me.andering – Willem van den Ende

I’ve upgraded wordpress (the software that runs me.andering). Still not sure why – the nice tag cloud display (ultimate tag warrior) is probably going to disappear for a while… WordPress seems to eat its’ young in a way, by adding tag support as part of the basic package. I’m still fiddling with the theme, so you may see some changes now and then…

Main reason to upgrade: I find it best to keep up to date, to keep the spammers out… As of recently, it has become easier to upgrade wordpress, by checking a stable branch out with subversion.

It is also a good excuse to try a new theme. Let me know what you think!

Blogging, it’s not just for (US) Americans anymore

“Originally orange-white-blue, the Dutch flag first appeared in the 17th century as a symbol of the resistance to Spanish rule.” The Dutch flag – Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The next eXperience Agile training is December 12, 13 and 14 near Eindhoven. We’ve created an e-mail newsletter to keep everyone interested more in the loop on upcoming agile courses and conferences. The first edition is about XP days Benelux and London – enjoy XP Days – register while you still can…

Yesterday saw the trial run of People vs Process: Cultural Patterns of Software Organisations. We had a lively session with eleven active and critical (in a good sense) participants. We got useful feedback for the next rounds, and a solution for a puzzle we couldn’t solve before: an example organization with a congruent culture.

congruent? by Alexander Aden

As Nynke Fokma puts it:

“Congruent culture: starship enterprise -> when going somewhere, we can go where no one has gone before, we can carry anything and we can beam ourselves anywhere, but this is all science fiction, or is it”

As Jerry Weinberg describes it:

“Everyone is involved in improving everything all the time.”

So far we had come up with Toyota as a possibility. However, I’m a bit wary of using Toyota as an example – the risk of a Toyota cargo cult in IT is slightly too big to use it all the time. Searching around, you can find gems like Two Faced Toyota :

“Meanwhile, Toyota’s playing footsie with federal regulations. Their Texas-built pickup hits dealer showrooms in February– at the same time other manufacturers are beginning to introduce some of their 2008 models. But Toyota is adamant the new Tundra is an ’07. That’s because the U.S. government is changing the way they calculate the fuel mileage ratings for ‘08 model year pickups. [..]

As you can imagine, Toyota’s heavy emphasis on their new gas-guzzling leviathan hasn’t gone unnoticed by auto-oriented environmentalists. In fact, environmental groups are finally facing reality: their automotive eco-darling is (gasp!) nothing more than a business. A business that conforms to all CAFE regulations, of course, but will do whatever it takes to make a profit. “

Porsche came up as a possible alternative, now the most profitable car maker. I read about it in the financial times, and should have kept a clipping. They say so themselves in the Porsche Principle, and this:

“On the labour market, because to secure our long-term success we don’t eliminate jobs, we secure and create them. On the business base issue, because we are committed to Germany and are a constant reminder to others that one can succeed here too. “

Sounds good, but whenever I see one of their gaz-guzzling high speed SUV’s pass by, I don’t know. Not bad for a car maker, and very effective and efficient. But still a car maker.

A participant suggested Semco. Marc and I went… Duh! We knew about that one, but somehow it didn’t come up during the preparation. Semco is a federated business, operating out of Brasil. It’s ceo Ricardo Semler wrote about it in the Seven Day Weekend :

“At the risk of offering a description, Semco is a federation of businesses with a minimum common denominator. What I mean is we are not monolithic, yet there are common themes and threads uniting us. All our business units are highly engineered, premium providers and market leaders in their niches. We haven’t ventured into any of them by chance.”

From their values page:

10 – Have the humility to recognize our errors and understanding that we can always improve.

Sounds close enough.

So, now we’re still looking for examples of a congruent culture example in IT or electronics. Or something to dispell our happy feeling about Semco. Anyone?

Preparations for the trial run of People vs Process: Cultural Patterns of Software Organisations this Wednesday are starting to wind down. The presentation, exercises and stories we want to do are virtually done. Marc uses cultural patterns to describe some common failure modes when starting with an agile way of working : Agile choreographies in the culture space:

Most of the time, transitioning to an agile approach means going from a Variable or Routine culture to a Steering culture.

Practices like daily stand-up meetings, short iterations, frequent releases, iteration retrospectives, test driven development, continuous integration, big visible charts, stop the production line mentality all help improve the visibility and stability of the software development system.

These are all indicators for a steering culture.

The transitioning process itself often escapes the attention of the unwary. That can result in an oblivious or variable transformation process, which in turn can result in one of the failure modes Marc mentions. A heroic (variable) or unconscious transformation can result in reduced performance, that you often won’t be able to notice… Or you’ll get lots of ‘resistance’ and think ‘how did that happen?’

The process of transformation itself can be done in a steering way, for instance by using a change backlog. It helps if one knows, for instance by experience, where to look. Because we don’t have a stable process yet, we have to rely on observation. To know what to observe, we can rely on experience. Either our own, as we go along, or re-using past experiences, e.g. from an experienced mentor/coach who knows where to look.

Using past experiences in various contexts to choose practices that apply in a new context, and doing risk analysis combined with scenario planning (elaborate, or back-of-the-envelope, depending on the complexity of the environment) already gives the change effort itself some characteristics of an anticipating culture.

For risk analysis, some of the failure modes Marc mentions are valuable input. Up-front identification and analysis of risks, their likelihood and mitigation strategies can be done in a simple ‘agile’ fashion as well – get the people involved in a room around a flip chart and brainstorm away for an hour or so. Then keep the flip chart on the wall, and re-visit it every iteration or two. As in all things ‘agile’ we do an ongoing assessment – of risks materializing, as well as potential new risks…

Otherwise, the result of an oblivious or variable transformation process might be, ‘that agile method does not work, let’s try to surf to the next wave…’

Photo Credits:

1. Smoking, Picking Nose and Driving by Mike “Dakinewavamon” Kline
2. Pink Swirl by tanakawho

I read in several places that systems thinkers tend to keep their work to themselves, and that stories work best to get more people to do it.

So, here is a story with a diagram of effects – want more traffic? .

Context: Last week, Marc Evers and I were working on a quote for a community website, based on a request for proposal we got. We made the diagram to clarify our interpretations about the clients ‘business’ – a not for profit foundation supporting a community of practice.

I’m involved in a number of websites, e.g. to support my business, conferences and as of recently wyrd web – a budding company to support more of that. The diagram helped me understand this client, and some of my other contexts involving a community and its’ website(s) – e.g. systems administrators don’t always see why uptime and responsiveness provides business value to a community of practice (which if done well supports a thriving eco-system).

We decided to send the diagram to the client, and then I posted it. The diagram itself is isomorphic with part of its message: quality content drives traffic, which in turn drives quality content. The post attracted a nice comment, which helps me to write more about this topic .

We’ll see in the coming weeks whether this diagram helped the clients’ contact person in sharing our understanding of an effective website’s value with the not-for profit’s board.

I’m enjoying the term mythodology – collecting fieldstones for an article, I’m re-reading “Weinberg on Writing – the fieldstone method”

Doing an internet search for mythodology, I found Marco Abis named his website mythodology. As he says on mythodology:

Towards the end of 2005 I found it in the book “Weinberg On Writing” in relation to the (in)famous writer’s block (but interestingly the quote is from Tom Gilb):

‘Writer’s block is not a disorder in you, the writer. It’s a deficiency in your writing methods-the mythology you’ve swallowed about how works get written-what my friend and sometime coauthor Tom Gilb calls your “mythodology.” Fieldstone writers, freed of this mythodology, simply do not experience writer’s block.’

[..]Agile methods are the next (current?) step but are still only scraping the surface of the problem having myths themselves which get in the way of the true Quality.

Hear hear!

As Agile ‘methods’ (I’m still / more and more against methods ) become mainstream oversimplification becomes rampant, as was to be expected.

As a programmer told me:

One programmer is fanatical about code quality, he is especially strong against duplication. He is also the one who maintains an install program for our servers, and one for development workstations. They should be quite similar in operation – however they are two different scripts, one was once a copy from the other, but they have now diverged. This means defects have to be repaired twice, and the scripts are a complicated mess that only that programmer can maintain, with a lot of effort.

When I asked him “why did you duplicate these scripts” he said: “The what? oh yes, that is not a program. That is something I just put together so we can install our program. It’s not a program, it’s just a script… “

For some reason this second programmer sees the install script as a
non-program, so the same routine that applies to programs, does not apply to ‘scripts’, therefore duplication is not a ‘problem’ – he can not see it as a problem, even when the first programmer asks him about it.

The second Programmer has an oblivious pattern for one part of the project where he may apply a routine or steering pattern to other parts.
The first Programmer seems to be aiming for a congruent culture (albeit, so far a culture of one person only, a micro-culture so to say):

Congruent culture – everyone is involved in improving everything all the time; it is a culture of ongoing reflection and improvement.

So in that view

Scripts are programs too

And if there is a problem (defects caused by duplication in this case), you stop, work on the problem, find out what caused it and what we can do to prevent it from happening again. And, last but not least, we do this with the whole team, so everybody can step away from their micro-culture.

In a way, a congruent pattern makes it irrelevant whether something is a program or not…. if something gets in the way, we do something about it.

(This post is part of a series on cultural patterns of organisations. Marc Evers and I are hosting a trial workshop next week, so we’ll be posting some more stories and pattern descriptions as we are working on our introductory presentation this week).

Credits:

(photos under a creative commons 2.0 ‘by’ license)

“Oblivious” by James Craig (picture of a standing duck oblivious of a waterfall, because it faces the other way)

“Oblivious” by Emily Nieves (picture of a lady in the water with her eyes closed)

Tomorrow and the day after sees Agile Open California come to life. With a strong theme “Sustainable Agility: Thriving in the Mainstream” , and a good number and variety of participants, it looks like an interesting addition to earlier Agile Opens in Europe and Agile Open Northwest.

While procrastinating on the next post, Nynke jumped ahead with scenario planning and Marc continues with his routine on routines – we follow our routines (except when we panic) on what happens when a routine culture breaks down because of a foreign element. I could have anticipated that…

So this episode was supposed to be on how cultural patterns work on different levels, sort of like fractals, with stories. The first story already got quite more elaborate then I planned (and I wanted at least two in for the first story…), and I have no pictures for it! I’ll panic (following Marc’s lead ) and leave the stories for (maybe) tomorrow.

About my routine (when in panic, why not make a blog entry about blogging and me, which is what blogs are supposed to be about, no? )

My current process for posting a blog entry, is that I collect fieldstones, and when I feel one is strong enough, I go out and hunt for pictures. Because the feedback (steering…) on some posts suggested that posts with pictures and/or posts that are well prepared attract more readers as well as more comments (hint: I like comments)… So adding pictures became a routine… And in that routine, I have to follow the rules: post only with pictures…

To keep up with Marc and Nynke, I have broken that routine