Agile2008 Conference Submission

Agile2008 released the conference track recently here.One presentation that won't be there is my submission. Though it had some positive feedback, it didn't make the cut.

As the presentation was unique among the others I reviewed, I thought I would post it for others. I submitted it under the Leadership and Teams track. Despite the let down that I wasn't selected, I had a career highlight in getting very positive feedback from Jim Highsmith. :-)


Agile Strengths-Based Teams - How to Coach and Lead According to Strengths

This workshop will review the different approaches and levels I’ve used with a strengths-based approach on my Scrum teams. We will discuss my experiences at the individual level, listing team members’ specific strengths (with descriptions) and how I created new team roles tailored to allow each member to play to their strengths, involving the team in the way they work, and fostering improved communication and interdependency. Also, group discussion could cover hypothetical roles and situations, or run through a simplified strengths assessment for attendess and then walk through how they could make adjustments to leverage those strengths more on their team and with stakeholders and customers.

How Does Strengths Relate to Agile?
Jim Highsmith writes, “Agile Software Development Ecosystems are designed to capitalize on each individual’s and each team’s unique strengths.” and also that “developing each individual’s capabilities” is a key contribution to project success. In the spirit of agile, working with others according to their strengths is part of valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools. And adding the strengths paradigm to agile project management addresses several key points from the Agile Project Leaders Network Wiki of Knowledge, such as:

• Individual Leadership Style - Involving the team in determining the way they work
• Handling Team Dynamics - Encouraging individuals to self select tasks
• How to generate an open environment where people feel safe to express themselves.

Aren’t We Already Doing This?
Agile leaders should use a strengths-based approach as a tool, but don’t often do. Most people don’t know how to identify their strengths at a granularity that is practical and helpful. Those that do most likely don’t know how to make changes in how they work that enables them to capitalize on those strengths.

Strengths Is Not a Silver Bullet, But an Agile Accelerator Tool
In terms of in terms of productivity, profitability and employee retention, managers using a strengths approach had a 86% greater success rate than other managers. Strengths-based teams performed 44% better. But the most powerful benefit of the strengths movement is when agile leaders use it.

NOTE: Depending on group consensus, have a separate short session or workshop where the group takes Gallup's StrengthsFinder assessment. The results could be discussed, and attendees could then come to this workshop knowing their strenths profile.

Process/Mechanics
Facilitated a discussion on my experiences of introducing a strengths-based approach within a Scrum team at the individual level, listing team members’ specific strengths (with descriptions) and creation of new team roles tailored to allow each member to play to their strengths.

I. Samples of My Agile Strengths Implementation Experience

1. Team Member A has Strengths of ‘Focus’, ‘Deliberative’ and ‘Competitive’
2. Team Member B Goes From Impractical Complainer to Responsible, Driving Junior ScrumMaster
3. Team Finally Understands Team Member C, Because of Her Strengths

II. Review how to leverage strengths for better performance from ourselves and our teams. We would discuss:

1. Strengths themes vs. granular strengths
2. How to grow your strengths week by week
3. Ways to leverage the power of the agile + strengths combination
4. What if there is lots of overlap or gaps?

Finally, discuss how my efforts and experience coaching and influencing the organization in both agile and strengths, and the parallels of improved communication and collaboration.

Leadership is Simple, But Not Easy

As posted on the Mavericks at Work blog, leadership is simple but not easy. Same with agile. In the end, all you can continually do without being fueled by results is to be the change you want to be.

What makes Southwest Airlines successful has been studied, written about and public knowledge for years, as mentioned in the Mavericks blog here and here. But companies still don't (or can't) do what Southwest does.

The success of agile has been studied, written about and public knowledge for years, but companies, and even teams, still don't (or culturally can't) do it. The barriers I've seen are mainly letting go of control and trusting others.

Agile Worldview Quotes - Scattering Seeds

I just read in Mike Beedle and Ken Schwaber's Agile Software Development with Scrum that "Scrum represents a competing worldview when compared to the many other styles of software development or business organization." I've never heard the term "worldview" associated with anything in software development, but I fully agree.

Agile isn't just about how a team of developers builds something, it's reaches into the business - how the team works with the other departments, how the business must have a single voice and must prioritize requests.

Something I've found useful is to include in all of my email random quotes I've saved which reflect this worldview. The program I use is Qliner Quotes, and its free.

Here is a sample of some of the quotes:

I'm going to make mistakes, but I've got to be able to look myself in the mirror and say to myself that I believed in that decision and mistakes are okay. And once I make those mistakes I can adapt and change. - Frank Addante interview on Venture Voice

Companies with the most values based critiques of their industries often turn out to be the savviest and most aggressive competitors. - Taylor and LaBarre, Mavericks at Work

Saying smart things and giving smart answers are important. Learning to listen to others and to ask smart questions is more important.  - Bob Sutton, Professor of Management Science at Stanford University

Core values are not something people "buy in" to. Executives often ask me, "How do we get people to share our core values?" You don't. Instead, the task is to find people who are already predisposed to sharing your core values. You must attract and then retain these people and let those who aren't predisposed to sharing your core values go elsewhere. - Jim Collins, Good to Great

Courage in Scrum isn't a visible, tangible thing. It is not some kind or romantic heroism. Instead, it is having the guts, the determination, to do the best you can. It's the stubbornness not to give up, but to figure out how to meet commitments. This type of courage is gritty, not glorious. - Mike Beedle, Agile Software Development with Scrum

Harmony itself is good, I suppose, if it comes as a result of working through issues constantly and cycling through conflict. But if it comes only as a result of people holding back their opinions and honest concerns, then it's a bad thing.  - Patrick Lencioni, Five Dysfunctions of a Team

When I'm building a team, I look for people who love to win. If I can't find those, I look for people who hate to lose. I want people around me who have passion. - Mark Beeson

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. - General George S. Patton

Excellent firms don't believe in excellence, only in constant improvement and constant change. - Tom Peters

A manager must be able to do four activities extremely well: select a person, set expectations, motivate the person, develop the person. The manager role is the catalyst role. - Marcus Buckingham and Curt W. Coffman, First Break All the Rules

In the world according to great managers, the employee is the star.  The manager is the agent.  And, as in the world of performing arts, the agent expects a great deal from his stars. - Marcus Buckingham and Curt W. Coffman, First Break All the Rules

Are you going to take the risk to be different? Because no one is drawn to ordinary or average. And if you're willing to be different, be warned. Leaders are always controversial. Followers fit in. - T.D. Jakes

To succeed, a project relies on information from very different people: on one side are customers; on the other side is the technical team. If either side dominates these communications, the project loses. - Mike Cohn

A key role servant leaders often play is facilitating necessary changes. As a result, it's imperative that these leaders recognize there are four levels of change that vary in degrees of difficulty and time: knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and organizational change. The last one is the most difficult, because now you're attempting to influence the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of multiple people. - Ken Blanchard

"The record for successful software projects is dismal indeed, but there's a new kid on the block: agile programming. Agile principles include flexibility, teamwork, trust, and reflection. But sadly, these environments are few and far between." - CIO.com

Changes in Online Advertising

I was training a new project team member on how the advertising works on my company's website, all as part of a project to migrate the site to a new content management system. He wasn't aware of the business behind the banner ads that our users see when the visit our site.

Just this year, Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion. AOL buys Quigo for $340 million. Why such big purchases? In part because internet advertising is expected to top $27 billion this year, and there are a lot of people and companies who would like to make advertising money from all the advertisers. But picture the stock market and other financial markets. I might want to invest some savings I have, but I wouldn't do it myself. The most cost-efficient (and time-efficient) is to work with a broker who will make the transaction. Ad networks act the same as the broker - taking the money to be invested by the advertiser and spending where it will have returns most likely to make the advertiser happy.

In my broker analogy, I might want my money to go into options, or environmentally friendly companies only. The broker would then be limited to some markets (Chicago Board of Options Exchange) or need to know companies in several markets that represent a given sector. In the same way, some ad networks only provide a certain format of advertising (video on VideoEgg, or text links through Google's AdSense), while some ad networks specialize on demographic (Hispanic sites and visitors through HispanoClick).

In my experience with DoubleClick's DART for Publishers, we focus on where we want ads to be displayed on our site. You can add ad networks (which provides the ads themselves) through DART, as well as schedule and manage the ad campaigns.

To implement online ads, we first define how many ads will be on a given page, and what dimensions the ads will be. We give each of these ad slots an ID, and then place the same number of code\tags, each with its own ID, into our webpage (see the nice overview on Google's Ad Manager here). Now when we load our webpage, the tags call out to the ad server, which returns an ad. The ad server also tracks which ads where server where and when, and which were clicked.

Part of the business opportunity is that these ad networks take a cut of the money coming from the source (advertiser) to the destination (publisher site where ad displayed). Part of the business problem is that publisher want the best paying ads, but aren't in control of which ads come trough and their pay rate. Ideally, publishers would cut out the middle man, but managing and serving ads is challenging, while calling all the advertisers and lining up the deals is time consuming.

If we want to try and manage the ad serving with a tool, there are free ad management solutions (Google's Ad Manager for one). There are also now meta ad servers that sit between the publisher and the ad network. These applications work with many ad networks, while gathering statistics on ad performance and even making recommendations (see The Rubicon Project for an example).

Comparing Mingle and ScrumWorks Agile Scrum Project Management Software

Thanks to a recommendation, I'm now using Mingle. I've found it easier to use than ScrumWorks and Excel for managing the product backlog, sprints, user stories, and tasks. My favorite feature is the ability to group stories and tasks by sprint, each card color coded to reflect status, and you can drag the cards into other sprints.

One draw back is that it's hard to beat the visibility and energy of Post-It cards on the wall in status swimlanes, but you also can't export the Post-Its into an Excel sheet to send to management for a quick status report.

Each project management tool I've tried has it's drawbacks.

1. The Excel worksheet with stories, tasks and burndown was labor intensive to set-up or change very much, and often confused newcomers to the team.
2. ScrumWorks is not intuitive, and couldn't show burndown on partially complete stories and tasks.
3. The Post-Its can't be mass-updated, reported on, nor accessed remotely.
4. Mingle doesn't have a burn-down (that I found, although rel 1.1 is said to have one), and performance is pretty bad.

Right now, the customer likes to see the project overview, and Mingle provides that at-a-glance better than the others, so I'll be sticking with Mingle for now.

Office Developer Conference - ODC 2008

Some notes from the Microsoft Office Developer Conference (ODC 2008) in San Jose -

I was most impressed with InfoPath 2007. It allows for simple creation of forms for data entry or lookup without code, while allowing access to workflow and .net object model for coding if required. I also read how designers and developers are using it for prototyping user experience (UX) on new sites, applications and features. This sounds good, given that you can build a page in a couple minutes that accesses and displays real data.

InfoPath and SharePoint, and any custom programming, can use Windows Workflow to automate emails, task or list creation, and follow-up actions. The assignee of an IT Ticket can have a task created and assigned to them, as well as sent follow-up emails including escalation until the ticket is completed. Also, you can publish InfoPath forms to SharePoint to be accessed as webpages. No need for InfoPath on every desktop.

Visual Studio 2008 is geared to leverage SharePoint for .Net developers, both with access to workflow, workflow templates, tools to simplify building and deploying new features. SharePoint Service Pack 1.1 just came out, and it’s loaded – almost a Service Pack 2.0 release.

A new XML standard allows sharing data across the Office applications, and allows customization of the ribbon in those apps. Microsoft recommends keeping office workers in the applications they are familiar with, rather than go to other, separate apps to do parts of their job. Examples include the AdSage add-in, and the Xobni Outlook plug-in (http://www.xobni.com/learnmore/). Lot's of talk of the user experience as "contextual" or "immersed". For example, if most the the information a user (typically an information worker) is doing is in, they shouldn't have to leave Outlook to use another application to get related information or do a related task, such check the status of a task specified in an email or send a fax of a document attached to an email.

SharePoint has been used to build applications for a New Hire Process, a Project Management app for cross-functional (matrix) organization, a network sppt and monitoring solution, and Sales Generator. These rough apps were each built overnight by teams of three .Net developers trained for only one day in SharePoint.

CRM Live, at $60 per user, might be a good option for sales force automation (SFA) needs of most small to medium sized businesses. See http://crm.dynamics.com/ for more information.

Gartner recently announced MS BI Platform is now in the "magic quadrant" of being an industry leader. It is matching up well against big players like IBM/Cognos and Oracle. Microsoft's strong recommendation is to use Excel and Excel Services as the end-users BI tool. Report Services can be difficult to implement due to multiple security layers. For the first BI project, put all software and data on one machine and go for the smallest data domain possible.

Speakers recommended a number of tools, templates and helper applications on CodePlex. CodePlex was likened to SourceForge for Microsoft apps. See http://www.codeplex.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?ProjectSearchText=moss for an example of user contributions for WSS and MOSS SharePoint development. Most teams should first review what's out there before building any new applications.

What companies can do with these new tools and functionality depends on their company's priorities. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and actions items could be:
1. Increase revenue - Leverage the AdSage\AdCenter Excel Plugin for keyword and campaign analysis. See http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/addin-demos .
2. Control spend - Automate and simplify expense reports
3. Gain customers - Flow customer feedback to site and Customer Service into key performance indicators and analytics
4. Retain existing customers - Automate reports on customer email, comments or other Customer Service data capture of feedback
5. Increase productivity for Sales, Operations, SEO, Editorial, Customer Service and IT
6. Streamline 3rd party interaction and interfaces
7. Automate and simplify business reporting with scorecards and key performance indicators
8. Allow drill-down and trend analysis of business data

The 2007/2008 toolset allows a greater ability to deliver on all of these items.

Resources from Code Camp Presentations

Below are links from my presentations this winter at Code Camp.

The outline for the presentation Improve Your Management and Leadership is located here.

The books referenced in the presentation are:

• Marcus Buckingham's First, Break All the Rules,
• Now, Discover Your Strengths, and
• The One Thing You Need to Know.
• Jim Collin's Good to Great,
• Ken Blanchard's One Minute Manager and
• Andy Standley's Making Vision Stick.

I also referenced Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

All of these authors have spoken at The Leadership Summit and their presentations may be available through that store.

I also briefly mentioned a book on metrics. My blog post on that is here, and the book is Five Core Metrics: The Intelligence Behind Successful Software Management.

The outline for Sunday's presentation Combine Agile with Your Strengths is located here and the slideshow is shared over the web on SlideShare here. The books mentioned include First Break All the Rules and Now Discover Your Strengths, linked above, as well as StrengthsFinder 2.0 and Go, Put Your Strengths To Work (on Google Books, so you can read parts of it).

I previously wrote a fairly thorough summary (certainly not an elevator speech) of the business value of using a strengths-based approach here.

Don't Know What You Got ('Til It's Gone)

I've recently had the opportunity to see what's lost when a team goes from Scrum to...something hard to define - general milestones and high level requests to get things done. I'll list the pain points.

What's Lost:

1. Visibility. The primary stakeholder doesn't really know where the project is. That's why he's having to ask several people throughout the day what their status is. But what good is asking them how it's going? It's very difficult to be objective, and their attempts are relative. "It's going well." Compared to...where you were yesterday? The non-existent schedule? The estimates before all the late changes came in, or after? Missing the deadline by a mile, and now thankfully looks only by weeks? Scrum records status and progress daily and more importantly the use of burn down charts track the trend!
2. Clarity. Are the people asked normally optimistic or pessimistic? Good estimators or bad? Ones who include code dept, deployment time, or just unit test and throw it over the wall? Our Scrum estimates were hammered out by group conscience (via planning poker) and we defined and standardized "done" via a "done is" checklist.
3. Teamwork. The team is now divided and fighting against themselves due to individual developers getting pulled by different business owners for different projects. Developers either don't help each other, or if they do, are chided for not exclusively working on some other "priority" project. The real problem isn't the developers. Scrum provides a framework to help the business in defining THE priorities in sequence, as well as defining who the one product owner is whom can dictate where the resources (developer hours) should go.
4. Motivation. All these issues combine to undermine motivation (a classic mistake, per Steve McConnell). Working towards a difficult deadline, without milestone deliveries to celebrate and foster hope, without real teamwork and interdependency, and without laser-like focus on the goal, motivation dries up. And then work becomes a grind, negatively breeds and a downward spiral of self-fulfilling prediction of an unreachable goal takes root and grows. Left alone, the business reaps nothing but failure for their investment, and the hours and days and weeks of people's lives are wasted on a harvest of the bitter fruit of failure.

What Is SharePoint?

Microsoft provides a set of functionality called Windows SharePoint Services, now on version 3.0, within Windows Server 2003 that is free to use. This free group of services provides document collaboration, information-sharing, list creation, Web page creation and related services. It is very useful for workgroups, departments and other small groups of users to work together on a set of documents, share information and otherwise collaborate.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the new version of SharePoint Portal Server (combinging Microsoft Content Management Server) and provides additional functionality for business intelligence, business process integration, enterprise search, enterprise content management, and personalization.

The most common uses of SharePoint that I've seen are:

1. Creating team sites where only certain project team or department members can login, see, edit and add information and documents
2. Creating lists of information that can be easily customized by adding new columns, value lists and multiple filters
3. Setting alerts on information or document areas so that all team site users receive an email notice of information added or notified.
4. Using issue lists that email the assignee of the issue of any change with a before and after summary of the change, as well as keeping a history of comments on the issue.
5. Using document libraries (lists) that allow version histories of the documents, including checking in and out, creation of folders for organizing groups of files, and an Explorer-type view that supports drag-and-drop.

The types of business uses I've seen include:

1. Tracking employee hours, including using a lookup of tasks to choose from so that information is always correct.
2. Data entry of metric data that drives other graphical reports
3. Letting teams have their own designated and central area for their documents and other information
4. Creating a business process of several required steps
5. Using the discussion functional to capture a conversation thread of multiple users on a document posted to the team site.
6. Using a modified issue list to categorize, prioritize, track, assign and drive issues on a project, as well as quickly export the list to Excel and send to additional outside users.

There are Microsoft partners that run SharePoint Services as a hosted service, lowering the barriers of complexity and effort for small and medium business to try out the functionality and see if there a good return for the money.

Agile Project Estimation w Scrum Planning Poker

I learned this week that planning poker is a big return for the small investment. I could not find planning poker cards in stock anywhere in the world, until Mike Cohn just made them available again (http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/products/cards).

Besides all the great benefits outlined in Mike's great book on Agile Planning and Estimation, I found that the team interaction was good. There were great alternative views and just an overall good feeling of everybody's opinion counting.

The Leadership Summit - Session 1 - A Vision to Die For

The Leadership Summit
Notes from Session 1 - A Vision to Die For, Bill Hybels

Vision must be owned. Ownership is the most powerful weapon in casting and maintaining vision for your organization. It's the painting of the picture that brings passion out of people. It ties into purpose – a sense of destiny beyond to 9 to 5.

Hybels referenced the book of John – Being an owner vs. just a hired hand.

"I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd puts the sheep before himself, sacrifices himself if necessary. A hired man is not a real shepherd. The sheep mean nothing to him. He sees a wolf come and runs for it, leaving the sheep to be ravaged and scattered by the wolf. He's only in it for the money. The sheep don't matter to him." - John 10:11-13

Hybels challenged us to ask ourselves, "At my current workplace, am I the owner of the vision, or the hired hand?" Do I pray for it, protect it, volunteer for it. Owners of the vision will sacrifice deeply. They will be high capacity workers.

Hybels then referenced a group that was an owner of a vision. On March 7, 1965, a group of civil rights marches left Selma, Alabama for Birmingham. They made it as far as the Edmund Pettis Bridge. There they faced state troopers and county sheriffs armed with billy clubs tear gas and bullwhips. The lawmen attacked the peaceful protesters and drove them back to Selma. This event became known as Bloody Sunday. Owners of a vision will be willing to die for the cause.

Out vision is so important. It should be bold, faithful, honorable, and clear. But vision needs to be owned by the people in our organization.

How do we do this? For some Type-A leaders who live on blazing a trail and calling back to everyone to follow their lead, it's a four letter word: P-R-O-C-E-S-S. Without process, we defeat every one left out (which is everyone but the leader).

There are three steps in the process for vision ownership:
1. Vision Formation
There is the top-down approach (bad), or the team approach (good). The top down approach is so often taken because it is quick, but doesn't take, doesn't hold.

The recommendation on the team approach was to have an offsite, with the focus being the question "What should our organization look like in five years?" It may feel slow or inefficient, and to some quick-acting leaders like "swimming in peanut butter." But this builds community, value and more likelihood of ownership. The team members may not always have their way, but they at least need to know their ideas have been considered.

2. Vision Refinement
Make a first draft of the vision. This crystallizes it, even in draft form. Take this draft to the groups at the next level out, trying to get different types of groups, feedback. Ask what's clear, what's confusing, what excites you, what scares you. The goal is to come away with a crystal clear, compelling vision.

3. Vision Declaration

Introduce the vision in front of leaders first, asking if it is clear and compelling. The declaration is not a solo effort, but a team activity.

Great leaders know that more time in the vision casting process increases ownership. Vision leaks, but don't berate the workers for this. Use any tactics to keep refilling the vision. And remember to celebrate progress.

Meeting Rules for Daily Stand-Up / Daily Scrum

For the team:

1. Arrive on time or early.
   
2. Be ready to say what you did yesterday and what you plan to do today.
   
3. Keep your report specific, precise and short in order to help the meeting end within 15 minutes.
   
4. Listen to other team member's status in case it might relate to your tasks or impact you.
   
5. Don't interrupt people when they are talking.
   
6. Don't agree to decisions or action you don't understand. Ask questions and insist on answers when you need clarification.
   
7. Note the tasks or action items you volunteer for.
   
8. If you raise an issue or question that can't be resolved in a minute, ask to discuss with the parties involved after the meeting.
   
9. For those calling in, be sure to start your report with "This is [your name]."
   

   
    

   For ScrumMasters:
   

10. Be sure to have (or have access to) your relevant information (the sprint or product backlogs, the software being developed, or the project, requirements or design documents and code)
    
11. Be sure to have (or have access to) the phone numbers of any team members who you are conferencing in.
    
12. Be sure to have scheduled the recurring meeting and invited all appropriate people
    
13. Be sure that the invitation includes the relevant information, such as meeting location, project site URL, and conference number.
    
14. Be sure the invitation subject line is specific (for those involved in multiple projects).
    
15. It is your job to keep the meeting focused and starting and ending on-time.
    
16. It is your job to know why and how scrum works. Look for teachable moments in the daily scrum.

Why Scrum Works

Just finished the book Project Management with Scrum, and it is excellent.

Here a great overview quote from the forward:

"Gary Convis notes that Toyota's sustainable success comes from an 'inter-locking set of three underlying elements: the philosophical underpinnings, the managerial culture an the technical tools. The philosophical underpinnings include a joint [worker] , customer first focus, an emphasis on people first, a commitment to continuous improvement...The managerial culture...is rooted in several factors, including developing and sustaining a sense of trust, a commitment to involving those affected by first, teamwork, equal and fair treatment for all, an finally, fact-based decision making and long-term thinking.'


Scrum works for all the same reasons. Its philosophical underpinnings focus on empowering the development team and satisfying customers. Its managerial culture is rooted in helping others achieve their goals. Its technical tools are focused on making fact-based decisions through a learning process. When all of the factors are in place, it's hard for Scrum not to succeed. - Mary Poppendieck"


From Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional).

Summary of Marcus Buckingham's Strengths Movement and its Value to Business

A few months back, I wrote a summary of the strengths movement – personal strengths, or employee strengths if you're a manager, according to the work done by Gallup and Marcus Buckingham (previously misspelled Markus Buckingham on my blog).

I've since found myself forwarding this email numerous times to others to give them a quick overview or primer with a focus on the value to the company. This post is the same content and formatting for easier reference.

Overview- Why and How

"Our people are our greatest asset." Correction - your people's talents are your greatest asset, or more precisely "Aligning our people's talents to their tasks so that they play to their strengths the majority of each day is our greatest asset."

The premise of strengths-based teams is that the most effective method for motivating people is to build on their strengths rather than correcting their weaknesses. People don't change that much, and the effort to remediate their weaknesses is much effort for minimal return. Researchers at the Gallup Organization have analyzed results of interviews of over 1.7 million employees from 101 companies and representing 63 countries. Less than 20 percent of employees stated that they were using their strengths every day. And there is no relation to type of work, skilled or unskilled, industry or even within company. In fact, more disparity existed within companies than outside, showing that there is no such thing as "great companies," only great teams within those companies.

One must purchase a book (noted later in this post) in order to get access to the test which reveals their strengths. Once they learn their profile, a manager can begin a process of how to capitalize upon each person's unique traits, aligning them with the goals of their team and the company, resulting in better performance and employee satisfaction.

Summary of Strengths Books by Buckingham and Gallup

For background, here's a summary of the related books. In "First, Break All the Rules," strengths are mentioned as one of the levers that great managers can use to get the most out of their employees. In fact, it trumps all the other tools a manager can use. Then, in "Now, Discover Your Strengths," aimed at management and business, the authors focused on solely on strengths (because it is the greatest single lever to increase team performance), listed all 34 strength types, and gave cases studies and examples. The book includes a code to take the strengths profile test. The new "StrengthFinder 2.0" book is geared more for the individual, and contains a slightly newer version of the test with a bit more guidance on the next steps of how to apply your strengths. Finally, in the new "Go Put Your Strengths to Work," Buckingham explains (and gives great, practical tools) on how to take personal responsibility in turning knowledge into action, because just knowing your strengths alone doesn't change a person into someone who leverages their strengths the majority of the day.

Supporting Facts

Here's an edited down snippet from a Gallup white paper on the results of their strengths study:

Definitions of performance vary, but typically include indices such as productivity (revenue in business), profitability, employee retention, customer loyalty, and safety. Substantial predictive validities have been established between structured interview measures of manager "talents" and future manager performance (Schmidt & Rader, 1999). In a recent study of more than 2,000 managers in the Gallup database, Gallup researchers studied the responses of managers to open- ended questions related to management of individual talents versus weaknesses. In comparison to poor-performing managers, top-performing managers (based on composite performance) were more likely to indicate that they spend time with high producers, match talents to tasks, and emphasize individual strengths versus seniority in making personnel decisions. Success was 86 percent greater for managers with a "strengths versus non- strengths " approach (Gallup Organization, 2002). Managers with a strengths-based approach nearly double their likelihood of success.

The ROI of Employee Engagement

The employees who say they "have the opportunity to do what they do best every day" have substantially higher performance. In a study of 308,798 employees in 51 companies, teams scoring above the median on this statement have 44 percent higher probability of success on customer loyalty and employee retention, and 38 percent higher probability of success on productivity measures (Harter & Schmidt, 2002). "Success" is defined as exceeding the median performance within one's own company, across work units. Managers who create environments in which employees have a chance to use their talents have more productive work units with less employee turnover.

The ROI of Strengths Development

Gallup researchers has performed studies of talent identification, feedback, and strengths development activities with a "study group" and a "control group" who were administered the "StrengthsFinder" assessment and given feedback, both individually and in group sessions, with follow-up. Post-intervention measurements of employee engagement in productivity were conducted six months later. Results indicated that the study group productivity grew by 50 percent more than the control group did.

Taken from http://media.gallup.com/DOCUMENTS/whitePaper--InvestingInStrengths.pdf

Other links:

Gallup's StrengthFinder Center: http://gmj.gallup.com/book_center/strengthsfinder/default.aspx

Marcus Buckingham's site: http://www.marcusbuckingham.com/

Do We Need to Manage People?

Going through Good to Great again, and was struck by Jim Collin's statement that the best companies hire self-disciplined people who don't need to be managed, and the leadership manages the system, not the people.

One of Scrum's principles is that the teams are self-managing. But I can see now that that principle depends on having the right people on the team – disciplined people. Just because I'm running scrum doesn't mean that someone on the team who wasn't previously self-managing or disciplined suddenly becomes disciplined. The opportunity is there for them, and hopefully peers around them to model after, but the brutal facts might be that there are team members who will never become self-managing, self-disciplined. Perhaps the team manages these people off their team, but if the team and process doesn't gel immediately (average of several sprints before typically gelled and consistent), then it is likely the ScrumMaster may be the first to deal with whether a person is right for the team.

David Maister on Passion, People and Principles

David Maister is so straight on with his post on Passion, People and Principles (posted here).

Over and again on projects and teams and in companies, I see these truths and consequences lived out. Throw in embracing a paradigm of servant leadership and an understanding of strengths, management and leadership, and I believe every person who wants to be successful, can be. But from what I've seen, many people aren't willing to give up what they want, even for better long term, or if it hurts the company, themselves or others. Like the monkey who can't get his hand out of the jar because he won't let go of the banana inside, these people get what they want but trap themselves in the end.

Agile, Operations and Strategy

From a management point of view, you want to know that you are getting the top return on investment for all of your IT efforts. Scrum makes this clear, visible and in the control of the product owner, who is often funding the effort.

But what about all of the other time and effort by IT personnel whom are not on agile projects, those who are most often "putting out fires" or working on short-notice market-driven system changes? Without a lightweight method to track these efforts, funding could be misspent and neither CIO's nor CEO's would know. Worse than money wasted on effort not making a difference, it is money that could have been spent on something that would have improved the company and\or IT.

This IT request tracking should give visibility to requests, timeframes, the requestor, estimated effort and status. It should be visible to all IT and company management and proactively alert key stakeholders, and also provide summary reports of effort so that management can regularly easily see a high-level view of all effort and knows how money is being spent.

Notes from Sprint Planning Observation

Watched a veteran ScrumMaster do sprint planning for a team's 16^th sprint. Below are some practical notes.

1. This team of 10+ found that 2 week sprints worked best.
   
2. A 'Done Is' list (unit tested, checked in, code debt noted, integrated into staging environment, smoke tested, etc) was handed out at the beginning of the meeting. Later, when estimates were given, the ScrumMaster would ask "Does that estimate include everything from the Done List?
   
3. They have a theme for each sprint. For this sprint it was roughly "Major focus is on user experience and usability issues."
   
4. Ramp-up time for new team members or members taking on new roles was noted, but not explicitly assigned hours. Instead, the weight of ramp was factored in to any given related task.
   
5. The sprint tool was Excel, and the estimated line items were grouped (using Excel's grouping functionality) by Feature or Activity.
   
6. Each feature had a team member assigned as Lead (noted in Lead column) who was responsible for 'cracking the whip' if need be.
   
7. Each task still had a specific assignee.
   
8. Meetings had line items for each person that was scheduled to be in the meeting with planned meeting length assigned.

Applying Your Strengths Where You Are

After attending Yelo, I had a chance to ask a question of Erwin McManus that has been on my mind for a while. I know my strengths, but what is the next step in moving toward working in my strengths more of each day as well as developing those strengths putting them to work right where I am? When we are not working in our strengths, work is harder, draining and we are less successful.

It was explained by both Erwin and, later on, another strengths coach that applying our strengths where we are is a matter of viewing the same tasks from a the perspective of our strengths.

At times I am overwhelmed with the details of numerous project management tasks. I am not by nature a detailed person or driver (Achiever, Command). But rather than look for other roles to apply my strengths of Strategic, Maximizer, Input, Relator or Connectedness (see below for definitions), I can view these same tasks through the lens of my strengths.

What I've done this week is:

1. Step outside myself and view my role and situation as an objective Maximizer. My immediate response is "We've got to clean these projects up: close the open items, push through the obstacles, provide clarity and direction for all those involved." What was stressful and exhausting when sitting in the office chair now becomes energizing and empowering while sitting in the Director's chair, even though the only actor on the set is myself.
2. Also, previously I viewed most of my team and task efforts as moving things forward for the sake of 'closing' them, but 'closed' didn't always mean that a task's destination was the best. Often it was good enough, or a customer-requested compromise of functionality and cost. Now from the Maximizer perspective, I can see that these task and project destinations truly are the best that I could do from the customer and my PMO's point of view (which should be my point of view as well) - that's what they're asking for. Now I'm driven to move these customer and organization requests from good to great.
3. Seeing my tasks and daily to-do's from the viewpoint of Strategic. When I did this, I felt a sudden, strong drive to get control of my day-to-day worklife because I was sure there were opportunities, inefficiencies, and broken processes all around but I couldn't see them because of the overgrown brush and weeds of business, overload and living in reaction mode. I could smell opportunity like Yukon Cornelius could smell gold, and I desperately wanted to clear out this overgrowth in order to get to the real treasure - strategic opportunity.
4. Considering, as someone who has the Input strength, all the valuable information that I'm not collecting because I'm too hurried. I was more motivated to get my projects and tasks under control so that I can not only collect data and information for the sake of proving useful at some later date, but also the opportunity that this information might provide in making more connections with people, projects, and initiatives.

These were the strongest results I had from trying to apply my strengths right where I was in my current role and responsibilities.


Definition of Strengths Referenced

• Strategic
  People strong in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.
• Maximizer
  People strong in the Maximizer theme focus on strengths as a way to stimulate personal and group excellence. They seek to transform something strong into something superb.
• Input
  People strong in the Input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information.
• Connectedness
  People strong in the Connectedness theme have faith in the links between all things. They believe there are few coincidences and that almost every event has a reason.
• Relator
  People who are strong in the Relator theme enjoy close relationships with others. They find deep satisfaction in working hard with friends to achieve a goal.

Reasons Vision Doesn't Stick - Success

I was listening again to Andy Stanley's presentation from The Leadership Summit 2003, and was struck by this statement:

Vision doesn't stick when you're successful because when you are successful, you have options and if you have too many options you get unfocussed...You wake up one day in a large organization and the largeness has made it complex, and complex organizations are stupid organizations. The smartest [my organization] has ever been - unbelievably efficient - was when there was just six of us.

But as you are successful, you become complex, and complexity is the enemy of efficiency and complexity is the enemy of vision. It could be that you're in a successful organization, but the vision hasn't stuck. Everybody's busy, but you've lost the connection.

Resources from Code Camp Presentation

Below are the resources related to accelerating your career by focusing on strengths.

Both Gallup's work and the MBS strengths are mentioned elsewhere in this blog.

Sweet Spots
If you don't find meaning in your work--or you're one of the 80 percent who don't believe their talents are used, what can you do? Finding your "sweet spot" is part of the Cure for the Common Life.

MBS Strengths (colors):
www.Strengths.com
My MBS profile
How to Work with Scott
MBS Profile Comparison

Gallup's Strengths:
www.strengthsfinder.com
http://www.marcusbuckingham.com
http://technorati.com/tag/strengthsfinder
My Signature Themes
My Strengths Guide

Private Victory:
Be Proactive, Begin with the End in Mind, and Firt Things First are the first three of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
FranklinCovey's training and resources website

ScrumMaster Training

Just completed ScrumMaster training through Danube, with Tobias Mayer. First off, Tobias is incredibly gifted in bringing understanding of business drivers, software challenges, and the spectrum of people's strengths and idiosyncracies all into a blend of guidance and assurance of how to really make this work.

My biggest take-away is that Scrum is simple, but it's not easy. And it's better to jump into rough water and try it than to wait for an ideal time and circumstance. From what I could tell from those who had been praacticing it, Scrum takes some courage (absense of self for the sake of the cause) to lead through it.

It is easier to do command-and-control waterfall projects, knowing they're more likely to fail, because the structure makes blaming others for project failure to easy (and often incorrectly) because of visibility on silo'd efforts. When effort in that specific task fails, the owner is more likely blamed because it appeared that required requisite steps were 'completed' and done so correctly (or else the project wouldn't have moved on).

In a scrum, all requirements, programming, project management and QA efforts are occurring simultaneously and you know the outcome in 30 days or less. So, who would you blame in the event of a failure? The whole team was involved. So one would have to look deeper into the causes, and that is always the right thing to do. Also, how severe would the consequences be on, at worst, losing a month's worth of work on a Scrum sprint versus three, six or more months on a waterfall project?

As far as learning Scrum, here are two additional links: The Agile Toolkit podcasts and a list on Amazon called The Scrum Master's Bookshelf.

Time Tracking for Team Member Accountability

As much as I feel strongly about employee motivation and appreciation, I see the accountability and extra effort that comes from employees who have to account for every hour of the day via timesheets (I should add how important that these timesheets are actually reviewed).

I have seen exponentially more effectiveness when an employee realizes that they have to not only account for where their time goes each day, but that there is accountability for how much time is taken for each task and some responsibility for whether that task was the appropriate priority. If there is no consequence for not working, not working hard, or not working on the right things, then what is the motivation to work diligently on the right things? Generally there is no more consequence than “you should have asked me: for more work/if that was the priority/how long I expected that task to take.” If so, every day spent doing what the employee would rather do is its own reward.

I’m seeing now that new employees generally work quite hard in the first week or two, not because the want to impress, but more often they are concerned about consequences for not working hard at the right things. Once they are sure there are none, they quickly adjust to the acceptable (palatable) pace of those around them.

Think of the additional gains of a time tracking system: real time actual costs of projects, estimates-to-actuals by project, team size, team members, real bell curves of resource usage in order to intelligently schedule overlapping projects.

Project Areas and Team Member Proximity

I’ve seen significant increase in information sharing on project teams due simply to having daily scrums (agile status meetings). I’ve wondered how much more would communication (and therefore team performance) improve if I had the team members moved to cubes in the same area. The evidence from Tom Peters, below, is significant. Note how close teammates need to sit for optimal interaction.

“…if you and I are separated by 5 yards or less, the odds of us communicating at least once a week are nearly 100%. At 10 yards of separation, the odds plummet to about 9%; and said odds are almost constant at 3% if we're 30 to 100 yards apart.”

Quote referenced from Tom Peters’ weblog here.

Proactive with Dependencies

I use the Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In from NetCentrics (http://gtdsupport.netcentrics.com/learn/ ) for time management and I depend on it for project management because it allows me to set email reminders for follow-up email interactions with other team members I require a response from, especially the sometimes goal-disconnected client team members because they are not in our office.

A tool I would like to have in order to be proactive about dependencies is a network resource monitor. In consulting, too often we have tasks that we get tripped up because someone changed something on us without notifying us. When it comes time to perform the task, we find that we have lost privileges to the client’s VPN, or SQL Admin rights to a database or local machine admin privileges on a test server. The delay in getting these resolved can impact deadlines.

If I could set up a monitor app to check these resources, using accounts the client has given us, I could know immediately when access has changed. I could then quickly put in a request to resolve it, and have the problem worked in parallel and fixed before it impacts project deadlines down the line.

If anyone knows of an application that can do this, please let me know.

Pacing Scrums

A client recently asked that I change our project management so that we run our one month scrum, then stop development activity. The pause was to allow the team to be available to help with support and user adoption, asses, then determine what to take from the product back log and begin the next sprint.

It’s easy to move faster than the user community, and if several dozen new features and functionality pile up without adoption, the result is that it is quite possible the real objective has not been met. I like this idea of scrum 'pacing', although it makes planning staffing more challenging.

IT Manager's Survey

I've been conducting an IT Manager's survey. I'll be using the results of as part of an effort to understand how personality and natural talent can be leveraged to improve one's career. The responses will be aggregated with the answers from other managers, and I'll post the final results here sometime in the futre.

I was previously a supervisor of a development team, and have my opinions on how developers can improve themselves and their career, but I want make sure I accurately represent the breadth of IT managers. The responses from other managers will help ensure this. Below is the survey.

Manager's Survey


1. What vehicle do you prefer for candidate leads?
A. referrals
B. job posting and interviews
C. recruiters and interviews
D. Other:

2. On the range of 1 to 5, with 0 being no experience with a technology and 5 being significant production-level experience, what significance would you give a interviewee if they had used the technology you're looking for a prototype at work, working demo or test application at home?
A. 5 - Equally significant. Understanding the technology can is the same whether done as part of a complex production or a working demo on a dev machine.
B. 4 - Significant. Of considerable value.
C. 3 - Minimally significant. Of little value.
D. 2 - Somewhat insignificant. Of almost no value.
C. 1 - Insignificant. Making a demo or test application is of no value in getting experience of applicable worth.

3. If a candidate had a blog, would you read it? Would a blog factor into requesting an interview or your evaluation of candidate ability and match for the position?
A. 5 - Very significant factor. I would take time to read the blog and give them equal weight with the resume.
B. 4 - Significant factor. Glad the candidate is sharing their knowledge and views. I would likely review some or most of the blog.
C. 3 - Not really a factor. Good for them that they're blogging, but I most likely would not even go to the blog.
D. 2 - Somewhat insignificant factor. Of almost no value. I would not go to the blog.
C. 1 - Insignificant. I couldn't care less that the candidate has a blog.

4. Besides technical skills and previous positions, what traits do you look for in a job candidate?
Please mark no more than 4.
self-starter works well independently team player
good communicator problem solver innovative
dependable calm leader
energetic organized creative
follows directions works well without structure Other:

5. Describe the attitude of your best employee. What does he/she do?


6. If you could have your typical developer change or grow in some way, what would it be?


7. What's your most common complaint, problem with a developer?


8. What do you look for when you have an opportunity to promote someone?


9. Describe one of the best workers you've recently (or still) have.


10. Describe one of the worst workers you've recently (or still) have.


11. What would you recommended to a programmer (or other IT worker) looking to advance in his career?


12. Could you list three to five basic traits, skills, or talents (such as strategic, responsible, decisive, persuasive, high achiever, adaptable, disciplined, quick learner, positive, or any others you choose) that define or describe the following roles:
- Senior:
- Architect:
- Lead:
- Supervisor/Manager:



13. Have you read about or been involved in training regarding personality styles, temperaments, traits, or strengths, and if so, what was the material or organization?


14. How did you get into your current position?
A. Hired into the position from another company where I was a manager/supervisor
B. Hired into the position from another company where I had a leadership role
C. Hired into the position from another company where I did not have a management or leadership role
D. Transferred within the same company into the position from another group where I was a manager/supervisor
E. Transferred within the same company into the position from another group where I had a leadership role
F. Transferred within the same company into the position from another group where I did not have a management or leadership role
G. Promoted within the same team
H. Other:

Spolsky's Guerilla Guide to Interviewing

I've been reading the chapter on interviewing from Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software (2005 Jolt Productivity Award winner). Two points that floored me, but I had to admit rang true.

First, there's only two qualities to look for in candidates:

1. Smart
2. Gets things done

Spolsky clarifies "smart" not as "knows a lot of facts" such as the "What's the difference between VARCHAR and VARCHAR2 in Oracle8i", but aptitude - the ability to learn quickly, easily.

I'll also add that the reality is that the paradigm of programming knowledge has changed over the last 6+ years. Before the internet boom, the ability to learn and hold details (such as syntax) was valuable because it took time to find information in a book or ask a coworker (stopping his flow). Now, it takes seconds to find answers. The value is now on the ability to search effectively and know enough about concepts to help set the context of your search and what you actually need.

Secondly, in the interview, ask open-ended questions that allow you to see three key attributes:

1. Passion
2. Ability to explain things well
3. Signs of leadership

Personally, I see these three as qualities that cannot be coached or taught effectively.

Add these items to other areas in business where we should First, Break All the Rules.

My Strengths According to Gallup

Per the Gallup Organization's Web-based talent assessment tool StrengthsFinder. When you purchase "Now, Discover Your Strengths" by Marcus Buckingham, you are provided with a key to take the exam online.

Per StrengthsFinder, my top five strengths are:

Strategic: People strong in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.

Input: People strong in the Input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information.

Learner: People strong in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.

Responsibility: People strong in the Responsibility theme take psychological ownership of what they say they will do. They are committed to stable values such as honesty and loyalty.

Arranger: People strong in the Arranger theme can organize, but they also have a flexibility that complements this ability. They like to figure out how all of the pieces and resources can be arranged for maximum
productivity.

I have had several of my staff take the exam as well. Not only are we finding that the results are incredibly accurate, but the seeing strengths of my team so clearly has helped me to adjust the work so that they are fulfilled, challenged, better utilized and more productive.

Which Project Management Approach Is Best?

I've been studying the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) lately, in preparation for the Project Management Institute's Certified Associate in Project Management credential (CAPM®) . I had recently read Craig Larman's book Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide. Reading about so many benefits of being agile and incremental in project approach, I would have said my project management preference was agile.

Now that I'm reading the PMBOK, I'm finding that there is a lot of value in the process-heavy PMI PMBOK. I say process heavy because, for starters, there are over 20 process steps in the Planning Process - one of five core processes. Each of those process steps can have several input and output artifacts. The value I'm finding is that, per the PMI's decades of effort towards a comprehensive project management guide, if I know their framework I shouldn't miss any steps in the next project I work on. I say framework because the PMBOK itself says that the steps are optional, and should serve indeed only as a guide. So, take what works and leave the rest.

One fear I have is that perhaps some say 'go agile' partly because it is easier to digest and understand in your head. But if someone doesn't understand all the possible steps they should take, they will miss the times when some extra process step would have saved the project at a critical juncture. Like any software framework, the PMBOK is a structure, guide and set of optional tools, but the benefit is in knowing what it is and therefore what you can apply where. Agile, in part, means low ceremony and therefore just enough process and documentation to deliver a quality product that meets the customer's needs and expectations. In my opinion, Agile and the PMI are not mutually exclusive. Not only that, it seems apparent that smaller, less defined, lower risk projects would benefit from an agile approach, while a large, multi-disciplinary, high-risk project woould be best suited following the PMBOK's process tightly. And odd as it sounds, I'm studying the PMBOK while starting my second agile project management book (Agile Project Management : Creating Innovative Products).

Perhaps its human nature, but I'm finding some tendency to polarize. I've worked with developers who felt that client-server was old and bad, and that, web development was the obvious direction to go, but there's a right time and scenario for each. I think people like precut answers, and veer away from answers like "well, that depends.."

So, what project mgmt approach is the best? Well, that depends...

Stay Lean

From Nuts! Southwest Airlines Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success regarding staying lean:

Bureaucracy creates a mindset of dependency, which makes people do what they are told but no more. Rather than encouraging employees to assume ownership and responsibility, bureaucracy teaches them to transfer responsibility. Leanness, on the other hand, gives control, ownership, and responsibility to those who are closest to the action. Southwest allows its people a lot of decision-making power and authority. With no more than four layers of management between a front-line supervisor and Herb Kelleher [CEO], the leader's span of control is very broad at Southwest.

Kelleher believes that excessive bureaucracy results from the egos of empire builders who try, through title and position, to emphasize their own importance.

In a bureaucracy it's easy for an employee to say "that's not my job." This undermines productivity and prevents the company from being as nimble and moving as quickly as it might. Leanness helps identify nonperformers because,in a lean organization, marginal performance is difficult to hide.

Insights from Southwest

Southwest Airlines is an exceptional company. They are the only U.S. airline to have made money every year since 1973 (since 1978, 120 other airlines have gone bankrupt). Southwest has consistent market share of at least 60% in almost every nonstop city-pair market it serves. Southwest has the best customer service record in the airline industry and is the only carrier in the U.S. to win the industry's "Triple Crown" - baggage handling, on-time performance and customer complaints. Southwest has a turnover ratio of 6.4 percent, one of the lowest in the industry, and was listed in the top 10 best companies to work for in America.

Several interesting quotes from Nuts! Southwest Airlines Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success:

• When people work really hard for something they believe in, a special bond inevitably develops between them.
• "Most companies fail in their growth because they don't have a vision." Howard Putnam, former Southest CEO.
• "Market share has nothing to do with profitability. Market share says we just want to be big; we don't care if we make money doing it. In order to get an additional 5 percent of the market, some companies increased their costs by 25 percent. That's really incongruous if profitability is your purpose." Herb Kelleher, former Southwest CEO
• "We'll train you on whatever it is you have to do, but the one thing Southwest cannot change in people is inherent attitudes." Kelleher
• Southwest was, in the words of Gary Barron, chief operations officer, "nimble, quick, and opportunistic." How did Southwest get that way? Whenever possible, Southwest flies in the face of bureaucracy: it stays lean, thinks small, keeps it simple."

Imagination and Tradition

This quote was recently shared by a pastor.

Imagination continually frustrates tradition, that is it's function. - John Pfeiffer

Perhaps based on this, I can expect resistence from traditionalists, operations-centric people, structure and consistency-oriented people. Perhaps I should even see the joy in that imagination is at work when people are frustrated with newness or "that's not how its been done."

I just don't know how much effort and time to spend trying to open people's minds, or help them shift their paradigms...

Putting Yourself at Risk: The Price of Leadership

Notes from The Leadership Summit 2oo5:

Session 4: Putting Yourself at Risk: The Price of Leadership, Eleanor Josaitis and Curtis Sliwa

Session 4 was an interview with Eleanor Josaitis and Curtis Sliwa. Bill Hybels introduced the session by saying that"leaders will always, always, always pay a price."

Eleanor Josaitis, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Focus:HOPE, began interview by saying leaders need and are marked by passion, persistence, and partnerships. As far as opposition, she said "You have to outsmart 'em."

For her challenges, she used the approach:

1. Meet the need, focusing on efficiency and specifications
2. Solve the problem

Criticism. Eleanor's response to criticism is "You can either deck 'em or out class 'em. And then work twice as hard." During times of criticism, her colleague would give her a penny, reminding her that "in God we trust."

Curtis Sliwa, Founder and leader of the Guardian Angels, said it was about being the "first, not the best" and recognizing that the "problem is our own." He would ask people, "How are you making a difference?" and challenge them with the "grander vision."

He added that in society "we lost the idealism," the belief that we can make a difference.

Seeing the Unseen

Notes from The Leadership Summit 2oo5:

Session 3: Seeing the Unseen, Mosa Sono

Mosa Sono started out by noting how good it is for leaders to take time out to learn and grow.

Sono, from South Africa, said that leaders are called to continuously see the unseen. There will always be opposition, but know that God will see us through. Mosa said there is a saying in South Africa, "If the rooster doesn't crow, the dawn still comes." We need to stay hopeful, because "hope deferred makes the heart sick." We need to embrace the future, we can't settle. "Wherever you are is better than where you've been." He summarized this point by saying that leaders should be bold, strategic, humble and informed.

Sono also explained that we need to empathize with our people. He said that if we do not understand the needs of the people, if we can not speak their language of suffering, then we will give a prescription not asked for. We will "scratch where there is no itch."

conversely, Sono said everybody must do their part. It is the leader who must be seized by a vision, but we as leaders must engage the minds of others, show how they can be involved. We need to move people away from a dependence mentality, as if someone else will solve their problems for them. Sono gave examples from the bible where God helped many people only after He had them take the first step (roll away the stone, fill the jars with water, throw the net on the other side of the water, step out of the boat into the water).

This certainly ties into my previous post where the worker needs to be the change he or she wants to see. Even more, from Sono's perspective, the leader cultivates this in his people, calling for initiative and moving those asking for change to become stakeholders themselves. Perhaps it is that step without seeing, that personal investment, that helps the vital hope and trust in the organization grow.

I found another good review of Sono's session on Jeff Mikel's blog here.

Leadership Is Stewardship

Notes from The Leadership Summit 2oo5:

Session 2: Leadership is Stewardship, Rick Warren

The key point from the second session of The Leadership Summit was that our job or position at work can be our identity, income and influence.
And this very thing we hold on to so tightly is what we need to lay down. Our purpose at work goes far beyond the several paragraphs on the job description from Human Resources. It isn't strictly tasks and responsibilities. It is even more than motivating employees to make them more productive (turning Production Capability into Productivity - Steven Covey, 7 Habits).

Warren mentioned the difference between The Reformation, centered around creed and beliefs, and what he said we needed now - The Second Reformation, focused on deeds and behavior. What I take from this is that the software development professional has no lack of access to good software development lifecycle models, documented best practices and supporting metrics, consensus on modeling languages, and excellent development and network tools. We have an abundance of current international information sharing and technical, editorial and business-oriented topics. We lack in no way for knowledge of what is right, and my experience is that most IT workers believe in the same sense of the 'right way' to do what we do each day. Many willingly share extensively on what they think is wrong in their workplace and in the industry. Sometimes they even share ideas for solutions, what needs to be done.

What we lack is action.

If we already know what needs to be done, then what we need is deeds and behavior. We say "design first," but begin coding the first day with any design forethought at all (even the process-light XP gives design effort 20 minutes). We say complain about things, but often don't bring suggestions. Even if we do bring solution options, we don't take initiative or give effort to implement them ourselves.

So we don't like the SLDC we have, do we research options and give supporting information in the language of management (more efficient, cost-effective, higher-quality)? So we don't like the specs we are given, do we provide specific feedback to the author? Don't like the tasks we are given, so we do them exceptionally so as to earn the right to ask for something different?

For all the talk about management's shortcomings, other team's shortcomings, the company's shortcomings, our tool's and technology's shortcomings, I rarely see someone who feels passionately about specific issues working diligently to make a difference. It sounds abhorrently trite, but I mean it with all seriousness, "talk is cheap." It is easy. It costs us nothing. And often we feel better, for a moment, thinking that everything would be better if someone else did something about it. As I recently read, "Be the change you want to see."

As a manager, I feel I am asked to lay down the very position I have been given. Lay down my identity, income, and influence for the sake of the cause I believe in. Warren gave the example of Moses and his shepherds staff. The staff was a symbol of identity (shepherd's staff), income (that is what he used to tend the sheep and make his money), and influence (the staff itself was used to pull or push the sheep by the hook or the crook). The story from The Bible is that God told Moses to lay down his staff. When Moses did, it turned into a snake. God made it come alive. If I lay down my position, put myself second, perhaps my purpose will truly come alive as well.

Warren said that "prominence does not equal significance." We make a difference, are significant as leaders, no matter what position we hold (or don't hold). He also noted that the key aspects of the character of a leader are courage, endurance, and optimism. It takes these three character traits to make a difference day in and day out.

Finally, Warren added that the directive Jesus gave the disciples when going into towns to share the message was that they were to "find the man of peace." The man of peace was someone 1) open and 2) influential. This person didn't even have to believe the same as the disciples. This idea came as new to me and caused me to rethink how I work with others to bring about the change I believe needs to occur. These people don't need to see things the way I do. They just need to be open. And, for the sake of the cause, I need to invest time with open people who are influential. What I need to move away from is spending excessive time with those who already see things the way I do and who are not influential in bringing these changes about.

Although it seems a somewhat cold and calculated way of spending time and connecting with others at work, perhaps the uninfluential person who sees things the way I do would be happy with the end result of positive change in the workplace? Then, instead of jawwing about all the shortcomings we see, we could talk about how good it is to see genuine positive changes occuring in our workplace. And our job as leaders, though Human Resources didn't quite capture it, is to be doers, contributing catalysts of change with courage, endurance and optimism - good stewards of our influence and authority.

The Leader's State of Mind

Notes from The Leadership Summit 2oo5:

Session 1: The Leader's State of Mind, Bill Hybels
What precedes vision? For Bill Hybel's, it is what he called a "holy discontent," some issue or cause we can't stand to see left in its current state. This "furnace of frustration" becomes part of our purpose. Along the way to resolving this issue, a leader casts vision for others, builds a team, inspires and developers others, leads change, and intercepts intropy.

A key point of the session was pessimism vs. faith-based optimism. As bad as the current situation might be, leaders cannot let hope die. For me, there are correlations between what his points and my preious post.

Hybels also said several specific items that struck me. One, the cause can't afford my pride. To me, this means I need to not get in the way with what I think is best if the group conscious doesn't think so, or differs somewhat. Secondly, I don't need everything to be my idea. I didn't realize this was why I wasn't also happy for someone else when they came up with a clever idea, or made headway with an idea I had thought of (whether I told anyone or not) previously. Another reminder was to "engage team members more deeply." Even the term "deeply" made me reflect that these are people on my team, not simply task completers. Hybels also warned against grandstanding and "turf protection," two areas I know I have to watch myself.

The biggest impact from this session for me was understanding that my frustrations with specific situations at work are the very spark for leading change. Don't ignore them, don't medicate them away. Let them drive change, all while walking the fine line of staying hopeful about the eventual outcome.

Welcoming Reality: The Furious Indifference to Our Cause

For all my talk, I weekly come back to the question "So how do we put this into effect here where I work?" It is not uncommon for those in IT to rarely see the ideal solution, method or process actually put into practice.

Recently I've seen the confluence of, at first glance, unrelated items. When seen holistically, though, these items point to what I feel is at the heart of leading change in the workplace.

You Need to Fight, but Fight Right

"A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine." - G.K. Chesterton

In business terms, a leader is surrounded by all the reasons things don't change in their workplace. If he is to succeed in making a difference, he needs to combine a strong desire to keep his job and favor with his boss and colleagues with a strange carelessness about being fired. He must not merely worry about keeping his job and what those in influential positions think of him, for then he will be a coward, fearful, and he will not make a difference. He must not merely wait to be fired - saying things and taking actions that communicate not caring about being fired or about what his boss or those in influential positions think of him, for then he will be fired and he will not make a difference. He must seek to make a difference in a spirit of furious indifference to whether he actually succeeds in creating change.

First, we must decide that we're going to fight to make a difference. This is the "strong desire for living." Making a difference takes effort, commitment, determination, and often much more physically and emotionally exhausting than just accepting a substandard environment.

Second, we realize and accept that making a difference is a desire, not a goal. Desires are what we strive for, goals are what we can actually achieve. Often, people and circumstances get in the way of what we hope to achieve. If they get in the way of goals, we can become frustrated, angry, resentful. With desires, it is easier to accept failing to attain the end result in its entirety - not getting closure. This helps one to keep from reacting. Instead, they respond. The focus is on the action(s) or logical argument(s) in question positions being discussed, not the people themselves having the dialog.

Third, we find a way to put ourselves second to the cause and the possible consequences of advocating the cause. This is the "strange carelessness about dying." We stop looking out for "#1" - ourselves, as paramount. I haven't found a way to be effective in making a difference when I am thinking of myself first because I keep getting in the way. That is, while trying to convince someone of my point, fear and doubt keep me thinking in the back of my mind, "What if they think this is a truly bad idea? If they did, would they communicate that to my boss? What then would he think of me?" At times, I become competitive. I approach discussions where a decision outcome will occur as a zero-sum game where if I don't win, I'll lose. In these cases, I must win because if I don't, I'll appear weak, foolish, less-than, that my ideas aren't sound. This emotional reaction can be especially strong in a public forum, such as meeting or an email thread with many recipients.

These three points are simple, but not easy. Making a change to the way things are done involves other people. We are interdependent in all but the smallest IT organizations. And it is our interactions and relationships with these people (and their attitudes, beliefs, understanding, motives, agendas) that are principally the challenge.

If You Want a Queen, You Have to Be a King

There's a saying in courtship that if you want a Queen, you have to be a King. This means that if we want a certain reality, we have to be the type of person deserving of that reality. We have to be a person of character if we are to expect a working environment where there is good, healthy interdependence and commonality.

Creating the unity necessary to run an effective business... Requires great personal strength and courage. No amount of technical administrative skill in laboring for the masses can make up for the lack of nobility or personal character in developing relationships.

In addition, we can see on an even deeper level that effective interdependence can only be achieved by truly independent people. It is impossible to achieve Public Victory with popular "Win/Win negotiation" techniques or "reflective listening" techniques or "creative problem-solving" techniques that focus on personality and truncate the vital character base. - pp 202, 203; The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey

The combination of these two quotes from recent reading and my concerns on how to truly create change in our IT department occurred as I reviewed a document this week. It was a going-away present for a coworker. This coworker is widely viewed as an exceptional and very well respected senior level developer in our organization. The gift was a list comprised of individual submissions from his colleagues of the positive traits they saw in him. For all his wealth of technical and intellectual talent, by far the most common items in the list were "patience", "persistence", "friendly", "helpful", "giving." After working alongside him for a year, I had been mistaking the dominant reason he was so effective. It was because of his character, who he is. He was a great worker because he was a great person.

To be change agents, we need to commit to the cause, let ourselves be second, hold on to what we want with open hands, and have the kind of character which nourishes good relationships (and effectiveness) with our coworkers.

The Architecture and Technology Council

Upon review, I found a fair number of our software projects over the last year came in late, over budget or failed for reasons that attention to architecture could have prevented. We have been unable until recently to get approval for Architects as a position. Even now, we only have one and he is on the smallest development team and so has limited sphere of influence.

So, how to address this gap? Build an Architecture and Technology Council. This council will have one representative from each of our development teams. I can see several benefits to having this council.

Culture: the existence alone of a council brings attention, discussion and, likely, validation that architecture and technology is of significant importance to the success of our projects. More dialogs will open up between technical, project and business teams. The business will see a significant expression of concern for IT's goal for effectiveness and adding value. Project stakeholders and key players might pause to consider if they are taking into consideration concerns published by this council whose focus is project success.

People: the mere existence of a council raises the bar. Council members are acting on the belief that they can make a difference, that we can be change agents. Other IT workers see an example of leadership that is difficult to write off as positional, political or purely based on length of service because these members are selected by their peers. The council is encouraging because shows an avenue of personal and career growth where the technical worker doesn't have to give up their technical role for a management role.

Process: we begin finding a way to address the issues we all agree are issues. The existence of the council gives a moment to confront our classic mistakes, examine our processes and review opportunities for best practices.

The road ahead is not that clear to me at this moment. I think the Council should regularly go through a lessons-learned dissection of a failed or flawed project from the past. I think we should come up with a suggestion for a technology and architecture road map for our organization that addresses their strategy (platform, tools, languages, architecture). From a process view, we should determine where and how checks are executed to prevent IT from doing something to repeat a mistake when we have learned the lesson. These process checks should also keep us from diverging from the road map.

Moving IT from Victim to Visionary Advisor and Vehicle for Progress

Two consistent patterns I've seen in IT shops are:
1) Being order takers, rarely bringing innovative solutions to the business and often unaware of what their problems are unless told
2) Feeling like victims, unable to do what we feel is best due to lack of resources (time, people, or money).

How do we move from victim to visionary adviser and a vehicle for progress towards supporting and empowering the business' strategy?

For my current situation, I'm going to do a cost-benefit analysis to show how a content-management solution should save the time of at least five people, as well as get us off the hook for guaranteeing quality on a business process we can't control. From there, I'm requesting my team members to give me a list of the the trouble-spots as they see them and go from there.

Knowing that You Don't Know

Although the matrix is used for other purposes, the Known-Unknown matrix in this article from Intelligent Enterprise has been useful to me for many purposes.

Most recently, I'm trying to see what fits in which quadrants as we try to migrate from a third-party mission-critical application to a custom-developer in-house application on a widely-adopted and open platform.

The next step I'd like information on is "How do move forward when you know that you don't know all the issues?"

The Five Core Metrics of the Software Development Process

I did some searching on the internet, and went through the chapter on Measurement in my well-worn Rapid Development, but still didn't have a small starter list of metrics for our software development efforts at work. What I found was Five Core Metrics: The Intelligence Behind Successful Software Management, and it has been great. The authors' five core metrics are size, productivity, time, effort, and reliability.

"We can represent any kind of work activity by a statement such as the following:

People, working at some level of productivity, produce a quantity of function or a work product at a level of reliability by the expenditure of effort over a time interval."

Pair Programming Benefits

We are taking a crack at Pair Programming to see if we can get some of the same Pair Programming Benefits that I've seen reported.

Interestingly, most of the developers are excited about it. Personally, I see the increased motivation and energy alone as a valuable intangible.

Personality Types and Effectiveness

A good number of employees here, including myself, have just completed training given by Management By Strengths. Very enlightening.

I have yet to hear what employees are to do who do not have the dominant personality type, but want their ideas heard. The coaching from MBS was to 'talk the language' of the recipient's personality type. It would seem, though, that those with the same personality type as their manager have a natural advantage over those who do not. If a manager is a dominant type, prefers face-to-face, results-orientated communication, he may likely not give equal credence to input from those preferring email, or unassuming presentation of ideas, groupthink.