SPaMCAST 646 – Reduce Cost and Risk With Off-Premise Infrastructure, A Conversation with Albert Ahdoot

In the Software Process and Measurement Cast 646, Albert Ahdoot and I focus on discussing the impact of strong off-premise infrastructure on the delivery of value, the impact on the bottom line, and the mitigation of risk.

 

SPaMCAST 635 – Practical Ways to Manage, A Conversation with Johanna Rothman

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Cue the music . . . Happy Birthday, Software Process and Measurement Cast!  Today we begin year 15 with a visit from Johanna Rothman.  We talked about her THREE new books:

Practical Ways to Manage Yourself: Modern Management Made Easy, Book 1 https://amzn.to/2LXKkiQ

Practical Ways to Lead & Serve (Manage) Others: Modern Management Made Easy, Book 2 – https://amzn.to/39Viwnj 

Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization: Modern Management Made Easy, Book 3 – https://amzn.to/3qS90Z3 

We of course covered more ground.  For example about 2/3rds of the way through we talked about why the word experiment is a dirty word in most organizations. This is a longer interview, but when I grow up I want to be just like Johanna (I am serious).  Here is her bio:

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. Her most recent books are the Modern Management Made Easy series, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby) and Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver.

See all her books, blog, and other resources at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.

The Software Process and Measurement Cast is a proud media sponsor of the DevOps Online Summit. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, one of the best ways to get your message heard is to speak.  The crew at the DevOps Online Summit provides a phenomenal platform to network with fellow practitioners from all over the world. Start the journey to speaking at the DevOps Online Summit 2021 by submitting at https://bit.ly/3syp2c5

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Re-Read Saturday News 

Today we take on Chapter 7 of Great Big Agile, An OS for Agile Leaders by Jeff Dalton. In three more weeks, we will begin Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems (it is time to buy a copy).

Remember, buy a copy and read along. 

This week’s installment can be found at http://www.tomcagley.com/blog

Previous installments:

Week 1: Re-read Logistics and Front Matters – https://bit.ly/3mgz9P6 

Week 2: The API Is Broken – https://bit.ly/2JGpe7l

Week 3: Performance Circle: Leading – https://bit.ly/2K3poWy 

Week 4: Performance Circle: Providing – http://bit.ly/3mNJJN7 

Week 5: Performance Circle: Envisioning – https://bit.ly/2JEVXdt 

Week 6: Performance Circle: Crafting – https://bit.ly/3ntsX69 

Week 7: Performance Circle: Affirming – http://bit.ly/35OvFgC 

Week 8: Performance Circle: Teaming – http://bit.ly/366CYk0 

Next SPaMCAST

User Stories and Tony Timbol will take center stage. User stories are ubiquitous in agile.  Getting them right is really important. Tony gives us some ideas to move the ball forward. 

 

Software Development Organizations: Preparing for Life After COVID-19 (Part 3)

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This is part 3 of an essay based on a presentation I did as part of IFPUG’s Knowledge Cafe Webinar Series. The presentation is titled Software Development: Preparing For Life After COVID-19. I have not heard if the final version has been posted. I do have a copy of the audio which I will edit.  I will also post a PDF of the slides in the near future (email me if you like to have a copy of the slides before they are posted). 

Once we have an idea of what is important: throughput, cycle time, productivity, and delivered defects, deciding when we care about measuring becomes critical. The answer is simple on paper, focus on the product backlog, what is between “Start and Done” and what crosses the line of done (production!). That we care about these three slices of time reflects the need to focus on how the work flows. Only counting the flow of value when it is done is a recognition that, at least in software, if code isn’t in production, you have not delivered.

 

Software Development Organizations: Preparing for Life After COVID-19 (Part 2)

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This is part 2 of an essay based on a presentation I am doing Friday, June 5th at 9 EDT (sign-up: https://bit.ly/3gH0Uy5). I am presenting as part of IFPUG’s Knowledge Cafe Webinar Series. The presentation is titled Software Development: Preparing For Life After COVID-19.

Management guru Peter Drucker said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Benchmarking is a tool to identify work that should not be done or done better while continuous improvement provides a structure for improving the opportunities found in the benchmark. There are many approaches to benchmarking and I suggest combining qualitative and quantitative assessments.  The combination is critical for identifying how to improve effectiveness and efficiency. In a post-COVID-19 environment, all of us will need to answer whether how we are working is delivering tangible value in a financially sound manner. If you don’t know the answer to the effectiveness and efficiency questions leaders will be reluctant to spend money on you, let alone large scale improvement exercises. Once you know where you stand then begin to make changes using a feedback loop to know whether or not your experiments are working.

 

The Power of No

Work-in-progress, work entry and “no” are highly interrelated. Not saying no generates a cascade failure that reduces efficiency, quality, and value, while at the same time increasing cost, time-to-market, and turnover.  Any way you slice an organization not judiciously saying no is a prescription for disaster. In the essay, Why Work Entry Is Important In Agile, we discussed the serious disruptions that occur when a team can’t or won’t control the flow of work to the team.  The uncontrolled flow of work causes:

 

SPaMCAST 544 – Measuring and Predicting Performance, An Interview with Jeppe Hedaa

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SPaMCAST 544 features our interview with Jeppe Hedaa.  Mr. Hedaa and I discuss his new book, Nucleon: The Missing Formula That Measures Your IT Development Team’s Performance. Our discussion centers on the book but also touches on meritocracy and why you want top performers on a team. This is a wide-ranging interview with thought-provoking ideas as we talk about Nucleon!

Jeppe’s bio:

Jeppe Hedaa has been working with complex systems development for more than 30 years, serving the largest IT development departments. He is the CEO and owner of 7N, who is an agent for top 3% IT specialists. 7N has departments in the US, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Poland, India and Denmark. In September 2018 he published the book “Nucleon: The missing formula that measures your IT department’s performance”, where he describes how to calculate a hard number for an IT team’s performance that could best be compared to that of horsepower in a car. In the book, he also measures the factors that hold back an organization’s delivery and identifies the most impactful areas for improvement.

Our review of Nucleon: http://bit.ly/2XQvB9T

 

Nucleon by Jeppe Hedaa – A Book Review

Nucleon by Jeppe Hedaa is a short and concise book that is rich in thought-provoking ideas. To give you a sense of scope, the subtitle, “The Missing Formula That Measures Your IT Development Team’s Performance” speaks volumes. The book weighs in at 119 pages with front matter (always read the front matter), six chapters and eight pages of endnotes. I will admit that I am a sucker for grand unifying theories. I am still rooting for Stephen Hawking to posthumously pull a rabbit out of the hat (I sure hope someone is looking through Hawking’s personal papers). Mr. Hedaa, founder and CEO of 7N, developed the theory that team effectivity is a function of the sum of each person’s effectivity (the ability to be effective). Effectivity is a function of people, organizational, and complexity factors. Arguably the idea that people, organizational, and complexity factors influence effectivity is not controversial.  But, these factors can be consistently measured and then used in a deterministic manner to predict performance is controversial. Mr. Hedaa spends the six chapters of the book developing a logical argument based on experience and data for the premise that there are ways to measure the factors that matter and that knowing the answer matters to leaders that want to get the maximum value from the money they spend on software development (the broad definition that includes development, enhancement, and maintenance). The Nucleon formula is:

 

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Re-read Week 1 – Logistics and Introduction

Today we begin the re-read of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.  Not counting the endnotes, my copy has 448 pages and is comprised of an introduction, 39 chapters in five parts, and two appendices — if this were a blog the book would be approximately 41 separate entries, which is my current approach to the re-read (plus one week for a recap).  The chapters are, on average, relatively short, however, I am reticent to suggest out of the box that I will combine chapters during this re-read. Therefore, I am planning that this re-read to take 42 weeks. Kahneman’s writing, while engaging, is FULL over ideas that are useful for anyone that thinks of him or herself as a leader and change agent. As I noted last week, I will need your help calling out the parts of the book that resonates with you. If you do not have a favorite, dog-eared copy please buy a copy.  Use the links in this blog to books help to support the blog and its alter-ego, The Software Process and Measurement Cast. Buy a copy on Amazon. Now it is time to get reading!  

 

Addressing Work Entry Issues

You can ride but not all of the time!

The eight problems that cause work entry problems are diagnosable if you are willing to expend a bit of shoe leather talk with team members and stakeholders or just observe. Knowing that there is a problem is important, however, the hard part starts when you try to fix the problem or problems. Work entry problems often occur in clusters because they are a reflection of the way the organization is structured, how work is funded, methodologies and/or organizational culture. These four general categories are addressable by different types of work entry fixes.

 

Diagnosing The Top Eight Work Entry Problems

A diagnosis or patch?

The majority of work entry problems are caused by eight problems. The eight problems often occur in clusters and are a reflection of organizational culture.  Knowing that there are eight problems is useful when they can be recognized. Unless people wear their motivations on signs hung around their neck, recognition requires conversation and observation.  Hints for recognizing the top eight work entry problems are: