… Primarily because of articles like this one by CIO Magazine. I found this article through Ameel’s website, so hat tip to Ameel for that one.

Every once in a while someone publishes a “nn reasons why your IT project fails” article. Every time it leaves me with some longing for something insightful. In this CIO Magazine article, every one of the 14 tips provided are logical and rational. Each one of them is actionable. Each one of them is also useless.

The only tip which comes close to dealing with the true underlying problem is tip no. 14 on communicating with project sponsors and stakeholders. Even this only addresses it in a very rudimentary way.

What’s wrong with this?

Firstly, the points made in these articles are practical and useful. I believe they have some value. The problem is that they simply don’t go far enough.

As IT people and project managers, we are trained to be operational, logical, planned, rational and ultimately to solve problems. We read material which reinforces this world view of ourselves. In this instance, the article hands us a platter full of 14 problems to solve and some very palatable solutions. In fails in addressing the real hard questions we need to deal with in order to be effective leaders of IT projects.

This article, and others like it, provide us with a convenient scape goat. As long as we do these things (e.g. select the right project team, use repeatable processes, track changes), then we can avoid the real issues.

What about agile?

Agile deals with this partly by making it easier to “go with the flow” and safely absorb the changing nature of projects. Most of the documentation I have read on the subject focuses on creating processes to control and manage. Don’t get me wrong, these are really really important processes to put in place.

Where I fear we trip up is when we implement the processes expecting them to solve or at least help with our people issues. Again, there isn’t much focus on engaging with real people. How do we better relate to them? How do we learn to understand them and their own pressures and needs? How do we “do communication better?”

What should we be adressing instead?

In my mind, the real issue is a lack of dialogue. Not talking. Not listening. Not communicating. But real dialogue. The ability to put your own needs aside and engage on a deeper level with those you are working for. Only when we get to this space will we begin to see significant gains in IT project successes and real positive outcomes.

Often we need to hear things that we don’t want to hear. Often we need to say things others may not want to hear. As leaders of projects, we need to create a space where this can occur. An open, respectful and reflective space.

This is an area that I am only just begining to explore for myself. Because of this, I still find it difficult to explain in words. The area is one studied by Ronald Heifetz and is known as Adaptive Leadership or Adaptive Change. As I find the words and have the experiences, I hope to write and share more about this.

Until then, some of the following articles might help provide some insights for you:

• When Leadership Spells Danger
• Adaptive Change: What’s essential and what’s expendable?
• Adaptive Leadership
• Adaptive vs Technical challenges
• A conversation with Ronal Heifetz - Leadership without easy answers

This isn’t about the Jeff Kennet addition to our Victorian number plates, but rather our house move over the weekend. Still with a throat infection, we managed to get it all done in daylight and rain on Monday.

As much as I enjoy bagging other companies out for their poor customer service, I enjoy giving kudos to those few who are an exception. Metro Movers is one of those great companies.

Before the move

Moving house is said to be one of the most stressful periods of change you can experience in your life, so I was keen to make it less so in any way that I could. This is where the Metro Movers website gave me my first boost of help. Their FAQ has some great pointers on packing and organising stuff for your move. Many of which I put into practice immediately.

Making this information free to the public, gave me a sense of trust for them. Immediately they appeared to be some type of expert in the field. They realise that moving house isn’t just about moving day and try their best to make the entire experience as stress free as possible.

Loading the truck

Matt and Jess turned up early, in the rain, and immediately set to work. Emma and I haven’t moved like this before so we were exceptionally nervous about things breaking. The blokes exhibited a wonderful balance between fast and careful which put us at ease. Furthermore, they had our entire unit packed up in a little over 2 hours. It was like watching a giant game of tetris albeit a slowish one.

Throughout the entire experience, they both offered advice on how best to organise things and exactly what we could do to help. We couldn’t pack my treasured plasma into the truck (they didn’t have the right box for it - which I forgot to order!) but they did wrap it up carefully and load it into the back of Emma’s car.

Unloading the truck

This went much faster and still with exceptional care. Both Matt and Jess were very careful to not drag mud into our newly cleaned house and helped us to move all the boxes and furniture to exactly where we wanted them. This took a little over an hour with the added difficulty of pelting rain which didn’t seem to bother the guys at all.

Rewarding your employees

Watching these two at work, I suspect that Metro Movers staff are rewarded for exhibiting their organisation’s values. I caught a side conversation which happened whilst loading the plasma into our car. I deduced that our movers would’ve been paid a bonus if nothing was broken during the trip. If it was, they wouldn’t receive their extra $100 odd. This encourage them to take care of people’s belongings - one of the main fears in having someone move your posessions.

This is similar to Zappos paying their new employees $1000 to quit shortly after bringing them on board and training them. In this case, money is used to weed out the people who aren’t interested in delivering exceptional customer service.

I wonder what we could do in our field to motivate our staff to exhibit the values and behaviours? It’s a tricky one because metrics can easily be dodged. For example, if you want to limit the number of bugs in released software, you essentially doom yourself to limiting the number of bugs actually logged/recorded, rather than reducing the actual bug count.

I wonder what other software teams and organisations do to encourage positive behaviours?

Most of what is published about agile/scrum methods doesn’t talk about this area very much. It tends to be focused mainly on a team dedicated to getting a single product to market. As an internal team, we often don’t have that luxury. We run multiple concurrent projects, some with different members, as well as numerous operational tasks & enhancements.

We manage our work, we looked at having multiple Product Backlogs (basically a prioritised list of work the sponsor would like us to complete). This naturally led to multiple Sprint Backlogs (which contain the work the team has committed to doing in the next 2 weeks). This was going to be very difficult to manage. Particularily when it comes to the team keeping focus on their activities. Multiple projects and backlogs all over the place.

What we really needed was multiple Product Backlogs that each project sponsor could manage, but one pipeline for the team to work off during their 2 week sprint.

Mingle to the rescue!

We’ve been using this tool by Thoughtworks for a few months now, and the more I use it, the more I love it. We’ve pretty much ditched Microsoft Project completely as this tool is powerful and simple enough to do all that and more (albeit very differently).

It was quite easy for us to create a number of “card walls” to filter out the work for each project or operational area. We then use these separate lists when we sit with the sponsor to have them prioritise the work.

From that, the team picks off the top ‘x’ stories and commits to delivering them during the next sprint. Mingle makes this very easy for us to manage.

The tricky part is knowing how much from each project we can commit to. Currently, I communicate the number of hours we should be dedicating to each project each week. Hours are one thing, but I’d like to get to the stage where we track our overall velocity. This way, we can more easily determine how many “points” we can take off the backlog from each project and commit to doing.

We’re not there yet, but should begin getting some metrics in the next few weeks. I’m keen to see how this pans out and whether the idea above will work in practice.

I’m a tool/model addict. I love them all. Anything which makes my thinking easier is a bonus. I sometimes struggle with forming my thoughts into cohesive structures, so I find models an invaluable additional to my arsenal.

One of the major benefits to an agile development process is the Inspect-Adapt loop. Reflection, or retrospective as it’s usually termed, is an integral part of continually improving what we do. In a Scrum Retrospective, the standard questions to ask are:

1. What did we do well?
2. What could be improved in the next sprint?

I believe these fall short in many ways. These two questions aren’t targetted enough to generate any real actionable outcomes. Instead, I would use the reflection model. We used it today in our Scrum Retrospective and I think the result was quite good for a first shot.

Like all useful models, it is extremely simple…

Spend a few minutes in each quadrant and ask yourself (or your team), what you should do more of, less of, and what you should keep, add and delete. You can work around them one by one or take random suggestions and add them to the appropriate box.

A nice outcome for the visuals amongst us is that you can see right away which areas you haven’t spent enough time on. I find it useful to focus on these for a few extra minutes  little more and force yourself to stretch your thinking.

It is also a way to subtly celebrate the things you’re doing well and come up with practical suggestions for those things which aren’t so great. When reflecting, it is important to phrase your words in actionable terms. “More communication” won’t get you anywhere, but “Update Jane once a week on progress” is much more useful.

The best thing of all about this model is that it is not only useful for work. When it was first presented to me, it was used for personal reflection. What in your life do you want to do more/less/keep/add/delete. You can really use it for anything you need to reflect and improve on. The more specific the topic, the better the results.

At Melbourne Business School, we’ve started using Scrum to manage our software development projects. Over the last few months, we’ve used it very loosely on a project as a trial run. The elements we picked up were the very basics of scrum. I’m nervous to even say that we were “doing scrum”. Even so, the results were so much better than I expected, and we completed our project ahead of schedule.

In the beginning …

The daily stand-up meeting was the first “ceremony” we instigated. It’s quite simple, we meet every morning for 5 - 10 minutes, standing up and we each answer three questions: what did you do yesterday, what will you do today, what obstacles are you facing?

The idea is that people want to get it over with quicker if they’re forced to stand up during a meeting. It really does tend to keep us focused and to the point.

It took a little while for people to warm to the idea initially, but we soon developed a bit of a rhythm. People were keeping to their time limits, mentioned salient points only and our ability to actually get stuff done increased considerably.

Most interestingly to me, was the new opportunities this created for the team. The opportunity to share every day has made it easier for us to offer help to each other when obstacles come about. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the 10 minutes invested in the stand-up has returned us numerous hours a week of muddling through things as individuals.

Now …

Lately however, things have started to become more like a status meeting. Going through the three questions just because that’s what we so. I realise now that keeping this meaningful and actionable is not a trivial task. It’s even more challenging for us as the team is constantly working on multiple projects. Sometimes what you’re working on really doesn’t effect anyone else in the team.

We may be headed for “Daily Standup Withdrawal.”

Stacia from the Scrum Alliance writes:

Many teams really, truly believe that the purpose of the daily standup is to “just answer the three questions without exceeding fifteen minutes.” Maybe it’s that the questions (what did you do yesterday, what will you do today, what obstacles are you facing) seem so simple. They are not. There is so much underneath the surface of the three little questions. Coach your team to think about these questions and come prepared to the daily standup [...]

In other words, think about the tasks, the accomplishments, how it may impact John’s work or Mary’s next task, and keep in mind who you are working with to complete the task. Go into the daily standup with answers to the three questions that are meaningful, insightful, and proactive.

Later …

Taking on some advice from that article, I intend to spend some time actively coaching and giving more feedback to the team members. I also need to ensure I don’t contract the same disease myself. A bit of team reflection may be in order too.

Disclaimer

To date, I have avoided writing much about my work environment. Having thought about this quite a lot lately, I believe the net effect of writing about such things will be a positive one. So, it now needs to be stated that this clearly is a personal blog. The view and opinions I express here are my own and not those of the people, institutions, or organisations that I may be related with.

It’s really not all that far away. Only 9 years.
A report by “The Orange Future Enterprise Coalition” (set up by Orange Business Services in Britain), has some interesting predictions regarding the future.

Whether predictions in “The Way To Work” report eventuate or not, we are certainly going to be facing some huge changes in the way companies are run and business is managed.

Management Line (The Age) provides a good summary of the four scenarios in the report:

Disciples of the cloud: Companies have pooled together to save costs on office space and services, strong lines of demarcation between work and non-work (which could create big issues for people wanting work-life balance), and there’s a bigger focus on IT and teamwork. Also a lot of what you do is monitored.

Electronic Cottages: Employees working either from home or commuting short distances to a small hub or office. There is a stronger sense of community, with more people pooling together to help out on child care and crime prevention. Working life and everyday life are much more integrated.

Replicants: Everyone’s a consultant. Not many people are directly employed and it’s not unusual to be working for two to three companies simultaneously. Working life is less predictable and secure. And since work is unpredictable, people work hard for part of the year before taking huge slabs of time off. Companies take little responsibility for staff and people have to look after and find work for themselves.

Mutual Worlds : The big focus is on local communities with people preferring to work in small local ventures rather than big business

Why does all of this worry me?

Quite simply, I might get left behind!

Perhaps I’m just feeling the effects of hitting 30, but I notice that it is becoming more difficult to make fundamental changes to your notions of work. After years employment, ideas and values become very embedded. Your choices are based on prior experience and that experience is based in a world of the past.

I see a strong need to change. A need to adapt. A need to reconnect with life and the purpose for living.

In the next years to come, as the next generation begin to enter the workforce and thrust a new model of work upon us, how will we cope? How will we deal with our notions of work being challenged. How will our leaders (being my generation) manage this change.

A commenter named “The Futurist” makes an interesting prediction of the future:

Generation Y workers would get used to travelling the world, in search of work. Many would leave Australia to avoid paying their HECS debts.

More double income households will retire by 50, due to ‘burn out’ from high stress jobs; and ability to do so from income from investments to get through the years before collecting two sets of superannuation nest eggs for the later years.

The ageing society will be in full profile with many jobs for looking after the disabled elderly and people with dementia.

The workplace of 2016, Management Line blog, The Age

Whatever happens, it’ll certainly be an interesting ride.

Where I currently work, we’re investigating ways to reduce our carbon emissions (more in this specific project later.) What I found interesting what that as soon as this thought had settled in my mind, ideas and options suddenly presented themselves. It is quite amazing how setting an objective like this makes your mind work towards that goal.

So, what about some of these ideas? There are heaps and it’s becoming a bit of a competition which is nice. Here are a few:

• Turn all the kitchen waste into a compost to be used on the gardens and for the local school / community
• Ban printing on a specific day each week
• Computers and non-critical equipment to be automatically turned off after 6pm each night
• Changing light fittings to more economical models
• Provide recycling boxes in all offices and work areas

That’s just a few really simple things. I’ve already started by making every effort possible to not print anything and recycle any paper products and waste I can.

I’ll keep reporting on how these changes become part of our daily lives here and on any more ideas we have.

[5 minutes later ...]
ARGGHHH! This is going to be harder than I thought. Why is it that health funds and the like still insist on people printing and posting in forms? What gets to me even more is when they say “Join on-line by completing our on-line application form.” People, a downloadable PDF file is not an online application!

By 2010, six out of 10 people affiliated with IT will assume business-facing roles, according to Gartner.

If this article is to be believed, then I think our IT industry will struggle to keep up with the requirements of modern business. In my experience, it is incredibly rare to find someone who is technically competent and has a personality. Communication skills have always been an issue with our industry.

When I was working through the Y2K era, most of the industry had it’s head burried in the code-sand. After the world’s massive expenditure, business slahsed IT budgets. Now, they have finally (and rightly) turned the tables on us. Reaslising that they need to generate real benefit and improvement from their investment, they are turning to technical folk who can understand real business.

It will become even more important for IT professionals to be competent in speaking and understanding the business world. Project management, business analysis & facilitation will be the skills to have if you want to be employed.

By 2010, applications will become commodities delivered by external service providers. Internal development won’t be dead, though — it will just be done differently in 2010, Foote says. The challenge will be selecting packages and tailoring them to what you need. “Code-writing disappears in this world, unless it’s code-writing in customer-facing applications that offer strategic advantage,” he adds.

This trend has already begun. Businesses are looking for flexibility in the workforce and will call in specialist advisors as required. Application development will move even closer to a customer facing role. Here, some of the agile methodologies that focus on customer interaction will win out.
It will be interesting to see how the industry responds to this pressure from business. Existing technicians will need to change. Students will need to take a wider view on their studies. In the end, a change like this will be a positive one for those in the industry.