Clarke Ching - More Chilli Please

Grab your towels! - the return of the naked agilists!

Kevin Rutherford and I have been chatting for a while about him running the next "Naked Agilists" virtual mini-conference and I must say, from the note below, he's outdone himself! 

From the fingertips of Kevin Rutherford:

Do you wish you could attend the Agile conferences and XP days, but can’t get the funding or the travel budget or the time off work? Well there is one agile event that you can even attend from your own bath — the Naked Agilists!

Last year’s event was so successful that we’re running another. And you only need Skype to be able to attend. Save the date now:

Date: Saturday 19-Jan-08
Time: 20:00 GMT - 21:30 GMT
Venue: Your place, or mine

The event format is a Skype conference, supported by chat, and a website hosting slides and stuff. There’s also a mailing list where you can find more details of what happened last time, and loads of feedback on the event itself.

The event will be chaired by Leigh Mullin, who did such a great job last time — particularly to keep out the inevitable “tourists” who were hoping the “naked agilists” all had webcams! Please join the mailing list and propose a session. This time around we’re hoping to run with two different kinds of session:

Experience Reports Lasting 2, 5 or 10 minutes. Think of these as mini blog posts — your chance to share a quick idea or observation with the rest of us. Last time, most presenters prepared a few slides to support their session, and most were also followed by a few minutes of Q&A, discussion and Skype chat.
Open Questions You’ll get 1 minute to ask the group a question, and then there will be 10 minutes of discussion. This is your chance to tap into the experience and expertise of the assembled agile experts.

If you would like to present or table a question, please join the mailing list and post your suggestion there. We’ll put the programme together early in the New Year, so please get your entries in early. Detailed intructions for participating in the call itself will only be posted on the mailing list, so even if you simply want to be in the “audience”, join the list now to avoid disappointment.

30 years and counting

My daughter Aisling turned 5 a couple of weeks ago.  When I picked her up from school this evening I said to her "It's warm tonight isn't it" and she told me off, saying, "Yes.  And I told you that before and I'm right and you're wrong". 

Although it is irrelevant to the point of this wee note I must point out that she said no such thing and that I was right and she was wrong.

The point of this message is that I'm 38 years old now, she's 5, and as I look back on my own life I figure that it is going to be another 30 years before she realises that I'm right some of the time.  I'll be 68 before I am right again.

Wash your EFFING hands

If you've been in hospital recently you will have probably noticed that they've gone all stringent on hand washing when you enter a ward.  It's to stop bugs spreading. It is, apparently, a good idea ... if people follow the rules.

My wife (the doctor, need I remind you) just called me from Galway, in the west of Ireland, where she is visiting our brother-in-law in hospital where he is recovering from a hip operation.  She told me she was mildly horrified to see the local priest travelling between the wards without washing his hands.  He probably has more contact within the hospital than any other person and could single-handedly undo all the good hand washing done by all of the visitors and hospital staff who DO WASH THEIR EFFING HANDS.

Now I know that (apparently) God moves in mysterious ways, but I should hope that she doesn't send her agents round breaking rules and making people sick.

Hello

Too good to be true?  Apparently the word "hello" was invented by Alexander Graham Bell so that people had something to say when they answered the telephone.  They tinkered with "Ahoy" at first but it didn't work.  I didn't make this up. 

One miniature manager from Uranus

I am toying with the idea of publishing a small business-fable called "One miniature manager from Uranus" which is about conflict management in software development.  It'll be based on my workshop "Customers may be from Mars, Programmers may be from Venus, but how come everyone thinks that Project Managers are from Uranus" where I use a friendly version of Goldratt's evaporating cloud to understand and evaporate conflict between the roles in software development.

I'm motivated by the comments I received after the most recent session, like this one from krystyna, who attended the session:

I saw your presentation "Are project managers from Uranus?" and I like your approach of using conflict calisthenics. This is a very convincing way to show people anatomy of conflict. I would like to use this approach in showing changes in my company not on project management level. I would like to ask you for your permission to use your diagram with acknowledgement of a full credit to you.

Here're my thoughts so far:

The format:

• It will be written as a fable format like one of the "One Minute Manager" series or any of Patrick Lencioni's books (they're good at getting across a few simple concepts), rather than a full blown novel like The Goal or my RollingRocksDownhill. 
• This book will be small but it has to be - all it contains is a very useful took and a few life-changing ideas so it hardly warrents a bigger book.  The one minute manager book, btw,  only has about 10,000 words compared to rollingrocksdownhill which is around 100,000 words.
• I'll blog the book ... bit by bit, and use it as a motivating distraction from my other books.  Multitasking rules!

The story:

• It will probably be set in the future world of software development where Martians rule the commercial universe (and are therefore the customers), programmers all come from Venus, and Earthlings make the coffee. 
• They've just discovered that intelligent life does exist on Uranus and the Uranians just happen to be good at project management.  They're very short.  The working title is, of course a play on the "one minute manager".
• I'm not sure where other roles come from or if Plutonians will play a part given their recent demotion from the brotherhood of planets.

The takeaways ... after reading the book the reader will ...

• The assumptions that I want to get across are that most (a) people - no matter what plant they come from - just want to be good and do a good job and (b) when people come across as being assholes at work they're usually just trying to do a good job but (c) the system is set up incorrectly to put them in conflict with each other. 
• I want to help people to understand the other side's "concerns", that they do indeed share a common purpose and that by understanding the systemic conflict they can then fix the situation.
• The key "take away" will be to use the Conflict Calisthenics approach to tackle conflict.  Using the body parts ("my hands are tied", "one the one hand ... on the other ...", "the weight on my shoulders", "head, heart and gut") seems to be "sticky" and non-threatening. 

But ...

• I may decide this is a silly idea next week or I may even manage to rope in my friend Graeme to co-write with me.

Take a look at the blog at www.miniaturemanager.com for more details.

An update on my book(s)

A week ago I received the following note from Tom Looy who writes the delightful Conversations with Andrew blog and works for tacitknowledge.com in San Francisco:

Good morning Clarke.  I just finished reading the second draft of Rolling Rocks Uphill and I have to tell you that I am thrilled with it.  I have found where the first draft aligns with where the second draft ends so I can continue the reading but I just had to get back to you to let you know how good your work is. As a business novel it is very nicely written. Just as good as Goldratt's novels.  Excellent dialog that builds the case for the evaporating clouds and excellent dialogue that shows how agile conclusions were drawn using evaporating clouds. Maybe it's because I have been doing software for so long and that I have been in so many situations like Steve's that I found your storyline very engaging.  I also have my Craig/Jonah (Matt G... ) and I am aspiring to become more Jonah like so I find your book to be coaching tool for me in becoming an Agile mentor. 

If I could, I'd like to make a couple suggests.  I think the second draft comes to a nice conclusion with the successful launch of the VSP product with NSSP so maybe you could wrap that up as your first novel.  As I started to read the original draft at the point where the second draft ended and found that you are introducing Prerequisite Trees, I felt like I wasn't able to take on another tool in Goldratt's Thinking Process.  Information overload (and I already quite familiar with TOC and Agile.) Maybe introduce Prerequisite Trees in a follow-up novel. My second suggestion would be to button up the second draft by cleaning up some of the typos.  I want to send the second draft to dozens of my colleagues and former customers and I would love to send them a 'finished' product.  I'd be glad to help in proofing it if you would like.

Thanks again for taking the time to write your book - I am really excited about it!

As it happens I had already decided to split the book in two ... but I just hadn't gotten around to it.  I was dithering until I would up my current gig.  Thanks Tom - you've inspired me to pull my finger out.

So, here's the official announcement. 

First there will be Rolling Rocks Downhill where Steve learns that the physics of software development dictate that it is a hell of a lot easier, more efficient, and more predictable to develop software iteratively and incrementally, learning and adapting as you go, than it is to develop software by failing to get all of the requirements and design right up front, build it, then rework it until it is (only just) good enough to ship.  Why push a big rock uphill if, instead, you can keep people happier by rolling lots of little rocks downhill?  Why work against gravity, rather than with it?

I am planning to take the next 2-3 months off to round out the novel with the help of an American copy editor then I will self publish.

Second there will be the sequel Rocks into Gold where Steve and his colleagues discover how to sell his new discovery (by making shitloads of money for his customers), how to use it to build and rebuild trust between suppliers and customers, and how to use it in a product environment.  I also introduce the world to the NEOREJIZUM - the Japanese term for when large firms teach their software suppliers to thrill their customers by software of unprecedented quality, on time. 

I'm already about halfway through writing this novel, but I'll delay working on it until I finish or get sick of the first one :)

Your lens?

How do you improve?  What should you improve?  Where should you focus?  The answer to these three questions depends very much on which lens you view the world through.

1.  Some people and most organisations look at the world through what I call a Molehill Magnifying Lens. 

The molehill magnifying lens has the peculiar characteristic that it makes molehills look just like mountains and (just to be tricky) it makes some mountain look like molehills and other mountains look just like mountains.  It's very tricky when looking through the molehill magnifying lens to know where to focus your improvement efforts because every problem looks the same. 

So what do you do?  You try to manage all the details because - according to your lens - all of the details are important.  A very large company I recently worked with had equipped all of their project staff with molehill magnifying spectacles by declaring in their project "governance" procedures that if any task on their project was RED then their entire project should be considered RED.  The molehills and the mountains all looked alike.  The staff working on the project teams spent hours and hours in meetings and teleconferences discussing the details to death because all of the details were equally important.  The managers spent hours and hours each day ensuring that they knew all of the details of their projects so that they could share them confidently with their bosses.  And needless to say everyone bloated their estimates because they didn't want to be the ones to make the project go red.  (Their projects were, btw, red most of the time).

  2.  Some people, but few organisations, look a the world through what I call a Leverage Locating Lens.

When you look through the Leverage Locating Lens you only see the important stuff.  You look at a molehill you see a molehill.  You look at a mountain and you see a mountain.  You look at a chain and you see the weakest link.  #

Looking at the world through this lens, you not only know how to make big improvements with small changes, but - just as important - you also know what to ignore.

Here's a true story I heard from the CEO of an English Hospital who by  looking at life with LLL's achieved a 23% increase in the number of ophthalmic surgeries for the price of two chairs . 

When he first started working at the hospital his ophthalmic surgeons had a big waiting list and had, accordingly, requested budget for an extra surgery and more doctors. He went to talk to them. He told them that he was very impressed that they were 106% efficient but he said he was concerned that they had enough time for breaks during the day - he didn't want them wearing themselves out. They said they were fine and managed a half dozen breaks each day. Oh really, he asked.   Yes - there is always a little time to spare between patients. Oh really? Yes - sometimes they have to wait 20, maybe 30, minutes. Oh really? Yes - we call down to the nurses as we wrap up one patient; they then get the patient; a wheelchair, a porter to push the wheel chair and a nurse together and then transport the patient to the surgery. Gosh, says the CEO. Yes, say the surgeons, do you know how hard it can be to get them all together and all we want to do is move the patient 200 yards. But them's the rules.

Can you guess where he put the 2 chairs, who sat in them and when they sat in them?

Leaving

I've spent the last 10 months working with a client in Sheffield. Today was my last day with them and I'm really sad to be leaving. I only went there for 6 weeks initially to help them get an important agile project off the ground, but I stayed on to help bring the project to completion and to help kick off a few smaller agile projects and to teach the companies PMs about how to manage agile projects.

Along the way we discovered that incremental development works nicely with cobol, that FIT is a wonderful productivity tool, that starting out a project with the explicit goal of "rebuilding trust" is an extraordinarily powerful way of rebuilding trust, that customers who trust you are so so so much easier to work with, that developers are excellent planners if you teach them how to use critical chain scheduling, and that agile projects can produce lots of accurate and necessary documentation if it is needed. Oh, and what's more is that the project was fixed price, fixed scope, fixed schedule and ... Successful.

I do feel really sad to leave though. I made some good friends in sheffield.

.oOo. Sent from my BlackBerry www.ClarkeChing.com +44(0)7920114893

Strengths

A while ago I did the strengthsfinder personality test online. (You can do it very cheaply by buying the strengthsfinder 2.0 book and using the code hidden in the book).

One of my top 5 strengths is that I am good at making people feel comfortable and buildong a rapport with them when we first meet . I think they call the strength "woo". I don't do it deliberately in a manipulative way, but I do do it all the time. I can't help myself. I didn't really notice that I do it and that others don't do it so much until I did the test.

Yesterday was a bad day for me because I couldn't make the guy who served me in the local mini mart smile. I couldn't even make eye contact with him. It has been bothering me since. Most people has a smile waiting to appear even if they don't realise it, but this guy just didn't. I can't recall the last time this happened.

You know what though? I bet that he's less bothered by this sad situation than I am. I suspect he'd pity me if he knew ...
.oOo. Sent from my BlackBerry www.ClarkeChing.com +44(0)7920114893

The "Thrill" imperitive

I've recently given two unrelated project managers the following advice.

'When you start your project and you are wondering how to slice it up first ask yourself "who do I need to thrill the most", then ask yourself "how can I thrill them quickly".'

I think that is good advice.  The only thing I'd add is "Do it then Repeat".