MexAPLN Feb 2010 meeting

MexAPLN Feb 2010 meeting took place last night at the offices of Software Guru Magazine, a modern looking floor with cool artwork on the walls. Definitely a nice place to work. We had 10 people, three of them new with one of them from the city of Puebla. The central topic was to thumbs-up our charter's vision, mission, values, and principles and will be available before the end of this week. The discussion was rather short thanks to off-line work by 7 members in that most of the discussions took place before the meeting. We did a first-pass at the objectives and will be discussing them further as well as the other parts of the charter with the intention to finalize it at our March meeting.

There are numerous ideas and enthusiasm to start executing. I don't see a reason for MexAPLN to become of of the best!

Note: Software Guru has been making reference to a blog in Spanish written by Armando Peralta, check it out!

Second presentation at Congress in Mexico

This morning I gave a second presentation on lean-agile at Mexico's Congress aiming at medium and small industry. It was probably not the best day to schedule it because today is Mexic's Flag day and logistics got a bit complicated. The presentation was successful in that all attendants got very enthusiastic about lean-agile and the Q&A session lasted over 1/2 hour. There were three nice outcomes:

1. The Deputy I started doing all this with concluded is time to bring my ideas to the Secretary of the Economy. I will be meeting two of its members either next week or at my next business trip.

2. An entrepreneur wants us to talk about how lean-agile can help his new life-science business.

3. I was asked to give a presentation at the School of Economy at the National University of Mexico.

One very cool thing that also happened was a person from an indigenous area in Mexico was there and asked me about how to use lean-agile principles to help the community of craftsmen better their business. This is obviously a very different context but after hearing details on how they are working to create and sell their crafts I gave her some ideas and advice I hope will help them. Of course I would love to get a chance to go there for a few days and create a direct positive impact.

Effective employee performance assessment via lean-thinking

An eBay executive once asked me how I would go about doing individual employee performance review if lean-agile are team oriented. Effectively, in agile-lean thinking, we value team effort more than individual effort and consider individual rewards to hinder teamwork improvement. That doesn't mean, however, individual performance cannot be measured. As with enterprises, what we need to do is know what to measure.
We must use measurements that encourage the employee to improve teamwork through individual efforts for the benefit of the business and the customer. For example:

Measure sales executives in terms of the number of successful deliveries instead of the number of sales deals closed. That way the sales executive can't forget about the customer once the sales deal is closed. It is necessary to make sure the client gets what was paid for, and to do that it becomes necessary to work as a team with other groups in the company.

Measure developers in terms of how many stories got completed with good customer satisfaction instead of how many lines of code were implemented but rather . This developer has to interact with QA, the scrum master, the product owner, and customers to fully understand the stories and customer needs to ensure the code meets customer needs and has the quality required.

Measure QA engineers in terms of reduction of bugs in the code and increase of product quality instead of number of bugs found. That way the focus becomes building quality, as compared with showing how bad the product is. Activities are proactive, including higher interaction with customers and other teams instead of only the reactive activity of bug hunting.

Under such lean thinking the employees increase teamwork, quality, and customer satisfaction; and executives have an effective way to measure individual performance without fomenting individualistic work.

Some coming presentations

I will be in Mexico City the next two weeks (Feb 22 ~ Mart 5) and during that trip I will be giving the following presentations:

• Feb 24, Congress building. I will be giving my second presentation on lean-agile, this time to a larger audience that includes industry leaders and some congressmen. It is very likely that it will be broadcasted through the Congress TV channel.
• March 5, ITESM (Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey). I will give a lecture on lean-agile and innovation which will be broadcasted to its 33 campuses accross the country via satellite and internet.

Also, Feb 25 is the MexAPLN meeting at the Software Guru offices starting at 7:30 PM. Address is Temstocles 34, 3rd.floor, Col Polanco, Mexico City.

Jim Highsmith's talk: Beyond scope, schedule, and cost

I'm back home from the monthly BayAPLN meeting. This time we had Jim Highsmith give a talk entitled "Beyond Scope, Schedule, and Cost: rethinking performance measures for agile development". I read Jim's most recent book on agile project management and actually wrote a review on it (posted on by blog and on Amazon.com) and thought this talk was going to have as central point the new Agile Triangle as proposed on the book. I was very pleased that the presentation went beyond that. Jim exposed different ways in which we can measure performance by considering value and quality; and gave a good number of examples. He mentioned the importance on having a better standing point to evaluate and measure performance. A common factor on all of them is adaptability. The metrics must allow changes and be effective measuring under real-world variations. Quality could very well be the most important metric of all; but doesn't mean it should be the only metric to have.

Ikiru and why some lean-agile projects fail

Many years ago when I was in college I had the opportunity to see the movie Ikiru (生きる) by Akira Kurozawa. As a nice way to finish my work week, I just finished watched it again while having dinner. The story is around an elderly man, Watanebe-san, who is a public office head of department who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He immediately starts a desperate hunt to recover the 30 years he spend doing nothing as a public official, and after much soul searching he decides to help build a public park at a low income neighborhood. The park is finished shortly before his death, whose cause was unknown to his coworkers and family. At his funeral reception there are about a dozen other public officials of different ranks. It is there where an amazing display of bureaucracy is made clear, and after much drinking and discussing, those who remained at the room came to the realization of the reazon of Watanabe's death. Inspired by it they all determine to make their work as meaningful and really serve the public, only to get back to the same status quo once back to work.

There is a parallel to the story and why some lean-agile projects fail and, worse, why entire organizations fail in the adoption. Simply put, it is very easy to get back to the old habits. Many organizations claim to be doing agile, be it scrum, xp, kanban or whatever else, in reality they still do in good measure the same things they were doing before with minor modifications such as not sitting at their periodic meetings or using post-it notes for their use cases. This more often than not results in even worse dynamics than before the "adoption". If you want your organization to really adopt lean-agile then you have to fully embrace it and be willing to go through what it takes to really make the transition.

Cutter predictions 2010

Cutter published its 2010 predictions back in mid December, which includes a prediction by yours truly.

Agile-lean will become the new mainstream approach to project management and software development. Latin America will become aware of this and will start investing heavily on its adoption towards the end of the year in an attempt to bridge the IT gap between developing and developed countries.

You can see the full list at:
http://www.cutter.com/predictions/2010.html