unacoder

separated at birth?

2011-02-11T15:26:00.000-05:00

Josh Kerievsky

Michael Nyqvist

"agile doesn't work" doesn't work: open letter to an IT weasel

2011-02-11T11:49:00.000-05:00

i have a hard time accepting that "agile doesn't work." "agile" is a bullshit word in and of itself. the failure is yours, whatever path you followed to it. my question then is: what did you do to prevent failure or improve upon your ability to deliver?

secondarily, did your old process "work"? my guess is no, given your attempt to use another process or methodology. but i would congratulate you on recognizing that failure and experimenting with positive change.

quote of the day-or-so

2011-02-09T14:09:00.000-05:00

[My son] broke a CFL on the floor of his carpeted room last week. After learning the clean-up and dangers involved, CFLs have now been banned from this house from all but bathroom light fixtures. I already hated the light from those bulbs. I never want to expose my children to the innards if those bulbs again.

facebook friend

Kucinich drafts bill for new agency

2011-01-28T19:57:00.001-05:00

On the heels of his victory over cafeteria moguls, Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) declared at a rally on the mall his intent to introduce HR-45, The Sandwich Safety Act, which will establish the National Sandwich Safety Administration. Says Kucinich, "The lack of transparency for deli product safety has left Big Sandwich to squash our lunch rights for too long. This bill will establish a regulatory body ensuring delivery of open-faced sandwiches, guaranteeing America's citizens are not threatened by lunch meats or condiments."

Due to an improperly pitted olive, Kucinich has undergone several surgeries from a split tooth.

At the anti-sandwich rally, student agitator Sarah Bachman of Landover, Maryland led a crowd of nine protesters in a chant of "Peace now! Sandwiches free from hidden dangers now!" She is pursuing a degree in licensed accountancy.

Lester Murgrunch, director of Office of Federal Financial Management within the OMB, expalins that Kucinich's repeated absences for medical treatment have "saved an estimated 867 million dollars" since the unfortunate event, enough to fund the proposed office for a full half year.

twc fail

2010-10-30T18:36:00.002-05:00

i eventually figured out how to load espn3 to my xbox. twc is a big boner in attempting to block my access, including this attempt to register on their site. obstructionist enough to be republican.

thankfully, their login process isn't all that robust.

so you guys are agile?

2010-10-18T08:16:00.001-05:00

Hi [unacoder],

Yes I'm aware there are broken tests, I have 20 at my end. I'm going to fix these on Thursday when I fix the outstanding bugs.

I had to check in a few fixes in a hurry on Friday without getting chance to review the unit tests This was to give [project manager] the option of having an interim release between now next Thursday.

I hope this is not causing you any problems.

actually, yeah, that's a bit of an issue.

quote of the day-or-so

2010-09-22T12:27:00.000-05:00

So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves.

Marilyn Ferguson

quote of the day-or-so

2010-09-18T23:20:00.003-05:00

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

Ayn Rand

quote of the day-or-so

2010-09-01T06:17:00.000-05:00

Government programs to promote homeownership are American as flag-flavored eagle pie.

Will Wilkinson

xbox live adds content!

2010-08-31T09:35:00.000-05:00

unfortunately, i can't use any of it. espn3 is coming soon, so i could conceivably catch OSU games. unfortunately, time warner sucks megadong and won't pay the extortion fee enabling my access to the stream. xbox is also adding hulu plus, which itself requires a separate subscription—none of the free content will be available. these extra features will cost me an extra $10 per annum, which is fairly cheap if were to use them.

the incentive trap

2010-08-18T17:30:00.001-05:00

i'm certain many folks are already familiar with Dan Pink's TED talk on the science of motivation.

the key elements of motivation are

Autonomy – The urge to direct our own lives
Mastery – The desire to get better and better at something that matters
Purpose – The yearning to do something that we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

my first session at Agile2010 was with Simon Bennett, who ran a hands-on exercise to illustrate the same concepts. we were split into four teams: two with somewhat standard roles and pay-for-performance plans (taken from actual companies), one organized as a group of volunteers donating to a charity, and the last (mine) run as a self-organizing team with a simple, evenly split pay structure.

the work for each team, it was revealed after the experiment, was exactly the same (math problems with varying complexity), with exactly the same calculations for value delivered. the only difference, other than the pay structure, was that the volunteer team was actually playing for a real donation to their charity, though they did not know that ahead of time, i think. the results were amazing, even after having read on the subject and seen the video above. my team (self-organized) achieved a value of 54 with average pay and highest pay of 13.5. the first team of old-school roles and pay achieved a delivered value of -19, though their average pay was 13.5 and highest pay topped out around 25 or so. the second old-school team achieved a value of 0 with fairly low pay results, due mainly to a lack of work management, which was itself affected by the pay structure. the volunteers delivered a value of about 19 though their pay was fairly low (sorry, Doctors Without Borders).

the most interesting part of all of this is that no one actually made any real money, but the effects were measurable nonetheless.

in discussion, we decided that almost everything about a standard model of a corporation is wrong: from the language of a job description or role to the often cross-competitive pay structures for those different roles. secrecy itself, required to mask vast differences in pay, can hinder the delivery of value.

at the end of the day, incentives can only reveal priorities or demotivate workers by blocking intrinsic motivators or creating feelings of inequality. so our lessons as leaders are

inspire purpose
remove demotivating forces
grow expectations of success
promote connection over competition

these lessons appear obvious, but they are always given short shrift.

ticket system as anti-pattern

2010-08-18T17:03:00.002-05:00

what drives a company or business unit to install a ticket system? to be sure, there are benefits to be recognized from the use of a system to track work items. similar to a backlog, a ticket system prevents ideas or requirements from escaping the established business process. it offers a means of examining the history of work through trending analysis, or just aggregating the thoughts of numerous individuals.

so why is it that ticket systems are often such a pain in my ass? the answer lies in the ridiculous behavior teams or organizations often apply to their use. based on personal experience, most often ticket systems introduce barriers between communities, encouraging delay and disconnection. further, they are almost always used to enforce a metric of time-to-resolution, without regard to any concept of value provided. a necessary consequence of such thinking is the optimization of the "delivery" of bad software or service.

let's consider a recent example. in my team room, we have a wonderful multi-function device (MFD) that i wanted to map as my default printer. it is ten feet from my usual desk. (i won't get into why i have a usual desk in a team room. that's a topic for a different rant.) by convention, our printers have a pad of sheets near them, usually mounted on the wall or side of the device, that offer the details necessary to use them from windows. this printer did not have such a pad and had only a phone number to call, which was not answered.

all i needed was the network name of the printer. naturally, i called the help desk. (i know ticket systems suck, especially those that have a preface page that suggests strongly that one call the help desk because one's issue is statistically more likely to be resolved in hours rather than days.) the helper on the other end of the line gave me a ticket system (one of many) to use to submit my request. furthermore, he gave me the Topic i needed to select such that the correct "resolving agency" would answer my question: Request a new pad for printer. (i would note that this particular ticket system requires a user to select among hundreds of Topics before submitting a request. good luck if you don't know the language and domain of the appropriate resolving agency!)

navigating to the request form, i noted that the first field required the network name of the printer. i dutifully filled out and submitted the information, using "unknown" as the name, confident that i could use this printer once i returned from my week-long conference.

eleven days after i submitted my ticket, i received an email from a random woman stating that hers was not the correct resolving agency since this was an MFD and not a printer, but she would enter an appropriate ticket for me. not very long after, i received an automatic notification that the new ticket was Resolved. being the curious sort, i strolled over to the MFD to find the magic pad. no pad.

the result: i have one phone call and two tickets through three different failure demand pathways and no value to me. metrics: phone call over and done in two minutes max, one ticket done in minutes, another done in 11 calendar days. good? bad? indifferent.

law of intended consequences

2010-08-11T16:32:00.003-05:00

directly from Talking Points Memo:

quote of the day-or-so

2010-06-30T16:58:00.002-05:00

If 'the people' want to ban handguns, they say, 'the people' should be allowed to implement that desire through their elected representatives. What if the people want to ban books that offend them, establish an official church, or authorize police to conduct warrantless searches at will? Those options are also foreclosed by constitutional provisions that apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment. The crucial difference between a pure democracy and a constitutional democracy like ours is that sometimes the majority does not decide.

Jacob Sullum

quote of the day-or-so

2010-05-24T12:41:00.000-05:00

Every time I surrender, even necessarily, to authority which disregardingly or contemptuously violates me, so I violate myself. Every time I break an unnecessary law, doing so for my own joy and to the detriment of no other human being, so I regain myself, and become strong in the parts of me that the security man can never see.

William T. Vollmann

Oh Really?

2009-12-02T09:06:00.003-05:00

President Obama speaks:

As president, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests.

I know he's talking about Afghanistan. But thinking in a broad sense, this seems to be patently false based on his past actions.

This is the peanut gallery, signing off.

quote of the day-or-so

2009-11-24T19:14:00.001-05:00

gotta get it together...I might as well homeschool if I going to put this much effort into getting [my son] the education he needs. At least then he would have recess EVERY day AND be challenged...*sigh*:(

Facebook mother

quote of the day-or-so

2009-11-15T08:54:00.001-05:00

Do not consider Collectivists as sincere but deluded idealists. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not idealistic, no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to do good by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

Ayn Rand

quote of the day-or-so

2009-11-11T11:22:00.003-05:00

We ... perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.

The Americanization of Emily, via Sheldon Richman

quote of the day-or-so

2009-10-30T18:29:00.001-05:00

No matter what you think of Rand, there's no denying that the woman just swings a really big dick.

Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv

quote of the day-or-so

2009-10-09T05:42:00.000-05:00

It's a bit odd that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on the same morning that the U.S. is bombing the moon.

Peter J. Orvetti

quote of the day-or-so

2009-10-04T15:03:00.001-05:00

[I wonder] if homework for 3rd graders is intended for the parents and not the students... I can't get over the busywork that is categorized as 'homework!'

public school dad on facebook

quote of the day-or-so

2009-09-17T19:43:00.002-05:00

quote of the day-or-so

2009-09-16T09:29:00.001-05:00

You don't expect to hear that someone you know killed a guy with a samurai sword.

Diego Ardila

Weighing In

2009-09-11T15:02:00.005-05:00

First, here's my reference link : A transcript of Obama's speech on the 9th.

We'll do this by creating a new insurance exchange -- a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices. Insurance companies will have an incentive to participate in this exchange because it lets them compete for millions of new customers. As one big group, these customers will have greater leverage to bargain with the insurance companies for better prices and quality coverage.

It hits the right buzzwords : marketplace, shop, incentive, competitive prices, bargain. But only in regards to consumers buying health insurance. It doesn't speak at all to the real issue - That consumers are no longer the customer for health care. Insurance companies and governments are.

This seems wrong to me.

I'm not against the Obama plan, not really. But I think it's misleading. It's not a fundamental shift. It's a band-aid at best. It supports the status quo. Therefore I'm not that excited about it.

And for further reading, I enjoyed this piece from the The Atlantic.