random findings

I have moved

You can now find me at

www.portagile.com

Thanks

Markus

Kanban for maintenance @mobile.international

At OOP 2010 I was talking on our introduction of Kanban for the maintenance of the products of mobile.international. I will write a little more on my impression of Kanban in the furture.

For now, my main points on the introduction are: We really brought an not-so-agile- off-shore partner up to speed with this method (and increased his attention for our agile mindset). We reduced cycle time (pure development time) from 28 to 2 days and lead time (order to delivery) from 52 to 22 days in just three months.

What’s really impressing is the simple trick of visualizing your process and mapping the state of each work item, makes all the bodies of production knowledge available to the tinkering of your development process.

Further, being able to just document and tinker with your very own process offers a great opportunity for change if you just atsrt with your existing process as is and only fiddle around with some few screws where you want to improve your process.

As I said - I will write more on what we’ve done wih Kanban in the future.

Introduction of Kanban for large scale maintenance at mobile.international GmbH / OOP 2010

Happy and open for any question,

Markus

The (success of the) iPhone will be a midget to (that of the) the iPad

Years ago, early in the morning I stood in from of our offices. I work at a geek place definitely. I, a geek myself, work at a geek place, definitely. The evening before I just received my iPhone.

The clumsy procedure involved me having to drive to an ugly customs office with depressed and demotivated customs guys having a ball on trying to make me feel illegal because the iPhone was still supposed to be illegal when you unlock it. Yes, and I tried to save the import tax ;-) Anyway, I drove home and had the iPhone set up in 5 minutes time, I had it unlocked and jailbreaked in another 5 minutes. And I had all the music I needed synced in another 5 minutes, I guess.

Standing in the cold in the front of my office it didn’t take long and other geeks working at my place came along. the iPhone thing was quite new and I still an early adopter. The other early adopter syndrome plagued guy, my brother, didn’t yet have it. I knew right away what would happen: Hide or or be bashed. And so it was: All the gees at work were so smart: Oh, you don’t know there’s no copy and paste? You surely know, it’s only Edge, no 3G, do you? You know the camera is crap compared to my 5MB Ericsson/Nokia, you name it bla bla device - and so on and so on.

What was bothering me right away was the fact that all the guys were working for  the same company as I did - an internet company making a fortune on an internet product. So, I guess they shouldn’t be blind to the fact that all the shortcomings of the iPhone were more than compensated by the incredible and before unseen simplicity and elegance of the User Interface - and that despite of all the innovation behind it.

At the time they were all waiting for some new fancy linux based PDA or this and that or the newset fancy Nokia with any useless navigation on it and god knows what.

You know what happened. Today they all have iPhones. All of them. They even disrespect it (some of them) by placing it in a strange dock beneath their work station. Sure, the new cool thing for a developer is the Android (the good vs. the bad - again, so it’s good that google makes a statement towards China so that they are bit more ‘good’ again ;-)

And now - dejá vu - the whole geek planet is again complaining about the things the iPad is *not* and thus being blind to see what the iPad is and what its potential is. (And all the opportunities it will open for geeks and developers as well).

But guess what: It is a mass market device. Apple does not enter markets anymore with niche products to gain momentum. They have momentum and can directly address the large crowds.

Geeks may be disappointed by the iPad not having USB, exchangeable battery (again), no real keys, no extendable memory, still a closed environment, no camera!!!, etc. And yes, they are all shortcomings.

But my mum will be delighted. She doesn’t even want to know what USB is. the doctors running around in hospitals, using the iPad for documentation will not care about battery life, the sales forces don’t care about the keys and so on and so on.

The content providers will be more happy about the new revenue stream provided by the new marketing channels than they will be unhappy of the camera being added in v 2.0 of the iPad and concurrency in OS 4.0.

And guess what, all my geek colleagues will love to surf, watch movies on the couch, chips and beer on the side, an iPad in their hands in just some months.

The iPad will be Apples biggest success ever, whatever its current limitations are, because it defines several completely new markets and revenue streams.

(From an agile perspective: We always drive business to be content with a very minimal product to enter the markets, learn on the market and only add the features that are absolutely necessary to drive demand. It seems that many, as customers, do not like what the preach as those crafting the products ;-)

The product owner *can* be a team

New Title here (not above, ‘cause that destroys the permalink): The Product Owner can be a whole team

In his new blog post Roman Pichler breaks with the supposed golden rule that a Product Owner must be a single person, not a committee an organized team.

As with so many things in Scrum - which I guess stem from the beginning, where neither large companies nor large projects were driven by Scrum - I could never believe that in every context only one Product Owner could deliver the whole product service a Scrum team would need.

I do like Occam’s Razor and I do like the approach of Scrum to keep things as simple as possible. But sometimes, I guess the world is not as simple as you’d like to have it and yes, there needs a structure of product owners to serve an organization.

Read on in Roman Pichlers posting. The way he puts it is much smoother than I could ever put it :-)

P.S.: During the course of discussion w/ @StefanRoock (see below) I came to belief that again this all is a very deep misunderstanding around wordings. It seems that a committee is regarded as something that is simply not sharing a common goal, whereas a team is following the same goal. So teams seem to be fine, committees are not, at least in the Scrum world. I’ll try to look that up somehow. Anyway, I changed this text so that there is no conflict with Roman’s posting and my discussion with Stefan.

Tips on pay rise

Stephan Schmidt gives 10 + 1 very obvious but more so very true hints on how to get a pay rise.

Obviously most of them are not short term - how could they. Most of the tips concentrate on the right attitude on your job and the communication to your manager. They also put into respective the managers budget and copetence for decision perspective.

Even the radical but - oh so true - tip that sometimes you sometimes have to change your job is part of the list.

Nice write up!

Talking on Kanban Introduction at OOP 2010

On Tuesday, Jan 26, 2pm I will give a talk at OOP 2010 at the ICM Munich about the introduction of Kanban for Maintenance at my company mobile.de.

If you are interested in the background of Kanban, how we introduced and how we got to the point of reducing cycle time from 28 to 5 days and lead time from 52 to 22 days, join the session.

I’ll write more on that topic in this blog later on.

I’m quite happy that Stefan Roock and Bernd Schiffer of it-agile.de will talk about Kanban as well at the OOP on Thursday, Jan 28, 2.30pm - 3.30pm. Their talk is titled “Was ist dran an Kanban?” .

Happy to discuss with you at OOP 2010!

Roman Pichler now blogging

I am delighted that Roman Pichler is now blogging. A long time veteran of the Scrum scene and a very well know Scrum Trainer, Roman is one of the few with a special care for the Product Owner role.

An, Roman being Roman, in his first blog entry he gives a very good description of the Product Owner as more than a “simple” owner of the product backlog but having the central role in the Scrum process.

Further, he describes in his first blog post, that the PO needs to be a man of many talents (“cutting across existing job and department boundaries”) , just like we discussed about the architects in the good old times. One of the best points Roman raises is that indeed the Product Owner is not bound to a certain group of people in an enterprise but might be lived out by anyone with a special interest in a part of the product.

Let’s see what Roman posts next. Oh, we’re all waiting for his new book, of course :-) The stage is set now with the new blog.

Congrats to NOOP.nl and Jurgen Appelo

Jurgen Appelo’s Blog NOOP.nl is now exactly two years old and he’s celebrating by giving away books on blogging. Have a look on his birthday posting and join his tweet competition.

Thanks to Jurgen for the work on his blog, in which he presents a very unique mixture of tech, management and entrepreneurial topics.

Celebrate!

Markus

Why my Pecha Kucha is like it is and why I needed to read it from a manuscript

At the XP-Days 2009 in Karlsruhe, Germany (twitter tag #xdde09) I held a Pecha Kucha. As the people really seemed to like it, I thought to write a little on how I came up with the Pecha Kucha.

The topic was already used twice on conferences: How did we, at mobile.international get on the agile track and how did we develop.

Here is an example of a presentation on that topic, given on Seacon 2009:

Scrum-Einführung bei mobile.de

So, to me, it was more than welcome to drastically change the format to Pecha Kucha and thus concentrate on the small message I had:

1. We came from a mode where we saw all development as one large project, more or less.
2. We migrated our product from Perl to Java. That took us quite some time and this meant no new features for a long long time.
3. Close to the end of the migration we decided to go Scrum.
4. That wasn‘t easy but still successful as we delivered all of the first projects successfully.
5. We learnt that it‘s not all process but a lot of technical skills and craftsmanship. So, all the time we are oscillating between improving process -> working on skills -> improving process -> and so on.
6. We‘re not there yet, still lots to do in Test Automation, config management, etc.
7. Even more to do … ;-)
8. Same time, we introduced Kanban for maintenance, quite a difference again …

I could go on for ages, but I had only 6‘40‘‘.

I prepared myself for the presentation by looking into some examples on the web and some other presentation styles, like the famous Lessig style. The most impressive presentation that I came across was Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt (click and enjoy, I did so many times), which is one incredible piece of entertainment, information and incredibly precision. I really do not want to know at all how long Dick sat on the preparation. The video of his presentation is so effortless and flawless, I still can‘t believe it.

Anyway - it was clear at once that copying all the these brilliant guys makes no sense at all. I had to find my own way.

So I sat down and thought a little. I damned myself for the title of the presentation. The oh-so-funny travel metaphor got painful right away. Did I really want to keep that up through the presentation? Try to find a nice travel picture explaining for all the topics and concepts of your move to agile. Thanks for that.

So, I tried to refrain a little from the travel. I had no idea. Then I went running. As so often, that helped. At least, now I had a clear picture of the storyline and more: It should start out in a dark valley. Depression! But we knew there is a promised land. And there must be some way to get there. Then I could describe that we need a (travel) coach, show that promised land in all bright colors now. It‘s boring if things just go right from here on, so I needed some retarded moment in the presentation where the progress turns into bad luck again and then finally everything turns good anyway.

With the storyline and the pictures and colors in mind it all of a sudden was clear to me that the presentation needed a certain language. Like an old Humboldt report. Old language. Or even like a the language of one of my favorite writes oin one of his best books (where he describes his terrible fiction of a journey to the north pole): Christoph Ransmayr - Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, close to the boarder of being elevated or declamatory, nearly embarrassing myself. I wanted that language not only because it would fit the pictures but because I had the idea that it would be quite contradictory to the sheer speed of the Pecha Kucha format and make the experience more intense and dynamic and seemingly slower. Just like a really good musical solo - e.g. by Pat Metheny - where the musician starts of slow and then goes through all feelings possible for human beings, then suddenly dies and then comes to life again, not exploring only all notes and styles but also every volume there can possibly be. OK, I‘m not Pat nor any other master of anything, but I least I could give it all I got.

In a Sunday afternoon (and, I confess large parts of the evening) I got a good script together and had some pictures chosen. Now the embarrassing part: I knew I couldn‘t learn the whole text by heart. I also knew I couldn‘t talk in that style in free form, just like that. I guess, even Ransmayr couldn‘t do that or maybe he would. (It‘s a bit like talking old Latin language, try that. Yeah, I know, there are some who can, but hey!) But me: No way. It was Sunday, the presentation had to be held on Thursday, lots of work at mobile.de left to do. No chance of learning the script.

So the choice was: A) I do not learn the script well, get stuck somewhere, Bernd Schiffer‘s picture presentation software for the Pecha Kucha wouldn‘t stop, I would make a complete fool out of myself, not ending the 6‘40‘‘ presentation at all. B) I make half a fool out of myself, betraying the idea of Pecha Kucha and script read the whole thing, including feeling like a jerk and not getting the whole credit for the performance of course, as I didn‘t go the whole way.

Of course I decided for the latter, feeling bad about it. Finally, the Pecha Kucha was quite a success. But I do know that this would still have been so much more impressive had I just learned the sucker by heart and really ripped it all of. (Some written feedback on that point I got as well, damn!)

Anyway, you can have a look at the pictures here.

Journey Into Agile Land - Pecha Kucha

Finally a special Big Thank You! to Bernd Schiffer and Martin Heider who make such a good and dedicated job at establishing Pecha Kucha as an accepted and interesting format at the nicer conferences!

As @berndschiffer mentions in the comments, I’m also happy to include @jens_coldewey in the praise of having hosted the Pecha Kucha sessions at #xdde09. Further, I did not know (or unhappily forgot) about @StefanRoock pioneering this format already on the JAX2009! Thanks again to all involved for making it happen!

Thanks for your reading patience,

Markus

Sonne draußen

Der Winter wird ja immer besser. Jetzt kommt auch noch die Sonne raus.

Morgen also die längere Laufstrecke! Es bahnt sich evtl. doch ein Halbmarathon im Frühjahr an. Übrigens sind hier jetzt auch viele Skilangläufer unterwegs.