Thursday, May 31, 2007

Do you have your Sticky Buddy?

It came up in the discussion thread on my Kanban in Action post, that a white board was all very well but how did we deal with remote working? I answered that we use Team Foundation Server to track all work items and that we keep the white board in sync with the electronic tracking system.

Well it turns out that keep them in sync is problematic especially when people are working from home or otherwise remotely. Darren Davis has instituted a “sticky buddy” scheme where people who are WFH for the day, have to designate a in-office buddy who will update the white board for them and keep it in sync with the electronic tracking system.

I came in this morning to see this huge reminder to the team that we take sticky buddies seriously - or more importantly we take the integrity of the data on the white board seriously. They all got to see this reminder at the 9.45am standup meeting today.

It’s a good example of how we are combining, agility, collaborative working, end-to-end tracking, formal reporting and remote and multi-site working all together to deliver a better more lean solution for sustaining work. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering

Thursday, May 24, 2007

The Free T-Shirt

A friend of mine has been teasing me that I’m always wearing free clothing to work. She suggests that this is how I manage to afford the mortgage on my home in Seattle - I have to wear free clothing like this one I’m wearing today, the 2007 SEPG conference shirt.

Or this VersionOne (aren’t they just the coolest guys in our community?) Agile 2006 rugby shirt that I’m wearing while teaching a workshop on Coad domain modeling at Corbis this past winter.

in order to save money. I’m too cheap to buy my own clothes, or so she argues.

What my friend fails to appreciate is the tribal affiliation I feel and how these shirts symbolize and communicate that. It’s not that they’re free. I’m paid well enough that I can afford to buy shirts if I wanted to. But I love to wear my SEPG and Agile conference shirts and a whole bunch of others that communicate my passion for and affiliation to the software engineering community. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Software+Engineering, Agile

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Where’s the Lemon ?

Garrett Conaty joined my team this week. Recently, we’ve really been hiring some first rate people and Garrett is just the latest one. Garrett and I worked together in 1999 in Ireland at a subsidiary of the telephone company over there that was called Trinity Commerce and later Ebeon.com.

One day I remember trying to explain to the CEO how hard it was to hire good software developers and what kind of a difference a good one could really make. I tried to describe how a typical interview process worked and how my approach to interviewing was designed to make a difference. I used a football (soccer) analogy. I said, imagine you are the boss of a football team and we need to hire a new striker. So we work with a couple of agents and they each bring along a candidate. We stand here on the 2nd floor at the window and we tell the candidate to go kick a ball around the parking lot for 10 minutes. We observe from the window and based on this observation we will select a winner. Agent (1) provides a candidate who will cost us 100,000 in signing fees while agent (2) provides an alternative who will cost us 10,000,000 in signing fees. Do you think you could tell a visible difference between the performance of player 1 from player 2 based on observing them kicking the ball around the parking lot for 10 minutes? Well no, probably not! So why is player 2 worth 100x more than player 1? I don’t know! Well do you think you will win the league with player 1? and is winning the league worth  a 10 million investment?

And so it is with software developers. A 1 hour interview where we walk-through a resume of past positions and ask a few questions about APIs and languages and maybe a design pattern or two, is the equivalent of kicking the ball around the parking lot for 10 minutes. You can’t tell the stars from the lemons!

Garrett was good enough to point me today at this admittedly long piece from Reg Braithwaite on the whole lemon phenomena and why its all too likely your software engineering org and enterprise architecture is loaded with them. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Software+Engineering, Garrett+Conaty, Reg+Braithwaite

Sunday, May 20, 2007

APLN - Seattle Downtown

While there has been a Seattle APLN chapter for a while, it meets in Redmond, WA and for many of us who work in Downtown Seattle, the commute out to the meetings is inconvenient. So that people who live and work on the west-side can participate in the APLN, we’ve decided to form a Seattle Downtown Chapter. We plan to meet the first Monday of each month, from 5:30pm - 7:30pm at Avanade Inc.‘s Seattle office:

2211 Elliott Avenue
Seattle, WA, USA 98121
 
The first meeting will be June 4th from 5:30pm - 7:30pm:

People should enter through the main entrance (2211 Elliott Ave). The conference room will be accessible from the main lobby off the main entrance. The main door will likely be locked after 5pm. Dragos Dumitriu will be welcoming people up to 5:30pm. After that, people should call either Dragos (425-260-9283) or David Socha (206-418-8201) to be let in.
 
There is no free parking, but there is plenty of paid parking along Elliot Avenue before and after the Avanade building.

The agenda for the first meeting will be to figure out what the group wants to do, its goals, and format for future meetings. I look forward to meeting some of you there. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, APLN, Avanade

Monday, May 07, 2007

Heroes #2: Alex Ferguson

So it seems that Manchester United won the English League soccer title over the weekend. It’s timely then that I’d planned my second post on heroes (my first actual one on managers) to be about Alex Ferguson. [Unlike my fellow Singapore project colleague Stephen Palmer, I’m not a United fan but I am a huge admirer of their team coach.]

Back in 1986/87 I was working as a games developer for Ocean Software and their joint venture U.S. Gold. Ocean were based in Manchester, England. I mostly worked from home, flying or driving to Manchester perhaps one week per month. Alex Ferguson had just taken over as the manager of Manchester United, following his short spell as manager of the Scottish international side that played in the 1986 World Cup Finals. Ferguson was already an accomplished manager. He’d taken unfashionable Aberdeen to glory in European tournaments and won the Scottish League and other titles, as well as managing the national team. In some respects he didn’t have much else to prove.

He was still living in Glasgow and commuting to Manchester by air. Presumably, coming home after the game on a Saturday and flying back on a Monday or Tuesday morning for team training and the following week’s game. The staff of British Airways treated him like royalty. He was invisible. They’d keep a seat in the front row of the BAe1-11 jet (Americans can think MD-80) and “Fergie” would enter the plane and take his seat just before they closed the doors to push back and taxi.

So why is Ferguson one of my management heroes? Well first off there is longevity. In 21 years he has had only one job and he’s been hugely successful at it. He’s had this one job in a field which is not known for the longevity of management careers. This is partly a tribute to Ferguson himself and partly a tribute to his hiring manager - Martin Edwards, the Chairman of Manchester United at the time. Longevity and loyalty in management careers both by the individual and their management are to be admired.

The next aspect of Ferguson’s career again is a tribute to the patience of Martin Edwards. After more than 3 years without winning a trophy, the fans wanted a new face on the coach’s bench. But Edwards stuck by Ferguson telling people they had the right man for the job. And they did.

Another reason I admire Ferguson is that he manages prima-donnas all the time. The staff on his pay roll earn huge salaries - millions - at a very young age. Ferguson has the mental toughness to deal with this and to keep his players under control and focused.

Ferguson is also known for his success at bringing up youth players and grooming them for stardom and places in the regular 1st team. He’s paid nothing to acquire talent like David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Gary and Phil Neville and Nicky Butt. A true manager knows how to grow and nurture talent and Ferguson has repeatedly shown this ability over the years.

But the single most important reason I admire Ferguson is his ability to focus and make tough decisions about team selection and players. Often a player can be at the height of his fame and hugely popular with the fans, but Ferguson will see in training that the player has past his best. Perhaps running slower, perhaps lower in fitness or strength, or losing skill and accuracy due to lack of fitness, or perhaps issues off the field of play. Ferguson has never shied away from an unpopular decision if he felt it was right for the team’s long term performance. He’s stayed focus on keeping Manchester United a winning team, and after 21 years he’s still doing it.

So, management hero #1, Sir Alex Ferguson. Technorati tag: Management, Alex+Ferguson, David+Anderson, Stephen+Palmer