Snow Crash and the emerge of lean-agile

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----- Versión en Inglés primero y version en Español abajo -----

--- English ---
Silly question: have you read Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash? I know... I know... who hasn't? duh! I myself read it for the first time back in 1996 (didn't read it when it was published in 1992 because I lived in Japan at that time and the novel wasn't available in the City I lived in. Moved to the USA in 1995).

So, why am I bringing Snow Crash up? At the beginning of the novel, Stephenson wrote the are things we Americans do better than anyone else and the list includes music, movies, and microcode (i.e., software). This is a nice thing to believe. Take movies, for example; we make really good movies (The Matrix pops out in my mind). Even the bad movies are good; why, because even when they suck they entertain and bring audiences and make money. Fortunately we are much better at doing good ones even better. Take for example "La Jetée" made into "12 Monkeys", or the short story "The Sentinel" into the movie "2001 A Space Odyssey". Our pizzas are also awesome (Chicago style being my favorite) and although I have never been to Italy friends have told me there's no way Italian pizzas are better than ours! The emerge of new music in the USA is unlike anywhere else. We can create new music just as much as we can take something from anywhere else in the world and morph it into something new and cool.

All that is, of course, arguable. But we all are entitled to an opinion and even if things are not to the larger extent my words may sound we can all agree that many good things have been done here.

Similarly, lean and agile are a combination to two things. We took things that work in practice, regardless of what theory or established processes indicated, and made them better. We didn't care if a standard came out of a DoD sponsored effort, or a model came out of a prestigious institution. We wanted something that worked really well in the real world and that acknowledged the variability that comes from working in an ever changing environment. From market trends to customer needs, the economy, team members personal life, health, etc. We wanted and needed a foundation and practices to make us succeed in such chaotic environment.

Lean and agile evolved independently of each other, although it is clear that agile follows some very similar foundation. None of them brought something entirely new but both took bits and pieces that have had good results and shaped them up into something congruent and quite useful and effective.

The history of humanity has gone through some important changes such as from he feudal days to the renaissance, the industrial revolution, the popularization of culture, and an information revolution. The pattern is pretty much bringing something big, monolithic, power-based, controlling, and inefficient to something smaller, distributed, knowledge-based, collaborative and efficiency-oriented.

Lean-agile is following that pattern by emphasizing on work in small teams, breaking work into small chunks, empowering people (and respecting them), increase collaboration at all levels of the enterprise and with customers, and replacing costly and fancy processes with efficient practices.


--- Español ---
Pregunta tonta: ¿Has leído la novela de Neal Stephenson titulada Snow Crash? Lo sé ... lo sé ... ¿Quién no? Yo la leí por primera vez en 1996 (no lo leí cuando se publicó en 1992, porque yo vivía en Japón en esa época y la novela no estaba disponible en la ciudad que vivió in mudó a los EE.UU. en 1995).

Así que, ¿por qué estoy atrayendo atención a Snow Crash? Al comienzo de la novela, Stephenson escribió que hay cosas que los Estadounidenses hacemos mejor que nadie, y la lista incluye música, películas, y microcódigo (es decir, software). Esta es una cosa agradable de creer. Tomemos películas, por ejemplo, hacemos películas realmente buenas (The Matrix surge en mi mente). Incluso las malas películas son buenas, ¿por qué, porque aún cuando son malas entretienen y atraen al público, y ganan dinero. Afortunadamente somos mucho mejor en hacer algo bueno aún mejor. Tomemos, por ejemplo, "La Jetée" en la cual se basó "12 Monkeys", o el cuento "The Sentinel" a partir del cual se hizo "2001 Una Odisea en el Espacio". Nuestras pizzas son también buenísimas (estilo Chicago son mis favoritas), y aunque nunca he estado en Italia, amigos que han ido me han dicho que no hay manera de que las pizzas italianas sean mejores que las nuestras! El surgimiento de nueva música en los E.U. no tiene comparación con cualquier otro lugar.Podemos crear nueva música tanto como podamos tomar algo de cualquier otra parte del mundo y se transforman en algo nuevo y fabuloso.

Todo esto es, por supuesto, discutible. Pero todos tenemos derecho a una opinión y aunque las cosas no lleguen a ser de la medida que mis palabras reflejan, creo que todos estaremos de acuerdo que muchas cosas buenas se han hecho aquí.

Del mismo modo, lean y agile son una combinación de dos cosas. Tomaron las cosas que funcionan en la práctica, independientemente de lo que la teoría o de los procesos establecidos indicam, y las hicieron mejor. No nos importaba si una norma salió de un esfuerzo patrocinado por el Departamento de Defensa, o un modelo salió de una institución de prestigio. Queríamos algo que funciona muy bien en el mundo real y que reconoce la variabilidad que viene de trabajar en un entorno en constante cambio. De las tendencias del mercado a las necesidades del cliente, la economía, la vida personal de los miembros del equipo, la salud, etc.. Queríamos y necesitabamos una base y prácticas que nos hicieran prosperar en un ambiente sumamente caótico.

Lean y agile evolucionaron de forma independiente el uno del otro, aunque es evidente que agile sigue algún fundamento muy similar a lean. Ninguno de ellos aportó algo totalmente nuevo, pero ambos tomaron pedazos que han tenido buenos resultados en la práctica y en forma congruente para llegar a algo muy útil y eficaz.

La historia de la humanidad ha pasado por algunos cambios importantes, como de los días feudales al Renacimiento, la revolución industrial, la divulgación de la cultura, y la revolución de la información. El patrón es cambiar de algo grande, monolítico, basado en el poder, controlador, e ineficiente en algo más pequeño, distribuido, basado en el conocimiento, en colaboración y orientado a eficiencia.

Lean-agile está siguiendo ese patrón, poniendo énfasis en el trabajo en pequeños equipos, rompiendo el trabajo en pequeños pedazos, capacitando a las personas (y respetandolas), aumentando la colaboración en todos los niveles de la empresa y con los clientes, y substituyendo los procesos costosos y pesados con prácticas eficientes.

MexAPLN meeting: March 2010

----- English version on top and Spanish version at the bottom -----
----- Versión en Inglés primero y version en Español abajo -----

--- English ---
MexAPLN meeting on March 25 took place at Software Guru, again. Many thanks to SG for hosting us! I like their offices quite a bit, btw. Given the fact that a long vacation time starts next week and many people start early I expected few people but to my surprise there were 8 of us; which is great considering previous meetings have had between 8 and 12 people.

Agenda for the meeting was primarily to:

• Work on the charter's objectives. We covered a little over the list we had and added new ones. We have enough to get started and will cover the remaining ones by the next meeting, hopefully.
  
• Next meeting will be the first double-meeting, meaning a CoCo meeting followed by a general meeting. Venue is TBD and topic will be either one to be proposed by Alberto Balderas or one on project management by Masa
• Learning. I talked about the project management triangles and showed a new polygon I call the lean-agile prism, which I am currently proposing and submitted and article about it to Agile Journal.

--- Español ---
La reunión del 25 de marzo tuvo lugar en Software Gurú otra vez. Muchas gracias a la SG por recibirnos! Por cierto que me gustan mucho sus oficinas un poco. Dado el hecho de que las vacaciones de semana santa comienzan la próxima semana y que muchas personas inician su vacación días antes, esperaba poca gente pero para mi sorpresa hubo 8 de nosotros, que es fabuloso teniendo en cuenta que las reuniones anteriores han tenido entre 8 y 12 personas.

La agenda fué primordialmente:

• Trabajar en los objetivos de los estatutos. Hemos cubierto un poco más de la lista que teníamos y añadimos otros nuevos. Tenemos suficiente para empezar a trabajar y cubriremos los restantes en la próxima reunión, de ser posible.
• La próxima reunión será la primer reunión doble: reunión del CoCo seguida de una reunión general. Lugar para el event está por determinarse y el tema será uno propuesto por Alberto Balderas o uno sobre la gestión de proyectos de parte de Masa.
• Aprendizaje. Hablé acerca de los triángulos de la gestión del proyecto y mostré un nuevo polígono que yo llamo el prisma lean-agile, que estoy proponiendo en la actualidad y he presentado un artículo sobre el tema al Agile Journal.

Book review: Innovation Games

Everybody wants to better their businesses and make serious efforts to do so, but maybe we could be more effective is the efforts were less serious and more fun. Business communication is always challenging within the organization, with customers, providers, contractors, etc.. This is in part because they are not face-to-face and because most times one or more people who could add significant value take a passive role, in part because most times there is someone who enjoys dominating the meeting. End result is incomplete and biased information and decisions.

One main reason why games work is because (a) they are fun, and (b) they make everybody to actively participate. Hohmann's book is a great starting point. The games cover diverse needs and conducted properly add significant value (and save costs) to teams, projects, and entire enterprises.

Don't get serious... instead, start using this book!

Writing Spanish version of new Kanban book

Great news, I have been given the opportunity to translate David J Anderson's new book entitled "Kanban: Evolutionary change for you technology company". Needless to say I am thrilled by this.
:-)

Agile Training Game Board

Yesterday's talk at the BayAPLN meeting was on the Agile Training Game Board, proposed by David Chilcott from Outformations and Pat Reed from The Gap.

The basic concept is very simple. The same way that some of us actually use an agile dev board alike scrum at the training courses we offer, the ATGM shows the flow of stories from backlog to completion. What I think the contribution was is the emphasis on short timeboxes, 10 min in average and 20 min tops. This is particularly useful for training to executives because details are not necessarily important to them and they rather get the succinct version of things. They also encourage the thumbs-up-down-sideways feedback to consider stories Done. The board had extra columns at the end for value points and time, both important aspects to executives.

The talk included a stand-up game on self-organization to show how some concepts can be "explained" effectively and in shorter time through games.

Lean-Agile editor for the Software Guru magazine

Software Guru magazine invited me to be the editor for its lean-agile section and I gladly accepted :-)

This is a great opportunity to help in contributing more effectively to the penetration of lean-agile in Mexico and hopefully Latin America as well; and at the same time increase de presence of Mexico within the global lean-agile community.

The best way to fix the Prius sudden-acceleration problem is by not fixing it.

Did I get your attention? Good!
Tonight's news included yet another case of a Prius sudden-acceleration problem, this time in San Diego where the driver ended up being assisted by a police officer who used his police car to stop the Prius by driving in front of it to slow it down to a stop. Toyota's engineers are really scratching their heads over this problem and that particular Prius is now being analyzed very thoroughly in hope to figure out the cause.

So, how to fix this problem? Probably Toyota's engineers already thought about what I am about to propose but here it goes anyway: do not fix the problem! Okay so, before those of you who are still reading on what I think should be done is two things:

• Verify the algorithm and its implementation. One very likely cause is the software that controls the car's acceleration and brake systems. If that is the case and engineers cannot find and fix the bug(s) then a better course of action would be to start from the beginning and (a) create a new algorithm, (b) analyze the algorthm quality as such, i.e. as an abstraction, (c) implement and test it simultaneously. Step (b) is extremely important because that is the best way to make sure the algorithm is robust. If we wait until implementation time to do testing then it will be harder to know if the problem is the algorithm itself or its implementation. I think this is the most viable, fast, and cost-effective course of action.
  
• Unit level testing is not enough. One well know problem with measurement, from the physics standpoint, is that any attempt to measure something will affect what is being measured and therefore the measurement will be inexact. This means that once the algorithm and its implementation are robust it will be more effective to test at subsystem and system levels instead of inisolation.
• Reproduce internal and external test conditions. The best way to reproduce a behavior is by recreating all conditions that triggered the undersired behavior. In addition to the car conditions this includes road, slope, weather, etc.

Building things anew might be a quicker and better way compared to trying to identify and fix what is wrong.

Presentaion on Lean-Agile and Innovation at the ITESM

This morning I gave a presentation on Lean-Agile and Innovation at the ITESM (Monterey Advanced Studies Institute of Technology), which was broadcasted to its 33 campuses nation-wide via satelite and was also webcasted.

I talked about the motivation to create better products and services considering Quality, Value, and Design, then moved on to talk about fundamentals of Lean and Agile. Last I talked about the advantage of using games to foster innovation and did examples on planning and estimating, group cohesion, and product analysis. More specifically I used planning poker, pair drawing, and prune-the-tree games.

The oopsy part was that I used all of the allocated time giving the presentation so Q&A had to be off-line. But it was possible to compensate at least with the local audience through 10 min. of Q&A.

BTW, the ITESM staff did an extraordinary job with logistics, production, etc., and the campus is impressive and functional.