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 grigi by Eric Perrone

Why didn’t I get it?

Marc had a problem that he needed solving for himself, and he was obstinate about it, while I already had solved that thing for myself. Or so I thought…

We started building, and me not being that interested in the product helped. I kept asking: what is the Minimum Viable Product? What do we need to do to go into production, at least to start using it for ourselves? When can we invite others? How could we generate revenue out of it?

While we were building together, the idea for the product already started to shift. Even though neither of us could really use it yet. Just by looking at the things’ user interface, I’d say to Marc: “If I were to work with it, this-and-this would take me too much time (and turn me away)”, and then we’d have a discussion and things change.

Eventually, when we reached the point that we could deploy it in such a way that we could both use it, I started using it too.

And then I got it… I thought my needs were already covered by what I was using, but Marc’s idea was just slightly better than what I was using already. And that leads me to a puzzle: many potential users will have the same idea as me: they already have a solution that works for them, so they are not going to try this new thing out… How do you get someone who’s already got a solution to try out something new that might work even better?

Dancing Peacock by Hamed Saber

Here’s why:

As a writer, I want photos to go with my blog entry, so that it looks appealing for readers and inspires me to write more.

Brickpit Ring Walk Bicentenial Park by Louise Docker

As a presenter, I want photos to go with my slide, so the slides have metaphors that make people think, and my presentations look well prepared.

For these two stories we might not have bothered writing a web application – we could use the regular flickr search. However:

As a writer or presenter, I want to easily credit the photographer so that I can fulfill the obligations that go with the license and give viewers the opportunity to see more of their work.

I used to have Super Human Powers by Esparta Palma

We found that finding photos to go with a presentation was easy enough, but collecting the credits and then adding an attribution to the photo in a blog entry or the end of a presentation) often turned out to be a lot of clicks, which meant that we would not add photos to presentations as often as we like…

How does it work?

Photo Suggest queries Flickr and searches for photos with a liberal license (see the about page for a short list) sorted by interestingness. If you click on the link below an image, it takes you to the details page that shows the full credits, license and description together with the image. The reason we called it ’suggest’ is that when you type a keyword, the results are often not what you’d expect, but can more often than not make an interesting contribution to your text.

How did we get here?

With QWAN we try to apply lean and agile principles to everything we do, so we reflect at our ways of working continuously, identify things that add value, and do more of them, as well as things that are wasteful and eliminate them. We started to give more and more presentations to get the word out – we love experiential sessions over anything else, but they do not get us into more traditional conferences. Styles like Presentation Zen led us to do more with images.

Presentations with attractive imagery inspire me more when I do a presentation and they seem to energize the audience as well, so it becomes easier to add experiential elements (small exercises, questions) to a presentation.

Marc Evers and I have been thinking about how to improve our presentations as well as the way we produce them for a while. This led to a bunch of wild ideas, which we used as stories for the new new new! product development game – participants have to plan a ‘presentation 3.0′ project.

With Lasse Koskela I ran a Scrapheap Challenge at XP2009 – participants have to write a working application in half an hour. For that we needed exercises. Some stories from the game seemed well suited, so I did a small experiment – in half an hour I got quite far. Then I called Marc and asked him if he wanted to help me finish it into a working application. We had noticed we were losing some of our “superhuman powers” , so Marc suggested to “start from production”, which meant I talked him through the app while we brought it into version control and production, before adding more features & polish.

From experiment to production took half a day. After a day it was usable enough (but was missing the finish such as about page and stylesheet) for us for blog entries and presentations. When we demoed it during xp2009 a few participants jotted down the url, which encouraged us to polish and publish it.

What Can We Do With Flickr? by Alan Levine

We hope you enjoy it! Your feedback is welcome.

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).

1 New Information

We proudly presented QWAN = Quality Without A Name

We started handing out these rubber ducks at CITCON Amsterdam, for those cases when we are not around to pair (program, brainstorm, reflect, be innovative) with. Talking out loud helps, and ‘rubber ducking’ is a well known technique for this (e.g. Kathy Sierra writes that talking to pets works even better. We came across it the first time in the Pragmatic Programmer ). We chose QWAN as a name, because we are still inspired by Christopher Alexander’s early work on patterns (Timeless Way Of Building) most notably. QWAN is a label for stuff done by Rob Westgeest, Marc Evers and yours truly, often in co-operation with others.

QWAN co-created a bunch of new courses and workshops in 2008: eXperience Refactoring (also with Octos’ Emmanuel Gaillot), Unit Testing Masterclass, responsibility driven design with mock objects, dirty jobs (with Tjakko Kleinhuis), pimp my retrospective (with Topic’s Nicole Belilos), political games (with Emmanuel Gaillot), story testing with Rspec, and a revamped rightsizing your unit tests (and then some that I forgot. This collaboration seems productive, many more than last year it seems. We supported conferences in one form or another, e.g. by sponsoring, as co-organizers or ‘just’ running a session: CITCON Amsterdam, several Agile Opens, XP Days Benelux and London, ESSAP summerschool, Agile2009, AgileHolland.

2 Appreciations

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in our courses, conferences and workshops. Your enthusiasm and feedback helps us to improve and, not least, have fun in our jobs. Everybody who provided encouraging feedback when we published our brochure earlier this year. Especially Nynke Fokma, Becky Winant and other keys for giving detailed suggestions for improvement. We’ve had several great customers (you know who you are), who created amazing conditions for us to focus on our work. Thank you!

3 Complaints with recommendations

We’ve made some progress in supporting ourselves with a Customer Relationship Management system. There are still some improvements that would make our work easier (usability) and that of our customers (sign-up and notification of new courses). (Marc wishes for a more sustainable pace. I’m careful what I wish for – a more sustainable pace would be nice, but I’m also quite happy with our productivity, passion and income at the moment)

4 Puzzles

We made progress in selling open enrollment courses, and are still puzzling on better ways of selling those (as well as making it easier on our customers to plan and buy participation). The context for courses seems to be shifting at the moment – working more effectively has value, but many large corporations have the knee-jerk reaction of putting all training on hold when sales slow. At these corporations people have little time for training when things are good – too busy, and no budget for training when things are bad. Luckily we also have customers with a long term perspective, who invest in training, education and hiring continuously.

5 Hopes and wishes

We hope the ‘interesting’ economy will mark the breakthrough of lean and agile ways of working in more places. We hope to carry out more integrated on-site coaching … With integrated we mean doing whatever works best in a given context : a whole systems approach using combinations of lean, scrum, extreme programming with ’soft’ skills inspired by Satir and systems thinking.

We wish you a healthy, fun and prosperous 2009, and look forward to collaborating with many of you.

(meta-appreciation: thanks to Marc for coming up with the idea for a Temperature Reading, and giving feedback while listening to the items while writing them. Thanks to Marc & Maroesja’s kids Maris, Marden and Marijn for providing the necessary distractions )

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

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. ).

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

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.

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.

So, this is the new 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 !

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:

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…).