the consensual hallucination of Project Management. There is an almost universal belief that it is possible to predict ahead of time how long a project will take, how much it will cost and what will happen along the way. In the broadest sense, this is possible. If you have enough experience you can come up with ballpark figures; last time we did something similar it took this long and cost this much.  But some people believe Project Management should tell you these things down to the day and the dollar. A project plan should tell you every task that needs to be completed. A project plan should be flawless and leave nothing to chance. And a project plan should be completed before ANY work is done on the project."

The Myth of Project Management

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"Although they are often unappreciated by those around them, they are critical to making software development happen.  The best project managers are often the most inconspicuous since things happen so smoothly when they are involved."

Positive Activities:

1. Manage Customer Expectations
2. Develop a Rapport with the Customer
3. Understand Where the Project Really Is
4. Increase Visibility
5. Speak the Developer’s Language
6. Know How to Say No

6 Signs of Good Software Project Managers (via Tom)

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The key terms above also fit with arguments over the role of project management in Agile, where the commonly asked question is `Does Agile Dispense with Project Managers?' since they are not expected to 'run' projects:

"Agile methodologies do away with many of the tasks by which Project Managers formerly measured their own performance: they are no longer required to manage the triple constraints of cost, schedule, and scope.  Product Owners and Development Teams are now accountable for these activities. 
So, traditionally trained project managers experiencing the shift to Agile are often confused as to what their new roles and responsibilities should be in an environment that no longer requires them to make stand-alone decisions."

The positive activities detailed above really come into force here.

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To Manage Agile Projects you need to consider the following suggested practices:

• Emphasizing leadership, not management
• Tackling visibility and reporting
• Prioritizing requirements based on business value
• Making collaboration a first-order process
• Implementing true test-driven development

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People are still needed (pdf) to:

• Manage the Boundary
• Manage Team Membership
• Manage Risks
• Be a Team Champion

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There exists A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile which may provide a useful resource when I get the chance to read it.

Going Agile - APM

Taking an Agile approach to software development for the first time is no small task:  there are a number of different practices to onboard and process change is disruptive, frustrating and potentially demoralizing. How do you onboard Agile practices and still meet delivery requirements? To what extent can these be introduced, especially the first time around, so that they stick?

There are two things to balance when introducing new practices: adopt at a pace that doesn't push too far too fast and simultaneously establish a "critical mass" of core practices to reap symbiotic benefits. While there are no hard-and-fast rules on how or where to begin, the right sequence can increase probability of success and set the stage for greater process adoption.

So You've Decided To "Go Agile" - A Pragmatic Approach To Onboarding Agile Project Management

Potentially the main document I need to think about, and digest, this week I think.

Software Testers

• The love for bugs
• Detectives of the IT world
• We break things because we can
• Testers maintain focus
• Always learning

Characteristics of software testers by Rosie Sherry

Process Facilitator

The term "Process Facilitator" refers to the people in your organization whose primary responsibility lies in improving the effectiveness of the work that the teams are doing. This responsibility is mainly around the process the teams are using, but also encompasses less tangible aspects of work such as team development, organizational culture change, administrative and technical tools, and working with other Process Facilitators both inside and outside of your organization.

In an agile environment, the Process Facilitator has several aspects of expertise and skill to develop, and not all of these can be developed simultaneously:

• Basic Agile Work administrative skills.
• Obstacle removal.
• Team dynamics and development.
• Coaching individuals.
• Organizational development.
• Training groups and teams.
• Promoting agile methods.
• Strategic application of agile methods.

Reward your Process Facilitators as they take on and master each of these areas of skill and knowledge. A Process Facilitator is successful when he or she is able to help a team to become self-sufficient. The team has learned and perfected the basic Agile Work process. The team has gone through the stages of team development (forming, storming, norming and performing) and is now capable of self-directed self-improvement. The organization is no longer resisting the team's efforts to self-organize, to continue learning and to eliminate waste, but rather is fully supportive of these efforts. Once all this happens, the Process Facilitator is no longer necessary as a separate role. The person who has filled this role may then go on to become the Process Facilitator for another team or another part of your organization, or even be loaned out into your supply or customer chain in order to help make those relationships with your organization more effective.

Managing Process Facilitators

Ok, so...  Facilitator.  Not administrator or coordinator. Good to know for future reference. 

Actually, it's really good to know that this exists, and is not a self-created figment.  For now I shall stick with my role as Process Administrator.

More Links:
The Above Article as a PDF
Process Facilitator Cheat Sheet
International Association of Facilitators

Start-up Issues

In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you'll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don't do. And if you don't make something users want, then you're dead, whatever else you do or don't do. So really this is a list of 18 things that cause startups not to make something users want. Nearly all failure funnels through that.

The 18 mistakes that kill startups (via Kevan)

Notes for later:
Single founder, location, niche, derivative, obstinancy, programmers, platform, launching late or early, no clear user, money and spending, investor management, sacrificing users for profit, not wanting to get hands dirty, fights between founders, half-heartedness.

Project Management

I attended my first ever e-seminar on Thursday. It was an open seminar by the IEEE on How To Become a Successful Project Manager by Margaretha Eriksson. 

Once I got past the networking issues and resigned myself to using LiveMeeting, I found the interaction involved quite engaging.  I do wish the university's roaming network had allowed for a consistent connection.

It was interesting to find out how much of the talk covered management practices with which I was already familiar (mostly around communication and 'team experience').  I'll take this as a good sign, but not enough of a reason to quit my day job.