Mind Hacks and Surgery

This will be my last blog-entry for at least a couple of weeks. I'm going in for surgery tomorrow to have my kidney removed and transplanted into my sister. It will take me about two weeks to recover to the point where I can sit in front of the computer for any length of time - and another two weeks before I return to work. (Well wishes and prayers for both my sister and me will be warmly welcomed :-)

I received two pretty cool books from O'Reilly the other day. They're not your normal fare. And I havent finished either of them yet. But I'm leafing through them and they both look waaaayyy cool and extremely useful:

• Mind Performance Hacks
  By Ron Hale-Evans
• Mind Hacks
  By Tom Stafford, Matt Webb

I'm looking forward to making my way through the rest of these two books and learning more about how my mind works and how to make better use of it (and better "maintain" it :)

Scaling Agility: Summary of Resources

I published a bunch of entries with numerous resources on different aspects of Scaling Agility. I wrote most of them several days apart but many of them got "pushed out" (published) together in sudden bursts. Here they are again:

• Scaling Agility: Seamless Agility across the Enterprise (introduction)


• Scaling Agility: Agile CMMI and Dancing Elephants (15+ links)


• Scaling Agility: Agile Adoption across the Enterprise (20+ links)


• Scaling Agility: Adapting Agile to the Organization (30+ links)


• Scaling Agility: Agile Systems Engineering (15+ links)


• Scaling Agility: Agile Program Management (20+ links)


• Scaling Agility: Distributed Agile (35+ links)

Feel free to post a comment with other links are anything you feel warrants a new category (e.g., melding Agile with any of Lean, TOC, or Six Sigma)

Lean view of Deming's 14 Points for Management.

There has been a really great discussion thread on the Lean Development YahooGroup on the subject of "How do I find bottlenecks?"

I particularly liked a reply by Alan Shalloway that linked things back to W. Edwards Deming's 14 points for management from his Theory/System of Profound Knowledge. Allan's translation has a bit of a "Lean" slant to it, and doesn't explicitly mention eliminating/reducing variation quite so much. Here is how he summarized it:

Re respect for people, the best place to start, IMHO, is Deming. Here are his fourteen points (Chapter 2 of Out of the Crisis, by W. Edwards Deming, MIT Press, 2000; originally published in 1982.):

1. The world has changed and managers need to adopt a new way of thinking. Delays, mistakes, defective workmanship and poor service are longer acceptable.


2. Quit depending on inspection to find defects and start building quality into products while they are being built. Use statistical process control.


3. Don't choose suppliers on the basis of low bids alone. Minimize total cost by establishing long term relationships with suppliers that are based on loyalty and trust.


4. Work continually to improve the system of production and service. Improvement is not a one-time effort; every activity in the system must be continually improved to reduce waste and improve quality.


5. Institute training. Managers should know how to do the job they supervise and be able to train workers. Managers also need training to understand the system of production.


6. Institute leadership. The job of managers is to help people do a better job and remove barriers in the system that keep them from doing their job with pride. The greatest waste in America is failure to use the abilities of people.


7. Drive out fear. People need to feel secure in order to do their job well. There should never be a conflict between doing what is best for the company and meeting the expectations of a person's immediate job.


8. Break down barriers between departments. Create cross-functional teams so everyone can understand each-other's perspective. Do not undermine team cooperation by rewarding individual performance.


9. Stop using slogans, exhortations and targets. It is the system, not the workers, that creates defects and lowers productivity. Exhortations don't change the system; that is management's responsibility.


10. Eliminate numerical quotas for workers and numerical goals for people in management. [We add: Eliminate arbitrary deadlines for development teams.] This is management by fear. Try leadership.


11. Eliminate barriers that rob the people of their right to pride of workmanship. Stop treating hourly workers like a commodity. Eliminate annual performance ratings for salaried workers.


12. Encourage education and self-improvement for everyone. An educated workforce and management is the key to the future.


13. Take action to accomplish the transformation. A top management team must lead the effort with action, not just support.

These go back 60 years. And (I can't help myself) these principles are in the context that process causes 94% of the errors - so work on the process to support the people! (people and process, people and process, people and process, ...) ;)

Alan Shalloway, CEO, Sr. Consultant
Net Objectives, Gold Level Sponsor of Agile 2006.
Integrating people, process and technology through training, coaching and consulting.

Alan's website also has some really great articles, papers, presentations and resources on Agile, Lean, Scrum, XP, Design Patterns, and all things related to Agile development and object-oriented design.

For some slightly different interpretations and summaries of Demings 14 points and Seven Deadly Sins, see the following:

• Wikipedia entry on W. Edwards Deming
• Demings 14 points and Seven Deadly Sins of Management from Ends of the Earth
• A summary of Deming's 14 points from the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing
• Phil Cohen's summary of Deming's 14 points (which seems steeped in the language of removing/reducing variation)

There has also been a thread on another discussionlist (sorry - the name escapes me at the moment) on the relevance (or lack thereoff) of Deming's writings and philosophies in the world of today.

What are your thoughts?

Aikidoka Leadership, Influence and Conflict Resolution

There are a few good books about conflict resolution & leadership that use Aikido style/philosophy throughout. I highly recommend them for anyone interested in the connection between leadership and martial arts philosophy:

• The Magic of Conflict, by Thomas Crum


• The Randori Principles: The Path to Effortless Leadership, by David H. Baum (and Randori Partners)


• Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion, by Dr. George Thompson


• Articles by Judy Ringer on conflict resolution using Aikido principles


• ARTICLE: Aikido & Conflict Resolution: What's the Connection?

There must be some of you out there who have some other links to share on this topic! Leave a comment with your favorites!

Scaling Agility: Distributed Agile Development

Current issues of IEEE Software, CACM, and ACM Queue have articles related to agile distributed development and release management ...

The Sept/Oct 2006 issue of IEEE Software is about Global Software Development. It has several Agile-related articles (like A Practical Management and Engineering Approach to Offshore Collaboration)

This months CACM theme is "Flexible and Distributed Software Processes" with articles on distributed agile development (which are currently available online), including:

• An introduction to Flexible and distributed software processes: old petunias in new bowls?
• Ambidextrous coping strategies in globally distributed software development projects
• Can distributed software development be agile?
• Aligning IT components to achieve agility in globally distributed system development
• Dependency forecasting in the distributed agile organization
• Globally distributed software development and pair programming

ACM Queue an article on Agile/Iterative Release Management entitled Breaking the Major Release Habit.

Other resources on Distributed Agile Development:

• an Agile 2005 presentation on Introduction to Distributed Agile Development


• DistributedAgile.com


• Vince Massol's May 2004 Case Study on Distributed Agile Development


• a July 2004 Forrester Report on The Total Economic Impact™ Of Using ThoughtWorks’ “Distributed Agile” Approach, Single Company Analysis — Financial Services


• Distributed Agile Development, by Dafydd Rees, April 2004


• Agile Alliance articles on Distributed Agile and Offshore Agile Development


• Stickyminds.com article, Going the Distance: Five Tactics to Compensate for Distance on Distributed Teams, by Esther Derby


• 2004 SpiderLogic presentation about an Experience report on Distributed Agile Development


• Knowledge Management for Distributed Agile Processes: Models, Techniques, and Infrastructure from KMDAP2003 (and related paper)


• MKDAP2003 presentation on Proactive Knowledge Distribution for Agile Processes


• Martin Fowler's Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development


• Managing Commitments and Risks: Challenges in Distributed Agile Development


• Dependency forecasting in the distributed agile organization


• Briefing of Starsoft Development Labs related to Distributed Agile Development


• the Agile Journal back issues on Globally Distributed Development (April 2006) and Collaboration and Reuse (Sept 2006) [the latter has a few articles about distributed collaboration/agility]


• Jeff Sutherland's Distributed SCRUM paper from IICS'06 on Adaptive Engineering of Large Software Projects with Distributed/Outsourced Teams


• Aug 2005 Stickyminds.com article on Building an Effective Test Team for Distributed Agile


• Malcolm William's 2004 Master's thesis on Distributed Extreme Programming: Extending the Frontier of the Extreme Programming Software Engineering Process


• Follow the Sun: Distributed Extreme Programming Development from Agile2005, by Monica Yap (also see the powerpoint presentation)


• Naresh Jain's Offshore Agile Maintenance (summary, presentation, and experience report all available from this link)


• Distributed Agile, a 2004 presentation by Christoph Steindl


• Internationally Agile, 2002 paper by Matt Simons


• Summary results of March 2003 USC Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Agile Development


• Support for Distributed Extreme Programming by Frank Maurer et. al., XP2002 (also see a related paper on the same subject)


• eXtreme Programming in Open-Source and Distributed Environments


• Follow-up paper to the above (same authors): Distributed eXtreme Programming paper from XP2001 conference

Also, although it's not specific to Agility, the book Software without Borders appears to have some good reviews by several folks who are well-respected in the Agile community (also check out the online references section of the book.