Friday, March 31, 2006

Agile Vancouver in April

Come see me speaking at the Agile Vancouver group in Vancouver, British Columbia on April 24th. I’m going to present my “Who’s Managing Lunch” slides about Lean Project Management for the first 45 minutes followed by by “Feature Driven Development 101” slides after a brief break. It should be a fun 2 hours.

Thanks to Philippe Kruchten for inviting me. Now he owes me one - I’ll be inviting him to the Seattle Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) chapter later this year in exchange.

[Download my FDD 101 slides in PDF].

Agile Management in Japanese

My book is now (finally) available in Japanese. GANBARE NIHON! You can get it here from Amazon.co.jp. Ironic that it took this long to appear in Japan. There is such a big interest in TOC and Lean in Japan. Even more ironic is that another publisher paid someone else to translate it rather than Prentice Hall paying my wife to do it. The title of the Japanese edition is simplified to “Agile Software Management.” They didn’t tell me they were doing it. I only noticed when the royalty check arrived last week. I wish they’d asked because they could have updated my bio and some other details. I might like to have corrected a few errors and updated a few graphics too.

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Seth Sees Queues

Seth Godin has been seeing queues all over Las Vegas McCarren International Airport. He’s also been describing the capacity constrained resources and the exploitation schemes that would increase the throughput.

<!—StartFragment—>It amazed me that no one had bothered to look a the concessions at the airport. To do simple things, like change the pricing so that with tax, everything came out evenly—no need to make change. Or to change the product line up, eliminating the items that take five times as long to prepare. Never mind the more creative things, like having an employee working the line, taking orders in advance and bringing back change so that the person at the counter could work three or four times faster…

It’s amazing how we can see these things. They seem obvious and the solutions appear like common sense. Why can’t we do it when we come to work? huh? how about it? Let’s start bringing our common sense to the office, identifying the queues of work, the capacity constrained resources processing those queues and the relieving tactics that will better exploit the constrained resources, increasing overall throughput. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Seth+Godin, TOC, Lean

Scrum for Team System

Howard Van Rooijen has announced that Conchango have launched their Scrum for Team System, MSF process template for Visual Studio Team System. Conchango were the first partner I met that was working on an MSF process template. They built the first version of this on Beta 1. It’s really exciting to see it come to market.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Decoding Tribal Language

Regular readers will know that I’ve had a recurring theme on tribal aspects in the workplace since I read Ray Immelman’s Great Boss, Dead Boss. So here is another tribal installment.

Today I met with my new boss, Rick Maguire for the first time. [We’ve had a bit or a reorg recently - I’ll find out if I can blog about.] I’ve been biking in to work again. So far both days this week. I don’t leave my 1998 model Corratec team racing mountain bike lying in the parking lot - instead it lies against the back wall of my office. So Rick comes in and immediately the bike catches his eye and he says,

“So, you are a mountain biker then?”

and I reply,

“No, I’m just a guy with a mountain bike” (albeit an expensive racing model)

This made him smile. Why my reply in this fashion?

Quite simply, his first question was overtly tribal in nature even if he didn’t mean it to be. Communication is always decoded tribally first and functionally for content second. Hence, he really asked me if I was one of the mountain biking tribe. It turns out he considers himself one of the tribe and was searching for a fellow tribe member. I picked up on this and my reply communicated that I am no longer worthy of the tribe. My reply was functional - just the facts - but it equally has a tribal decoding of “No, I’m not one of your tribe.”

Why not? Anyone from the original FDD project in Singapore can attest to the fact that I was one of the mountain biking tribe. Well, no more. The last time I did any serious mountain biking was on Orcas Island in late summer of 2003. Orcas is famous for some of the best single track in the United States. I wasn’t even riding my mountain bike but rather my hybrid bike (without suspension) complete with a child seat and a 14 month old baby in the back. Earlier that summer we’d also done about 12 miles of the Mackenzie River single track trail in Oregon too. Since then I’ve been too busy being a dad. These days my bike is set up like a time trial bike with a racing gear block and a big chain ring, slick tyres and a position which has the handle bars 6” below the height of the saddle. You simply couldn’t climb mountains on it but you can cruise down 15 Ave NW at 30 miles/hour. So, no, not one of the mountain biker tribe any more - sadly. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Ray+Immelman, Tribal+Language