Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

Go Harvard!

Tee hee!!!

Some clever Yale students trick some Harvard students.

Worth a look.

Monkey business

I met Tim Bacon at XPDay 2004. 

He's just gone out on his own - new business, new website and new business cards.  But best of all is the self-aware name of his new business: prime eight ltd.

Good luck Tim.

make love not spam

I like this:

Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.

Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out. [bbc]

Cool cat for kids

My 2 year old daughter loves this animated, purring, meowing, mouse-chasing "P Cat".

[update: fixed the link, sorry.  thx graeme]

Tom Gilb and Christopher Alexander

From Tom Gilb's exceptional Software Engineering Management (1988), discussing Christopher Alexander's "Patterns":

The ideas here are quite exciting and revolutionary - we must wonder who will be the people to document that they have applied such rules in software development?

Simple Minds, dried apricots and software development

For a while now I've been trying to find an analogy to demonstrate the big problem of the Waterfall SDLC in that

• A project often progresses well in the early stages
• But, when it reaches testing all sorts of nasties are revealed
• So, the project runs late, is de-scoped and/or works horrendous overtime. 
• The problem is that we can't reasonably know how many bugs there are or how long testing will take until we're a good way into the testing.

Now.  Before the analogy: if you're not familiar with the effects of eating dried apricots then ... its the same effect as eating prunes ... if that doesn't help then ... ask your mother, she'll know.

Now, finally, the analogy.

A few years ago I was working from home and I was feeling a bit peckish.  So, I went to the cupboard, had a poke around. All I could find was a packet of dried apricots.  Not sure what they were doing there, but I thought "what the hell", had a nibble and decided that they were quite nice.  So, I took the packet to my desk and kept working.  And, nibbling.  Working and nibbling until the entire packet was gone.

No problems so far.  No idea what was waiting ahead of me.

Fast forward 3 hours.  I'm heading out the door to a Simple Minds concert (this was a revival tour) and there is a faint rumbling in my tummy.  Hmmmm.  Never mind.  All is still well.  More or less.

Fast forward 2 hours.  Just finished the first set.  I'm leaving.  In a rush.  Wife-to-be is hurrying along behind me; struggling to keep up; asking if I'm okay; but I'm not saying anything specific; just that I have to leave.  Concentrating too hard to talk.

Ten minutes later.  In a taxi.  Approaching home.  Still concentrating.  Give wife-to-be the keys to my apartment.  Hand the taxi driver a much-too-large note and say "keep" the change.  The wife-to-be has run ahead to unlock the apartment door.

Ten minutes later.  All is well.  No words said between wife-to-be and myself.  No need.  Modern apartment: the walls are too thin to keep some secrets.

If only someone had told me before hand.

The company of like-minded people

I've just returned home from my first conference ever: London's XPDay 2004! 

It was brilliant.  I got to put faces to several virtual friends.  And I got to chat to one of my heros Tom Gilb. 

I do so much like the company of like-minded people!

I ran a workshop introducing Goldratt's Theory of Constraints.  It seemed to be well received and I was told that some attendees even used the "5 focusing steps" during a practical exercises in a later session!  Cool!

So, here's the powerpoint presentation.

There were 4 parts to the presentation:

1. The introduction, overview and chain analogy.  My favourite introduction to TOC is this free chapter from Goldratt's Critical Chain book.
2. Managing bottlenecks using the "5 focusing steps".  This section included a borrowed animation and my assertions that
   (a) software development is THE bottleneck to new product development - i.e. the organisations future - in many organisaitons,
   (b) identifying the physical bottleneck within a software development system is not as easy as in a manufacturing system, but it is possible,
   (c) it's much easier to identify the physical bottleneck in agile/iterative/incremental environments than in waterfall environments, and,
   (d) within most software development systems the constraint is not a bottleneck, but 3 policy constraints - the waterfall sdlc + critical path project management + doing too many projects at once.
3. The evils of multitasking.  I think my simple animation in powerpoint says a lot but TOC guru Tony Rizzo's says it better.  [By the way, the example in my animation is fairly simple but I borrowed it from an article written by an TOC guru Richard Zultner].
4. The current reality tree explained how the waterfall SDLC tries to prevent rework, but ends up causing so much rework that the Critical Path method (which seems to assume no variation) explodes.  The CRT is a fantastic tool for bringing clarity to messy, tangled situaitons and for finding the few "root causes".

If you attended and would like to know more then first follow the links above, then read Goldratt's Critical Chain book, then email me and I'll make a few other suggestions.

[BTW: if you attended my session then (thanks and) I'd love to hear what you thought.  I'd especially like to hear any any suggestions for improving the content and or my presentation style.  Please, please, please email me at clarke.ching at gmail.com]

Writing - Johanna Rothman

Johanna Rothman has just posted a great piece on writing.

I especially like the bit :

"If you are the kind of person who needs to speak in order to think, you're an extrovert. Take care with your speaking, because as soon as you've spoken the thought, it's out. You no longer need to write it down. I use a number of aids, including a voice recorder, to avoid losing thoughts I need to write down."

I'm an extrovert who's trying to write ... so this is useful information!

My brain is so, so fascinating!

See you at London's XP Day 2004?

I'm currently packing my bags for London's XP DAY 2004.  I'm really looking forward to the two days - especially TOM Gilb's session.  I hope to see you there - if you'd like to catch up my mobile number is 07985-098281.

I'm running a session on Thursday morning titled: "An introduction to Goldratt's Theory of Constraints", in which I hope to whet people's appetites for TOC by demonstrating 3 powerful tools that can be used in product/software development environments.

My presentation is based around the conclusions made in the classic HBR article, Getting the Most Out of Your Product Development Process  [also see this HBR on-point collection - good reading if you're into this sort of thing]. 

The authors studied several successful companies that had successfully adapted lean manufacturing techniques into their product development processes.  They made three conclusions and I'll use a different TOC tool to demonstrate each of these conclusions.

The conclusions were:

• Conclusion 1.  Investments to relieve bottlenecks yield disproportionately large time-to-market benefits

I'll demonstrate how to use TOC's 5 focusing steps (POOGI) to manage bottlenecks. 

• Conclusion 2.  Eliminating unnecessary variations in workloads and work processes eliminates distractions and delays, thereby freeing up the organisation to focus on the creative parts of the business

I use one of TOC's thinking tools - the Current Reality Tree - to demonstrate (a) how the waterfall SDLC creates a huge and unpredictable amount of rework and (b) which Critical Path project management techniques just can't handle.  Iterative/Incremental processes eliminate this game playing and dysfunction and allow the organisation to focus on the value-adding, creative parts of their work.

• Conclusion 3.  Projects get done faster if the organisation takes on fewer at a time

Tool: I'll demonstrate how multitasking dilutes the effort on each project and how, by eliminating multitasking, organisations can do more projects in less time and dramatically increase cash flow and profits.

See you there?

TOC budgeting article

This article mentions "cost" quite a bit, but nonetheless :

http://www.imanet.org/ima/pdf.asp?TP=/ima/docs/2000/1982.pdf

Discusses the development of strategic budgeting method which was based on the assumptions behind a project management technique created by Eliyahu Goldratt in his book "Critical Chain." Application of lawnmower method for cost reduction; Time estimates for project completion; Strengths of strategic budgeting.