You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

While I was on holiday, Marc started creating a new product from scratch. He’d been walking around with a problem he wanted to solve and couldn’t find anything that he liked. Marc also wanted to try out the Scala programming language, to see if it would be worth using, and thought nothing helps you focus more than building an actual product.

I didn’t get it. But I gave Marc a hand anyway, because we had previously decided that QWAN values:

supporting someone who has a passion over discussing the business case at length

Variazione in scala di grigiVariazione in scala di grigi by Eric Perrone

Why didn’t I get it?

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Photo Suggest – photos to go with your blog entry or slide

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

We proudly announce Photo Suggest, a web application that helps you find photos with liberal licenses to go with your blog entry or slide Check it out.

Dancing Peacock

Dancing Peacock by Hamed Saber

Here’s why:

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A QWAN year :)

Friday, December 19th, 2008

I wrote a teaser post about iterative and incremental rebranding of eXperience Agile in September… It’s been four months and almost as many newsletters since then :) . So time to de-tease the blog…

Marc suggested to do part of the upcoming newsletter as a Temperature Reading, so besides getting some information, our readers also learn a technique, and it helps us structuring our own reflection over the past year. It’s been about a year since Marc, Rob and yours truly sat together after xp days london to discuss closer collaboration with courses and coaching (but still as loosely coupled as possible, because we like our independence).

A Temperature Reading has five questions, the order of which you can vary, depending on the context (see Temperature Reading for explanation and the default order, I’m going to do something different here).

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It’s over

Friday, April 4th, 2008

post it saying its’ over

This was the only ‘red’ card in the retrospective we held today at the end of another eXperience Agile :)

retrospective cards from friday

Further there was one looking ahead (‘Drink & book’ -meaning looking forward to drinks in the bar and receiving the book at the end of the course).

Personally I also loved ‘no more questions’ (I guess there will be more after a night of sleep). One thing we experimented with was shortening the iterations in Day 3′s exercises, so we would have time for a bit of questions and answers ‘open space’ style (or XP style – questions on post-its prioritized by the participants).

We had quite a number of ‘puzzles’ on Wednesday and Thursday, mainly open questions… And some red cards. Most related to traffic jams. Other cards we resolved quickly (not enough overview on the agend for the course – easily done with an extra flipchart, another one was that we had two pairs working off the same repository by accident, we still have some manual steps in installing workspaces that we do not yet know how to automate well due to the environment we are using. ).

wednesday retrospective cards

thursday retrospective cards

Seeing the green cards, and the happy, exhausted faces, there probably was quite a bit of accelerated learning going on – and that is not a coincidence.

I ‘m especially pleased to see green cards where we used to have red and yellow – dilligent work, and keep on trying to improve a few things each and every course. I don’t know what we’re going to change in the next one (we have some ideas around acceptance testing and have been experimenting), but I’m sure we are going to change some things. We, the ‘instructors’ are also part of the learning community, and I strongly believe our own learnings accelerates that of the other participants.

Therefore we hold retrospectives after every course day. Sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes the next day. Where it makes sense we ‘stop the production line’ and fix problems immediately, e.g. answer questions and gather questions for further discussion in a separate block or over lunch. In other courses this also helped us streamline exercises, the build environment etc.

As you might see in the green and yellow cards, much fun (green cards) and puzzles (yellow cards) come from the open source tools and games generously donated to the world. This includes the xp game, ruby, rspec, test/unit (included in ruby), firewatir, and of course techniques like XP, Refactoring and TDD that you can (amongst many sources) still read about on the C2 wiki and the XP mailinglist. And of course retrospectives.

I hope these happy colourful photos inspire you to experiment with retrospectives. A word of warning… besides focusing on what you can do better, don’t forget to celebrate the green cards (I have that tendency – still a bit of a perfectionist) and relax before the next round of improvments. Have a nice weekend :)

Course brochure :)

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Marc, Rob and I proudly present the first release of our courses and workshops brochure. We’ve bundled the courses and workshops we’ve developed over the last couple of years with new ones and practical information. We hope this gives you a clear overview of what we have to offer:

brochure

As with our courses, the brochure is also developed in eat-your-own-dogfood style. Work iteratetively, use small batches and feedback, for example. I’m still a bit weak on formal acceptance tests, but the main goal seems to be happening – sell more courses in more places – and have fun teaching them.

How did we do it? Marc found a printer that prints nice full-colour brochures in small batches, so we can apply feedback to each new batch. We started out by sending out the beta PDF to a handful of people, and feedback was so encouraging, that we made the first batch without all suggestions incorporated… We now have a small inventory of things to do, which we’ll process before the next print run.

I’ll bring some to the cultural patterns presentation in Houten tonight. I wasn’t sure at first whether making a brochure was worth the effort, having done some before with mixed results. So far it’s worked better than expected – the extensive descriptions and the wicked course-flow diagram Marc made come across well, and seem to make the courses much more tangible, which leads to better conversations. So all in all, making and distributing it is an enjoyable experience. Let us know what you think – your feedback is most welcome.

Systemsthinking for every day use – a tale of web site traffic

Monday, October 29th, 2007

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.


Choose life, choose a career… choose a license

Saturday, September 15th, 2007

I chose not to choose a license, apparently. I thought me.andering had a license, it must have disappeared. And I chose the right day to do so, when I went to creative commons site to choose a license, it turned out that today is Software Freedom Day, a “worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software.”

So, this is the new license:

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Netherlands License.

I chose an ‘attribution’ license, because I seem to believe that liberal sharing creates more value (and attribution tends to create more pagerank, which creates some value for me ;) ). I hope this blog helps you create value (monetary or otherwise) :) , writing on business value does not seem to go well together with a ‘non-commercial-share-alike’ license (let alone a ‘no-derivatives license’ – I wonder how that one holds up against ‘fair use’, see below).

Two points on sharing and value:

  1. Marc Evers shared this with me yesterday: Fair use worth more to economy than copyright, CCIA says (by Thomas Claburn) “The Computer and Communications Industry Association — a trade group representing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others — has issued a report that finds fair use exceptions add more than $4.5 trillion in revenue to the U.S. economy and add more value to the U.S. economy
    than copyright industries contribute. “Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion.”, said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion.”
  2. Yesterday, Hans Konstapel shared a story ( How to Destroy your Company by Implementing Packages or Outsourcing) Marc Evers responded to it, I responded to it, and got a gift in return… Graham Oakes posted a thoughtful comment that would merit a proper post – I call it “three reasons why project price depends on corporate ladder position”.

Sharing: good… Not sharing: bad . I wish you a happy Software Freedom Day !

How to destroy your corporation in 1024 easy steps

Friday, September 14th, 2007

My take on projects in ye average bigge organisation has been: the price of a project depends only on the position on the corporate ladder of the manager who starts the project. The lower the level of the manager, the cheaper the project.

Please note that delivered functionality or business value is not part of the ‘project cost’ equasion

I have often wondered about, and looked in amazement at these large projects that seem to go on forever. I believe that most projects can be done with less people in less time, and many projects are not worth doing at all.

Maybe someone at <insert large ‘consultancy’ company here> did actually invent a working perpetuum mobile…

Read what a (former) big shot in a large company writes on how this mechanism works in practice, and what it feels like to be on the receiving end. How to destroy your company by packages, outsourcing and ‘consulting’ companies (and not paying attention to your users and customers)….

“Outsourcing is a brilliant trick of the managers. The responsibility for the failing project is moved to an outside vendor. They are now the object of aggression.

The real customers don’t talk with the programmers. They talk with the managers that are talking to managers that are talking to managers. Somewhere in the chain of communication all the meaning is lost. The result is something they don’t want, the users don’t want and the customers don’t want. Last but not least the process took so long that the market has changed. They have to start all over again.

Do you now understand why we there is such a shortage in IT specialists? About 30% of IT-projects is succesful. This means that 70% of the IT-specialists are working for nothing.

My advice

Adapt what is working as long as possible.

A team of 15 people is capable of doing more than a team of 1000.

Do it yourself.

Hans describes a full circle process of what happens before a project is outsourced. I call it the “Shit” cycle I couldn’t resist making a drawing of it:

the shit cycle

I missed one phase in the process: the pre-project phase, which consists of a sales rep of <insert large ‘consultancy’ company here> taking the high-level manager to the golf course…

What I don’t know is, each time the project goes through the cycle again whether golfing is required (Hans writes about one project that cycled for ten years…).