Ultrasist

Just out of a meeting with Ultrasist, the first Mexican company to achieve CMMI Level 5. They are actually a very progressive company definitely ahead of the average Mexican software dev company. What was actually cool is that the innovative mechanism they utilized to achieve level 5 was apply the principles of XP at design level (pair design). They didn't go about doing pair programming though or any other agile practice. However it may not take long before they start doing some adoption.

Agile Open California: day one at Northern CA

The first day at Agile Open California was quite a treat (started yesterday). For those unfamiliar with the concept of an open conference, the premise it to start with the conference with one common theme, in this case it was Agile in Changing Times, and from there the first activity of the conference after an intro by the organizers is an open invitation to all attendees (I mean, participants) to suggest any topic of interest. All topics are introduced elevator-speech style and posted in the market place together with a room and time from pre-filled post-its to avoid overlaps (this can be considered a high-level planning. Everybody then goes to the market place and initials what they are interested on. From there people gather at the set place/time to work on the topic; be it a presentation, discussion, hand-on work, game or whatever else they feel is the right thing to do. Although time is fixed people are free to continue their discussions if they wish and can move to any available space indoors or outdoors.


Elizabeth McClellan is an artist who volunteered to do drawings of the event and during the planning session. The image below is the drawing from the intro and high-level planning.

I participated at a Scaling Agile session proposed by three people (including me) and covered three aspects: scaling teams, scaling challenges at enterprise level and enterprise-enterprise scaling. Highest experience was on the first case and there was quite a bit of feedback and opinions on it such as keeping teams and meetings small, having the extra meeting such as when doing scrum of scrums, distributed training, distributed retrospectives, collocating as much as possible and being careful with overcrowding spaces. For the second case there was a bit less feedback but still good ideas and practices such as how to increase buy-in, bottom-up vs top-down approach and when to use them, etc. For the third case there was even less feedback since the case is not as common ad the other two so it ended up being more of a brainstorming session; and some ideas were the parent Co demanding the contracted Co to do agile (forcing agile… hummmm), emphasizing buy in at top level first, having devs from both companies work collocated.

The next session was also on scaling at enterprise level and discussions where around how to interact with non-dev teams, the difficulties of getting customers involved, and budgeting.

Next I attended a session on team coherence given by Joanna Zweig. This is a very interesting and important subject that has a follow up session today and I'll write a blog about it afterwards.

Richard Marks led a discussion on Trust-based Collaboration within a team, between teams, and at enterprise level. The aha! moment to me was Cesar Idrovo's sharing a personal experience that is becoming an agile principle, namely value the productivity of your team above your own. This is something I experienced intensely during my six years in Japan but have found very hard to see happen anywhere else. This principle could be a key change that.

Last was a session on leadership by Davil Chilcott that also has a follow up today so I'll write about it later.

Growing Pains

The invited speaker at the coming BayAPLN meeting (Oct 20) is Ed Kraay, whose presentation is entitled Growing Pains: Why scaling scrum hurts and what you can do about it.

Since I'll be out on a business trip that day I contacted Ed and we agreed on a symbiosis: he would give me the presentation 1:1 beforehand so that he could practice it, and I would give him feedback on the format and content of the presentation. We skyped Saturday morning and I highly recommend it highly to people about to scale agile at their enterprises and equally to those who are or have scaled since the presentation will give everybody great advice and pointers on what to do and what to avoid.

Thanks Ed , you are a good friend (and no, I didn't feel like a ginnea pig).

A principle to a better you, a better team, and a better enterprise.

Larry Gelwix, coach of the Highland Ruby Team (with a 413-9 win-loss record between 1984-2009), motivates his team to never do anything that will lessen themselves, their team, or their families. This principle can be applied to agile teams to never do anything that will lessen themselves, their team, or their enterprise. I consider this to be a key ingredient to achieve hyperproductivity.

Key ingredients to hyperproductivity: executives

For an enterprise to achieve hyperproductivity it is key that executives:

• Buy-in agile-lean and ensure that adoption takes place at all levels of the enterprise, not just at the bottom. Team effort really means corporate effort.
• Be involved by actively and continuously participating in the creation of the products and services the enterprise offers to its customers.
• Delegate decision making to the downline ensuring that decisions are made where it matters most and where more value is added.
• Let go of command and control over their organizations, and instead guide them.
• Provide service to their organizations by ensuring their employees have the means (tools and knowledge) to get the job well done.

Code Camp '09

Attended Code Camp '09, held at Foothill College in the San Francisco Bay Area, on the first day (missed Sunday... preparing documents for my next business trip). The amount of attendees was quite quite possible higher than originally expected since some sessions were relocated last-minute to larger rooms. Organizers did a great job is making it very flexible in terms of logistics, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

I focused on attending sessions from the Agile track and they all were fun, very relaxed and informative. Most of the contents were at introductory level and adequate to most of the audience. A good aspect was that the subjects of discussion were atomic which allowed a discussion-and-participation format instead of a lecture or presentation format. As result the attendees got most of their questions answered. Unsure if and how presentation slides will be published. I'll post another blog with such info once I have it.

Making great customer service even better

It was yesterday that I finally went to the Apple store to get Snow Leopard for my macs and in addition getting a Time Machine / Airport which I needed bad since my old router had become more than just a pain. I was a happy camper upgrading my MacOS but the happiness started fading away as I proceeded with the installation of the Airport and started running into problems. At first I thought the problems were with Comcast, my ISP, since that's where the problems have been in the past. I tried several ways and none of them worked. I went to sleep late last night frustrated by the fact that I couldn't fix the problem.

This morning I contacted Comcast and they said things on their end looked good so I tried once again to no avail, at which point I contacted Apple. Mind you, Apple has great customer care and effectively they helped me out right away. Oh, but the bump on the road became clear when the Apple representative told me there is a known problem when setting a guest network and so I should not set that network until the fix is published by Apple hopefully soon.
If Apple knew about it how come they did not make that info readily available to (a) keep customers happy with an effective temporary solution instead of frustrating customers who wasted lots of time trying to make things work, and (b) reducing their operational expenses related to this issue?

Lean-Agile enterprises make sure that efficiency doesn't stop when the product is done but goes beyond those boundaries to reach post-production. Customer care is a paramount aspect of it. Being proactive instead of reactive reduces inventory, movement, and unbalance.

BayAPLN September meeting update

Joshua Kerievsky gave a presentation entitled Agile Brushstrokes in which he made an analogy between software development practices, particularly agile practices, and painting styles. He mapped how certain art styles such as baroque (romanticism) and coco are rich, elaborate, and time consuming just the way traditional software development is; and some agile practices that get too heavy on governance or other controlling/monitoring activities could also get there. Compared also with expressionism, cubism, and impressionism. He mentioned that Impressionist Agile is the point at which the team moves so fast and fluently that aspects such as iterations and backlogs start fading away to allow room for more fluidity, but made sure to point out that to get there it is very important to get the basics well-rooted.

Make sure to assimilate the values and principles, understand fully the methodologies, and practice them for a period of time before venturing into exploring new forms otherwise you may end up in the same--or worse--shape than you were before adopting agile.

The chasm after the chasm

Agile is no longer a competitive advantage. It is at the summit of the Early Majority, meaning, either you do it or be left behind.

Micro-scrumming

Last week I visited Financiera Independencia (a large nation-wide microfinancing company in Mexico) after having trained 18 staff over a month ago. It caught my attention that one of the engineers had on his cubicle storage a micro version of a scrum table. He said it is very useful to him to manage his own tasks following the scrum structure. I thought it was both cool and cute.

A good start, part 2: Get your executives on the same page

After training Bursatec on scrum and itroductory-level agile management, I had the opportunity to give a brief talk to the executive team of Indeval--the intitution in charge of financial assets within the Mexican Stock Exchange. All excecutives were very receptive and discussions were right on target although short due to time limitations. I think there was a good outcome and executives seem interested on learning more.

It was easy to see why Indeval is such a successful enterprise: executive involvement, timely decsion making, front-running, investment on infrastructure and personnel improvement. Their current work towards lean-agile adoption is an important step forward as well.

Their got a good start and I look forward to working with them on stage 2 of their lean-agile adoption consulting for them and providing more training.

A good start, part 1: Include your customers from day one.

I spent the last three days training around 30 people from Bursatec, one of the most important financial systems enterprises in Mexico, which is responsible for the software systems for most of the Mexican stock exchange . The attendants showed lots of interest through their continuous participation, discussions and questions. It was great how inquisitive they were because it showed legitimate interest on learning Agile-Lean, how to use it effectively, and identifying what is beyond its scope. One important area of difficulty they emphasized upon was governance; not from the agile-lean standpoint but rather from the regulatory side in terms of allowing things to be done that way.

Of all things, the one I particularly liked was that for the first time I had a group where participants included the actual customers (2 of them). That gave a great opportunity to both the P.O.s and the customers to better understand how important they are in the success of their projects and the right way to do their part to be successful.

Kudos to Bursatec for a good start!

Company evaluations from latinamerican customers' perspective

One of the first activities with potential customers is to perform a company evaluation and to present a proposal. My first direct contact with potential customers is often through a presentation on agile-lean and the services I offer. As result, they usually request a quote. I offer them two options: either a rather shrink-wrapped quote or a customized solution that will require a company evaluation. The evaluation has a small cost and 75% of that amount is deducted if they accept my consulting services.

Paying for an evaluation is common practice in the USA and customers actually like a lot the option of the cost deduction. My experience in Mexico has been quite different. Most companies do want an evaluation but are reluctant to pay for it, arguing that it should be part of the bid effort to win a contract. I explain to them that the evaluation goes beyond a small set of questions focused only on a project; it is an in-depth analysis of diverse aspects of the company to understand and determine how agile-lean can significantly improve they way they create their products and services, and it will require two to three days worth of work. Furthermore, the evaluation provides them with information that can help them make better decisions on diverse aspects of the company and its projects. Their point of view remains unchanged and I had instances in which they were happy with the evaluation but didn't proceed with giving me a contract.

An strategy that I started applying recently for such case is do just enough to gather the information to generate a good proposal and report to them the results in a meeting (showing spreadsheet tables and diagrams) but don't give them the document itself. If they see value in it and want it then they have to pay for that service; and if by then they want it more detailed then I proceed to continue the evaluation at a deeper level only if payed in advance.

Test-early, test-often

The recent news on instances of iPhone 3GS oveheating and even exploding brings an opportunity to revisit the importance of testing early and testing often. Every software and hardware technologies have aspects that are hard to test and it is not uncommon for a new product to have flaws that need to be fixed shortly after release to market. One reason for it is that the market itself is the best test environment possible. Most problems encountered have to do with either scalability, use flow, or extended usage. The second and third kind can be minimized if the product is used for as long as possible and played with at all times. A very important factor to increase the efficacy of this test-early test-often strategy is to make sure that feature prioritization takes into account risk-value factor. What this means is that the features that add more value and are of higher risk should be developed first so that the level of risk decreases over time thanks to intensive and extensive testing.

This is a great time for Mexican enterprises to invest on technology

Carlos Slim, a mexican entrepreneur and one of the richest men in the world, invited Mexican entrepreneurs to invest and to be prepared for the recovery in the economy. Carlos said that this and next year are a great time to invest (quoting him: "Creo quye este año y el que entra son buena época para invertir"). He also pointed out that technology is a key industry on which to invest.

Click here or here for more information.