North BayAPLN August meeting note

I'm back home from this month's North BayAPLN meeting, which took place at the Salesforce building in Market St, San Francisco. David Chilcott, principal at Outformations, gave a presentation on Effective agile meetings. The premise is to apply lean thinking and to extrapolate scrum practices to the way we plan and conduct meetings, and that by doing so meetings become cost effective and productive.

David suggests to manage a meeting as a sprint where the agenda is the backlog, an agenda item a feature, the desired outcome a user story, the agenda item owner is the product owner, etc.. Amongst other things he also talked about having roles and responsibilities within the meeting attendants, which I think is cool because not only the roles can rotate bu also because, and this is my point of view, is a subtle way to get attendants more involved and as result more attentive and productive. His presentation is available at the Outformations website.

Same as with agile-lean, most of what effective agile meetings is about is actually common sense. And as with agile-lean, even being common sense meetings are rarely planned and done right (or just good enough, if you know what I mean) until it is presented in a "formal" way.

Writing about agile while confined to avoid getting Swine Flu

Arrived to Mexico City on business last April 27 just two hours short of the WHO’s request to close Mexico's borders due to the swine flu. Not surprising, this has been the less productive of all my business trips: For example my last 10-day trip included 12 meetings and 3 presentations. This 14-day trip I ended up with lots of cancelations and so far have had 3 meetings and if nothing else is cancelled will have one meeting and one presentation before returning to the USA in six days. I even got to experience no traffic in Mexico City, wow! Better be safe than sorry, right? Streets are empty and remind me of a scene from the Spanish movie "Abre Los Ojos", remade as "Vanilla Sky" in English. Fortunately, I am staying at a very safe place, away from public contact and have been feeling as well as usual.

On the bright side, this has given me time to take some rest and do some writing, including an article on agile, standards, and models to be published on the Software Guru magazine this summer, and preparing some more training materials.

Mexico City traffic, vendors and self-organization

Everybody who has ever visited Mexico City for sure remembers the traffic. Think New York City traffic is bad? ...think again! A few decades ago the expressways and highways, although small for USA standards, were fast and a joy to ride. Nowadays traffic is so bad that on a recent day while stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Viaducto (an expressway) I saw locals walking in between lanes selling all sorts of things, from sodas to cigarettes, chewing gum, fruit, etc.; they even had banners posted on the expressway’s walls announcing products and prices.

What amazed me the most was how efficient those people were. Keeping an eye on which lanes were moving more slowly to shift from one to the other so maximize the chances of making a sale. Monitoring the overall traffic to determine if they should step aside for a few minutes or stay put and increase sales. They are also distributed along the road so that each person has a “reasonable number of customers”. They knew intuitively that it was better to disperse along the road when cars where moving at a slow steady pace, and to get closer together but in between different lanes when cars were barely moving. I was amazed by the efficiency of their self-organization.

I started thinking about how I’ve seen development teams be less efficient when they are being managed, thus waiting for a decision-maker to come and order changes, and how much more efficient they become when they self-organize. It is better to identify the demands of task-at-hand, assess the situation, determine a course of action, and act.

Hell's Kitchen needs some Agile and Lean lessons

I love cooking. Graduate school was overseas and the food at both the university's cafeteria and the local restaurant were less than appetizing despite of the great sea food, vegetables, and other goodies available at the market just a mile away, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and stated cooking. To my own surprise cooking was fun and easy; and I was good at it, thankfully because very few times I ate my food thinking I rather be eating at the cafeteria.

Although it is quite rare for me to watch cooking shows I have fun watching Hell's Kitchen. For those of you who don't know the show: there is this famous Chef Gordon Ramsay who recruits 16 contestants (8 women and 8 men) in two teams to compete cooking for guests at the restaurant under the same name as the show and eliminate one contestant from the losing team at the end of each episode. The winning team is treated big time with an outing to an upscale place, and the losing team has to do some quite nasty chores. The most fun part, from my point of view, is when the restaurant opens and the teams have to cook the orders because the entire kitchen turns chaotic very quickly. Food gets burned, undercooked, ingredients are missed, portions of one same dish are prepared at different times, contestants within the same team disrespect each other, customers get quite unhappy... and Chef Ramsay's shouting madly at the contestants until there is no way to save the night and the restaurant is shutdown for the night ahead of time. I don't watch the show all the time but from the couple dozen episodes I've seen out of five seasons service was completed only twice. That success record is embarrasing at the least.

Why does that happen? Both teams have strong motivation to win: not being eliminated and being treated like royalty. So, why things continuously turn bad? Here's my take on it:
- Poor communication: the team members don't communicate with each other to know who is doing what, keep their timings right, and help each other.
- Upfront planning: it would be a waste to plan how the entire evening will go because such plan would become obsolete within the first three minutes of receiving the first order; however they should all have a high-level strategy in place so that they know what to expect from each other.
- Slow to adapt: once one thing goes wrong problems escalate because they have a hard time adapting to the customer demands and the state of the kitchen
- Movement: as things start going wrong and escalate the contestants start moving around a lot more and more quickly. Such frenzy only delays things further and make it so much easier to make mistakes. They should help each other more instead.
- Lack of self-organization: were they better organized among themselves most problems would not occur.
- Lack of respect: Although it is a competition, if they respected each other they would work better as a team and significantly increase the chances of winning

Does that sound to you like what is going on in your organization or what happened at a previous job? I have many memories of projects going wrong for different combinations of the same reasons.

A very effective way to overcome those issues is by following the Agile and Lean principles. Effective communication facilitates self-organization which significantly reduces movement. High-level upfront planning allows the team predict each others actions more effectively and how to help each other. Continuously adapting to the current situation produces more and better results more quickly. And last but no least is the respect for each other, which not only makes working together more enjoyable but also increases productivity.