February, 2011

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Agile is More Than a Development Methodology

Monday, February 28th, 2011

Agile, at its core, is an organizational workflow and management practice. It enables empowerment of the team over bureaucratic authority and allows an organization to take control of their product strategy in the face of rapid change; much easier said, than done. Agile requires little paperwork, but a lot of discipline. In order for a company to succeed with Agile, it requires discipline based on a solid understanding of Agile methods throughout the organization.

Change and disruption are the realities for companies competing in the 21^st century. Just when an organization believes it has built a competitive advantage is when that organization needs to plan its next evolution. This is highlighted with Yahoo’s recent struggles. Yahoo was the first internet portal and pay-per-click search marketing engine, but they lost the race to Google. Now Google is looking at Facebook and is very concerned.

There are two very critical models in product theory. Model 1 is the S-curve as seen below:

The S-curve models the lifecycle of a product. Margin is made and market domination is built at the take off stage. As a product goes to maturity, the number of competitors’ increases, price erodes and margins dwindle. Agile methods in practice, allow a company to embrace change and operate in four to six week cycles. This operating mentality opens the business up to flexibility and agility in the face of a dynamically changing environment.

This capability is critical in handling product disruptions. If you have successfully managed a product through ferment into takeoff, disruption is an ever possible reality. A disruption makes the current product basically useless and either moves the market back to ferment or puts a “different” version of the product at the takeoff stage. (Perfect example of this is what happened with HD-DVD verses Blue Ray). If an organization is using Agile methods, they have a much greater chance of “seeing” the disruption because of the communication between departments that Agile requires. If the disruption is missed until impact, an organization using Agile can much more quickly retool and change to meet the disruption. Agile allows this based on the 4 to 6 week “sprint” development cycles and the consistent updates and reprioritization of the product back log.

Model 2 is The Critical Elements of Product Creation:

Successful products are developed based on an organization’s ability to understand these three elements. In traditional software / product development, the business teams understand value creation and competitive understanding and the development / engineering teams understand the organizational capability. Many times, when the two teams are out of alignment, opportunities are chased which are outside capabilities. Real opportunities are then missed because the business didn’t know what the organization could do.

Agile methods bring the business team into day to day contact with the development team. Not all day contact, but contact. This increase in the number of conversations allows more straight forward information sharing and basically makes capabilities become transparent. As capabilities become transparent, the business team opens its “eyes” to great opportunities and the development team opens its “eyes” to its deficiencies based on market demands.

Product strategy today has to revolve around change. Gone are the days of an eighteen month product development schedule or a locked down product roadmap. Agile was developed to empower teams and companies to meet the demands of a change on products and solutions. The methodology is successful because it demands participation from all aspects of the organization, not just development. The participation demanded is not excessive, but it is consistent. When executed with precision, an organization can truly align business with IT and gain a competitive advantage.

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Hire Tough to Manage Easy and the Rule of Three

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

As the economy slowly picks up, employee turnover will rise. If you have highly skilled, in-demand workers, the poaching will begin, especially if they have Internet or electronic marketing experience. (This recently happened to us.) You will also see unhappy employees leave – you may not have even known they were unhappy, or realize that you contributed to their unhappiness. A poor economy means one thing: people are afraid to move and therefoe turnover rates decrease. So, as the economy picks up, you better be ready to fill positions.

When someone leaves a critical position, our instinct is to fill it fast. This is very, very bad. It is like emotional intelligence. Our brains are wired for fight or flight to handle difficult situations. In the business world neither of these works. To be successful you need strong emotional intelligence to counteract your limbic reaction, and to use your cognitive skills to find a more appropriate reaction. The same is true when hiring after a critical loss: Control the initial reaction to grab the first person you come across and write up a plan instead.

Here are the parts of the plan as I see it:

Double how long you initially expect the hiring process to take. If you think it will take six weeks, expect 12.
Seek help. Recruiters and placement firms can be powerful partners in your process.
Make sure you are up-to-date on what the position does and what you expect in return in the position. Rewrite the position description based on expected outcomes.
Ensure you have carved out time on your schedule to review resumes, conduct interviews, follow up, check references, and finally, negotiate.

Now wrap around all four parts with “Hire Tough to Manage Easy” and the rule of three. You need to take the time, effort, energy and discipline to find the “right” person for the position. If you do this, managing that person will be significantly easier. You do not want to go through a three or four month hiring process, all the while dealing with the extra work load, just to find that you’ve hired in vain. In other words, you just wasted all that time and hired someone who doesn’t fit in with your team, thought the job was different than what it actually is, or can’t do the job. All of these things can lead to another job opening for the same position within six months, and even one year of lost productivity.

The rule of three ties directly into this. For each position you are hiring, you need to winnow your candidate list to three people you think are great for the job. From there, you need three other people in your organization to interview each of them. Who should these interviewers be? People who currently holds the responsibilities of that position, will work close with this person, you trust and respect, or is from HR. In addition, your boss may want to interview this person, but don’t count her/him as one of the three. Yes, this will be difficult and time consuming, but it will give you a much broader and detailed look at the candidates than what you could possibly do on your own. The key is to empower yourself with as much information about your candidates you can possibly get. Even with a careful process, there is the possibility of failure, BUT it reduces the risk of failure by a significant amount.

I mentioned before recruiting and placement firms can be incredibly helpful with your hiring plan. In following the rule of three, one of the biggest challenges is building a pipeline of candidates large enough to find the precious few. There are a few guidelines to follow when using these services:

Contract with one of these firms before you ever start looking.
Make sure their commission is paid by you and not the candidate. You want a buyer’s agent – not a seller’s!!!
There is nothing wrong with using multiple firms in a search. Do not sign up for an exclusive arrangement, and never let someone talk you out of looking yourself.
You can expect to pay a 10 to 20% fee based on the first year’s salary. This will come out either as a bulk amount or, if you are temporary-to-hire, it will be part of the margin in the hourly fee.
On top of the fee you want to look at the guarantee. Most firms will give you a 90 day guarantee. Meaning you have 90 days from time of hire to get your money back if the candidate doesn’t work out. This is an industry standard for high based salaried account managers or directors/executives. You can negotiate a six month guarantee and that guarantee is critical.

In following the hire tough rule, you must make sure candidates know what is expected of them before they take the position. The traditional position description is NOT a good tool to show this. It is basically a laundry list of duties with no understanding of what takes priority and what the expectations are.

Below is an example of utilizing the expected outcomes to build a position description:

Expected outcomes/Key results areas

Book $60K+ in monthly public seat sales in assigned territory

Tasks to achieve key result area

Follow up on all leads generated by all marketing activities within territory
Build, own and grow relationships with customers
Manage pipeline and report on it weekly
Maintain sales activity in Goldmine CRM database
Sell horizontally and vertically in past attendee companies in territory
Cold call to build suspect database, minimum goal of 100 new names each month

Collect and enter at least 100 new prospects into Goldmine CRM system each month from sales territory

Tasks to achieve results

Cold call smartly into sales territory
Work with marketing to develop lead generation (suspecting) strategies
Select call time (A time) and plan daily call volume to ensure metric is made
Set strategy for call activity including script and territory to call into
Report on new suspects daily

Make at least 200 calls a week

Tasks to achieve result

Plan daily activates
Select “A” time and “B” time each day (“A” time is calling time “B” time is admin work)
Plan to make customer call backs from prior classes weekly
Plan to make cold calls daily
Report on call volume daily

The position is given three major expected outcomes/key results, and tied to each are the associated tasks that someone in this position does to achieve those results. A candidate can quickly and easily see what is expected and know what he/she will be doing.

Hiring tough to manage easy isn’t easy, but it will ensure increased productivity and decreased turnover in the long run.

Posted in An Executive's View, Communication, Jobs | Comments Off

Happy 10th Birthday to the Agile Manifesto

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

Saturday, February 12^th marked a historical milestone for the agile community, the Agile Manifesto turned 10 years old. For those of you who don’t know the story… 10 years ago at the Snowbird Ski Resort in Salt Lake City, Utah a group of 17 “lightweight” software development methodologists gathered to discuss their plight. You see the industry had saddled them with the moniker “light” and they didn’t appreciate it. They felt that they had more to contribute to the world, hence the birth of the term “agile”. Since that historical meeting of the minds, agile has spread around the world and is far on its way to becoming mainstream.

To celebrate the Agile Manifesto’s birthday I would like to re-print it here.

“We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.”

http://www.agilemanifesto.org

Since 10 years is such a significant milestone the “Agile Alliance”, as the 17 are called, they recently held a reunion back at Snowbird. Alistair Cockburn organized the gathering and due to the rapid growth of the community it was by invitation only. The group of agilists that attended focused on answering 3 questions…

1. “What problems in software or product development have we solved (and therefore should not simply keep re-solving)?”
2. “What problems are fundamentally unsolvable (so therefore we should not keep trying to “solve” them)?”
3. “What problems can we sensibly address – problems that we can mitigate either with money, effort or innovation? (and therefore, these are the problems we should set our attention to, next.)”

If you are like me you didn’t get an invite, but would have given your first born to attend (just kidding). Fortunately, now that the web is mainstream and social media is prime-time, there are plenty of ways for all of us to contribute. If you would like to answer the 3 questions then visit http://10yearsagile.org and speak your mind. If you would like to join the conversation on Twitter then use hashtag “#10yrsagile”. I can’t help but being optimistic about what the next 10 years holds for agile, only time will tell, but I can guarantee that it will be a wild ride.

By: Brian M. Rabon, an ASPE-SDLC instructor who is a CST and a PMP. Brian is also the president of The Briantrust Consulting Group. You can read his blog, find him on Facebook, and connect with him on Linkedin or Twitter. Brian is a regular contributor to the ASPE-SDLC Blog and a thought leader in the fields of Agile and Traditional Project Management as it applies to Software Development.

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You Might Be a BA If…

Friday, February 18th, 2011

Posted in BA, Business Analysis, cartoons, just for fun | Comments Off

Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) – Taking Scrum Certification to the Next Level

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Have you ever stopped to think what makes the PMI’s Project Management Professional (PMP) certification so valuable? Besides the fact that the two-hundred question exam is so challenging, it’s that you need a minimum of three years industry experience to even apply to sit for the exam. Employers know that if you have your PMP then you have a good grasp of project management fundamentals and some relevant experience in the field.

With so many companies implementing Scrum today, how do you go about demonstrating your knowledge and experience with it? The answer is the Scrum Alliance’s Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) designation. The Scrum Alliance website states, “Potential employers can be assured that when someone is a CSP they have taken the initiative to go beyond a foundation-level understanding to achieve a depth of knowledge and experience in the Scrum process.”

How do you become a CSP? Here is a roadmap to guide you along your journey.

Take a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) or Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) course; each course is two days in duration (Note: If you take a CSM course then you will need to take the CSM assessment before becoming a CSM)
Gain a year of experience with Scrum (Note: the clock starts ticking when you start practicing Scrum, not when you take a CSM or CSPO course)
Complete the application (available on the Scrum Alliance website http://www.scrumalliance.org/pages/certified_scrum_professional)
Submit your application by signing and e-mailing it to the Scrum Alliance (practicingcertification@scrumalliance.org)
Your application will be reviewed by the Scrum Alliance (typically a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) or a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) will review your application)
A Scrum Alliance representative may contact you to ask you clarifying questions your application
You will then be notified if your application passes or not
If you pass the application review process then you will be eligible to submit the $250 certification fee and become a CSP

As you can see this certification takes a bit more work than the CSM or CSPO designations, therefore it is more valuable to yourself and to employers. This message is making its way through the industry and in the future you can expect to see more weight being given to CSP and less to CSM and CSPO. If you are serious about Scrum and want to show employers and the world that you have experience, then the Scrum Alliance’s CSP is for you. Visit http://www.scrumalliance.org/pages/certified_scrum_professional to download and application and apply today!

By: Brian M. Rabon, an ASPE-SDLC instructor who is a CSM, CSP, MSEE and PMP. Brian is also the president of The Briantrust Consulting Group. You can read his blog, find him on Facebook, and connect with him on Linkedin or Twitter. Brian is a regular contributor to the ASPE-SDLC Blog and a thought leader in the fields of Agile and Traditional Project Management as it applies to Software Development.

Posted in ASPE, ASPE-SDLC, Agile, Agile Development, Agile Software, CSP, PMI, PMP, Project Management, Project Managers, Scrum, Scrum Alliance, Scrum Certification, certification | 18416 Responses »http://www.aspe-sdlc.com/blog/?p=18412011-02-16+15%3A15%3A34Traci+Lester