March 2012
1 post
3 tags
Following Your Fear
There is one common impediment that I see in all organizations I work with that prevents them from achieving their goals: fear.
Day after day, week after week, I hear “That won’t work for us”, “Our clients would never go for that”, and of course, “Yes, but…”. Always, “Yes, but…”
It’s not just organizations, it’s people...
December 2011
1 post
5 tags
No One Told the Customer! The Importance of...
One of the great things that has come out of The Lean Startup movement is the focus on customer validation.
Too many organizations I work with either gloss over this step or skip it entirely.
The process usually looks something like this:
Customer reports a bug/requests a feature.
Bug gets “fixed”/feature gets built.
Bug/feature gets deployed.
Profit?
It all seems well and good...
September 2011
1 post
8 tags
Orange: It Rocks Far More than Apple - A Lean...
I recently came across an article on The Hacker Chick Blog called, “Lean Startup: It Rocks Far More Than Agile” and now it’s time to rant about it.
First, a disclaimer: I love the ideas in The Lean Startup. I ordered my copy of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries when it became available for pre-order, I bought The Lean Startup course on Udemy via AppSumo and I already have a copy...
July 2011
1 post
3 tags
What Would It Take?
As someone who brings change into organizations, at some point I will usually come up against someone who will resist the change.
Sometimes this resistance is not resistance to the change itself, but because the person cannot see the path from the current world to the desired state.
The process of changing can seem so overwhelming and so perilous that it prevents people from taking even the...
April 2011
1 post
4 tags
Are We Human or Are We Resources?
One common practice I see in the organizations I work with, is the use of the term “resources” to describe the people who do the work.
I often overhear things like “managing resources”, “assigning resources”, “not enough resources”, and even the “resourcing plan”.
What are we really talking about here? Pencils? Paper? Toner? Oil? ...
March 2011
1 post
3 tags
The Importance of Beginnings
I recently started a new coaching engagement and for the first time in my career I’m pairing with another Agile Coach.
I met briefly with the other coach a few days before my scheduled start date. He had been working with the organization for several months and was going to be absent my first week on site. We used the time we had to prepare for the week to come. We went over some...
November 2010
1 post
5 tags
The Problem with Working Overtime
There’s an old programmer quote that goes something like this,
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.
I feel the same way about teams working overtime. In fact, I would phrase it like this,
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, we’ll just work some...
August 2010
1 post
5 tags
On Improv, Agile, and Fear at Agile Coach Camp...
Back in June, I attended Agile Coach Camp Canada 2010 and it was an amazing experience. As some of you know, I had some issues getting to the camp, but once I was there I had the time of my life.
You can read Michael Lant’s excellent summary of the event or Selena Delesie’s great write up on the open space experience. You can even watch all the lightning talks or see the session...
June 2010
2 posts
7 tags
Greyhound Knows How to Fail
I had the pleasure of attending Agile Coach Camp Canada this year. It was an amazing experience. I’ll be writing about that experience in a future post, but in this post, I would like to address what I had to go through just to get to the conference.
Two days prior to Agile Coach Camp Canada, I received an email informing me that a spot had opened up and that I would be able to attend the...
1 tag
In Defense of Scrum Purists
It seems in every Scrum, Agile, or Lean discussion these days, there’s always mention of the mythical “Scrum Purist”, or “Scrum Zealot”.
There are even articles dedicated almost entirely to the topic, such as: Purist is a dirty word, You don’t have to be a Scrum purist, and ScrumButs Are the Best Part of Scrum.
It has almost become the Godwin’s law of...
April 2010
2 posts
Discovering Your Core Values
Back in January, I discussed an exercise where you would put your company values on the wall and allow anyone in the organization to remove them if they felt the company was straying from their core values.
But what do you do if you’re not sure what your core values are?
Here’s an exercise I did with a company a few months back that helped them figure out what they valued.
Make a...
5 tags
What the Celebrities on The Apprentice Could Learn...
I’m not usually one to watch a lot of television, but this past Easter weekend, my parents were over and my mother wanted to watch the NBC reality TV show, The Apprentice.
In this episode of The Apprentice, the celebrities are given a task of creating a 3D display for an upcoming Harry Potter attraction.
At first, I worked away on my computer, not really paying attention to what was...
March 2010
1 post
1 tag
The Difference Between Planning for Success and...
So what is the difference between planning for success and planning for failure? Here’s an example where a company I was working with almost planned for failure, but instead came out with a plan for success.
The team had been working on a new site for a client. This site was to replace their existing site, which was no longer being maintained by the original developers. We were to...
January 2010
1 post
You Get the Reputation You Deserve
I walked in early for a meeting I had with the Director of the Project Management Office at a company I worked for once upon a time. I took a seat in front of her desk and saw written on the white board the following, “We are perceived as not nimble and slow to change. Why?”.
Now the obvious answer was, “Because we’re not Agile”, and while I had thought of writing that anonymously...
November 2009
4 posts
3 tags
Waterfall – The Monkey's Paw of Software...
I’m a strong advocate for Agile development methodologies and frameworks, however, I’ve also spent a good portion of my career working in traditional Waterfall shops.
There seems to be this misconception about Waterfall that not many people talk about. Sure, there’s the overhead costs of the upfront process, the inflexibility inherent in Waterfall, and the painful change...
Problem --> Solution
A lot of management folk I’ve dealt with have brought this up enough times that it’s worth talking about. I cannot stress how wrong this is, but I will try.
The idea is that if you point out a problem that you must also present a solution.
Any managers that say this are practising weak management. They are not doing their job properly.
There are many reasons for this. Most important of all...
Informed Experience
“Informed experience”, the phrase made it into Todd’s initial post. Reading it over, it seemed to me to be a bit pompous. As if to say, “Our 15 years of experience are informed”. While that is what we are saying, hopefully we’re not being too pompous about it.
Too often we experience life in “auto-pilot”. While we still feel the ups and downs, our...
Why Do We Plan for Failure?
Welcome to the first post at Planning for Failure! Here we’ll explore why most software development organizations continuously make plans they know will inevitably fail. Why do we never learn from our mistakes? Why do we continue to plan for a future we know will never come?
Your hosts on this journey will be Adnan Ali and Todd Charron. Together we have fifteen years of informed...