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2021 will be the best year in our lives. It stands to reason because 2020 is the worst year in our lives.
Unexpected Parties are the Best FOMO - the greatest pedestal for disappointment. How many parties have you been to, expecting to find the greatest party on the planet, only to find another lame one. Especially as a kid, you have to go to this party because everyone else is there and it’s going to be the biggest thing of the year, but then it sucked. How many parties, gigs, events, have you been to with no expectations, and then come away with some of the greatest memories of your life? After the misery that is 2020, most of us are going into 2021, hopeful yes, expectant, I doubt it. Most of us are in some form of lockdown, Christmas cancelled, missing friends and family. You are thankfully still employed but your annual ski trip has been cancelled. You’re not booking your next holiday yet and if you like going on a cruise then good luck planning that anytime soon. However, all these things will happen next year (and I’m not just saying that because I’ve bought cruiseliner stock). I’m looking forward to going snowboarding next year and making my yearly trip to an Italian city (or two). I don’t know when I’m going to book it, but with the vaccine now being rolled out, it will happen soon. And when it does, boy am I going to let my hair down. Economic Bounceback - Better than a Dead Cat Bounce! Yes we have had a few false starts. It’s like trying to watch a movie before you have finished downloading it and you keep hitting the downloaded limit because you’re watching it quicker than the download speed. We miss our normal lives, spending money, socialising. Just look at Amazon and Zoom stock if you don’t believe me. Once the download speed is faster than we can watch, people are going to party like it’s 1999 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rblt2EtFfC4). Everyday will be a celebration! People will just be happy to be out, everyone will just be that little bit nicer feeling that freedom that has finally arrived. To make us all feel better there will be deals everywhere, shops will be desperate to stop you doing all your shopping online. There will be last year's colours and cuts to sell off, those designer shoes that never left the factory. Compulsive buying disorder is never greater than when you are walking around a store with all that temptation on show. The biggest difference between this recession and the last one, is that if you have kept your job, the money is still there to be spent (whereas last time the value of money halved or worse). Being in lockdown with very few shops open has led to a lot of people saving. People will spend this money on clothes, cars, and holidays, giving the economy a big jolt. People need to let loose, and they will in a big way as soon as they can. Forced Progress No one wanted or really anticipated Covid, but look at the innovation it has caused. We have made significant progress with medicine. Never in the history of mankind have we created a vaccine as quickly as the multiple Covid vaccines. We’ve progressed mRNA vaccines quicker than we ever would have without Covid. Remote working, while it has long been a thing, it has finally found its place. From large companies that paid lip service to it, who had their hand forced and didn’t go under (although I’m sure some micromanagers have gone stir crazy), to the employees who said they would work from home every day if they could, only to find that in practice it drives them crazy and they can’t wait to see the office again. People have learnt how to cut hair (with mixed results). People have survived without manis and pedis and people have learnt how to keep fit without the gym. People have learnt how to school their children and work at the same time, and people have learnt their neighbours name and what they need buying from the shops. Things will be different on the other side, but they will be different because we want them to be. We will still travel to meetings and have business trips but we’ll do them when we think they are needed, not because it is normal. Yes we will still meet our families at Christmas but Zooming with relatives we can’t see will no longer be something unusual. Companies will still work in offices but flexible working and hotdesking will become the norm. We will take what we have learnt and it will compliment our world, not replace it. The Rising Sun We’re close on this one now. There are multiple vaccines being rolled out and there are green shoots to give us hope. I know it sucks that Christmas and New Year are going to be the biggest disappointments we’ve ever had in our lifetimes but the darkest hour is just before the dawn, and what a dawn it is going to be!
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Silicon Valley is full of companies with great stories. We’ve all heard of them, Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, some have even been made into great movies like Jobs and The Social Network. These stories inspire people to try and create their own success stories. The sad fact is that 90% of startups fail and those are the ideas that even make it the startup stage.
Movies have a unique way of creating reality. I was watching John Wick 2 last night where they are in a very decorative hotel lobby in Rome, where in reality it’s actually the bar of an upscale hotel with statues added. I remember being in Venice and trying to hunt down a church from an Indiana Jones movie. When I found it, it turns out they only used the outside for the film and the interior was all created on a film set with no link to reality at all. There are many differences from the Social Network and the real Facebook story, by the director’s own admission they were more interested in telling the most interesting story rather than telling the real story, which is why Mark Zuckerberg refused to help them with it. My point is, live the book, write the movie. When you are thinking about starting your own company you must forget about success, forget about the movie. That’s for Future You to worry about, if and when you make it. You don’t hear many stories about the failed startups. History is written by the winners, so you can see why history sounds so rosey. The few failure stories out there are usually still written by the winners. How they failed so much before they succeeded. You hear how Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates all dropped out of school or college. These are some of the few successful people who dropped out and made it. Most people that dropped out did not become billionaires. The reality is, it’s hard work, really hard work, with a lot of sacrifice needed to even have a chance of success. For the fairy tale to exist, one must have eaten a few poisonous apples. The problem is that we all want to be an overnight success. As Jeff Bezos said, Amazon’s overnight success took 10 years. If you want guidance on how to be successful you need to focus on what you’re doing and not on the outcomes. Ignore the day to day results at first because success doesn’t just happen like in the movies. You need to work your arse off, and you need to do it everyday. Have a vision, a goal. Work out what you want, clearly define it and work out why you want to achieve this vision. What were you born to achieve? When you are passionate about this vision and you know you can make a difference, it becomes more than that, it becomes a calling. A calling is something you owe the world and you cannot stop until you deliver it. When you have a clear vision, the work becomes easier. Hard work becomes less effort. Once you have that vision, don’t let people put you off. So many people will tell you it’s too much hard work or your dreams are too big, ignore them. Believe in yourself. Before Roger Bannister ran the 4 minute mile it was impossible. Once he broke it, it was broken again the same year. Once a goal becomes real, suddenly people believe and commit to trying harder. Suddenly it’s not impossible Above all else, work your arse off. Success does not come easy. Yes there will be late nights, and so much coffee you’ll have wished you'd bought stock. There will be failures and close calls. There will be stress and sacrifice. But if you have a clear vision and you are committed, you can succeed. You won't succeed by half assing. You won't succeed by giving up. If you want something take it. Be prepared to give it all and more. After all, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Don’t become another statistic, live the book and then we’ll make your movie. A theme that has infiltrated many areas of business these days is the iterative process. Yes, it has been around for a long time when it comes to Agile development but it is so much more than that these days and there are many other business areas that are benefiting from it.
A core benefit of Agile development is the iterative process. It was the reason I moved across from Waterfall development, I wanted to know how to get faster feedback. I was frustrated by the fact that it took a long time to get my software in the hands of the user and by the time it was, it was either outdated or I found out that the requirements I had been given were not entirely accurate; when I had , in my eyes, already finished development. Being able to get a regular feedback loop in place significantly improved this process. At first I felt it was restrictive as I was not releasing my software as quickly as before. Bugs or previously unthought out criteria being found by QA, meant that I wasn’t able to consider things done as quickly as before. However this frustration soon subsided after I found that my software wasn’t coming back to me after I had considered it done. This is when I really started to appreciate the fast feedback loop of the iterative process, despite the extra work it needs in the short term.
So what other business areas can benefit from this approach? Company objectives and personal objectives when approached using OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) can follow this theme. Doing away with the annual performance goals for employees and the months of planning that goes into setting company goals that are usually over a year out of date by the time they are delivered, can be a thing of the past. By setting quarterly goals for both the company (departments) and employees, we can add more flexibility and focus on delivering meaningful goals. If the climate changes, the goals change. Budgets are set accordingly so we are not wasting (insert currency of choice here) on outdated requirements. Whatever the most important area of focus is for employees can be adjusted for the quarter. Heck, you can even adjust them within the quarter if you are feeling that crazy! We should not be getting to the end of the year or even the quarter with questions over progress. The company, the employees, the managers, should all know what the current status of progress towards the goal is. There should not be surprises at the end of the year, where a company or employee finds out they didn’t do enough or the effort they put in was great but due to xyz, what we set out to do was no longer the game changing priority it was when we committed the company budget to it. Over the last couple of years working closely with CS (Customer Success), one of my pet peeves has become not knowing if a customer is happy. At the outset of the relationship CS works with the customer and Sales team to establish what they are paying us for and off we go. Under no circumstances should the next time we talk to the customer be when we are reviewing their contract renewal. All this leads to is panic, running around fixing things and and building out last minute features to make sure a Save Plan is fulfilled. To avoid this unnecessary panic, customer QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) are the answer. If you have thousands of customers then meeting all of them quarterly might not be realistic. This all depends on your business model. I’m not expecting Netflix to call me anytime soon to make sure I renew. If you have lots of customers then maybe reserve the QBRs for the biggest contracts. But if you value a relationship, and by value I mean you can’t afford a nasty surprise at contract renewal time, then make sure you have QBRs. These will make sure you are delighting the customer, your business is providing tangible value to their business, and your roadmaps are aligned to create a meaningful partnership. So, the answer to no surprises is, if you want to ensure you don’t have a job that slowly kills you or bruises that won't heal, make sure you have an iterative feedback loop in your process. Covid, something that has impacted all of us. We started by reading about this mysterious virus in China that very quickly landed on our doorsteps. It’s changed how we live and interact with each other, it’s changed how we work, it’s changed how we behave and it will change how the future is shaped. Doc Brown once said “the future isn’t written yet, so make it a good one”. I hear many thoughts on how Covid is going to write our future, how we will never go back to the way things were. Well, with or without Covid, things never go back to the way things were so that is not something to be afraid of. Things like the motor car scared people. It went so fast and why would people ever need to be in such a hurry? The TV and then the Internet changed how we communicate and how information (or disinformation) can be spread. Yes Covid will have an impact on how the future is written but it will not write the future on it’s own! There will be a vaccine and there will be more Covid’s. There will be more motorcars and Internet game changing moments. All these will help form the future but we are the ones who will write the future. Working life will not go back to how it was. Even though people have short memories I can’t see a 100% office based company anymore. Flexible working will become the new norm. There will be offices but people will hot-desk and switch between the office and home. This is a good thing. It promotes the flexible working that we have been striving for (and some untrusting managers who fight against it). Enabling and empowering working parents without the concern that working from home and being flexible could somehow disadvantage them. We will go back to the office, let’s face it, there are some clients I couldn’t see me inviting back to mine for a meeting on my sofa (some might prefer it though). We need the water cooler chat and the after work beer to break down the social barriers. We can try all we like to have Zoom coffee events but they will never replace the benefits of a face to face get to know you. We didn’t need Covid to find this out. Why do you think we get on a plane to visit clients and build these relationships. It makes them stronger. When you get to know someone, see how they treat the waiter, see how they act when they are tired or have a beer or 2, it tells you more about the person than 30 mins on a video chat. Another interesting Covid Moment is cash. BC (Before Covid) cash was fading out, albeit slowly. There were campaigns in place to make sure cash machines didn’t vanish along with the ever diminishing number of banks. Suddenly everywhere I go it’s card only. No one wants to deal with dirty coins and the risk they bring of carrying germs. Sadly a reason we campaigned to keep cash was for the older generation who might not use cards. Sadly, the older generation might still be using cash, carrying germs, or Covid. There’s an idea. The campaigns shouldn’t be about keeping cash for the older generation the campaigns should be about getting cards into the hands of the older generation so they can be safer (any volunteers to run that please?) It will be nice when I can greet someone again without it feeling like a scene out of Mortal Kombat. Both wearing masks with arms flailing around like Scorpion while we try and work out if we are going to fist pump or touch elbows or both (AKA spear or leg takedown). The masks will subside (and I can’t wait). Hopefully humanity comes out of this with a more responsible sense of hygiene. Hopefully we can appreciate the fragility of the world and do more as a collective to help it. It will be nice to walk around and be able to see people smiling again. When Covid is under control we can reclaim what was great about the world and improve on it with what we have learnt during these times. We will have a greater understanding, and hopefully a greater sense of appreciation and responsibility for the world and each other. The future isn’t written yet and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Covid write it. Humanity will write it together, so let’s make it a good one! Meetings, the alternative to work, where the minutes are taken and the hours are lost. So many initiatives are created to make them more productive, keep people on point or just keep people out of them.
Something I’ve recently started doing is front loading the meetings in my day where possible. This helps by ensuring that when actions come out of the meetings there is time in the day still to do them. This also helps to ensure that when things come up during the day that have to be taken care of urgently, you are less likely to have to move meetings to accommodate them. This helps reduce one of my meeting pet peeves, meeting procrastination. If I have to move a meeting then I will move it once and do everything I can to make sure the newly arranged time is met. Obviously there are exceptions but if I have to move a meeting a second time, I really put some consideration into whether the meeting is actually needed, considering we have survived this long without it. Another key to reducing the meetings in your diary is delegation, or more specifically ensuring that the right people are in the meeting and the wrong people are not. If a member of your team can contribute more to the meeting than you and you are both in the meeting, why are you in the meeting? There are too many meetings that contain people who are not contributing. If they are not needed, it is the responsibility of the meeting host to ensure they are not there. There are alternatives to this, for example Elon Musk’s 3 meeting rules: 1. No large meetings Make sure that you are not inviting people who don't need to be there, try and keep the numbers as low as possible 2. If you're not adding value to a meeting, leave This is one I’ve used in the past but disagree with now. We would have people complain that they were wasting their time being in the meeting so we started telling them they could leave whenever they wanted. Once decisions were being made without their input they soon stayed in the meeting until the end. So this meant they were needed. This comes back to the previous point, if they are not adding value, the host should not have invited them. 3. No frequent meetings This is another one with a grey area. I think frequent meetings for Agile ceremonies are very much needed and these are not as painful as some make out. Working in an Agile environment, sometimes it can feel like there are a lot of meetings. Stand Ups, Sprint Planning , Retros, and that’s before the unofficial Agile meetings like Story Grooming sessions. You’ll find that there are just as many meetings using Waterfall but we don’t think of them because they are not named. Meetings such as catch-up with Jeff, workshop with Maria and so on. These ad hoc meetings quickly add up but without the recurring named meetings, they are quickly forgotten and never seem to happen as often as they do. If you are running a project then having regular meetings to touch base is very much necessary. Where I would agree with Elon is if this frequently recurring meeting is not needed and will not add value then it should be cancelled. We have enough to do without having to attend a meeting with no agenda. Speaking of meetings with no agenda, there are behaviours that should be considered for every meeting without fail:
So meetings are important, they are very much needed but they need rules, and they need to have a purpose and an outcome. If you find yourself in endless meetings where you are not contributing, ask the host why you have been invited and what you are expected to contribute. It may be you are needed but not for the whole meeting. Things like this need to be considered. Next time you arrange a meeting, take a step back and work out how much this meeting is going to cost is salaries per hour with all those people sat there. Can the meeting be shorter, can the information be sought in another way, is there an alternative that would work? The most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do with Agile is remote ceremonies. I would always insist on people joining in person whenever possible and I always designed the ceremony to have the greatest impact on those in the room. People who dialled in were never an afterthought but I was convinced that they would not benefit from the session as much as the people in the room. Retrospectives were the biggest challenge. You can only really participate if you were there, how else could you be fully involved and grasp the feeling in the room. Even with video, how would it even be possible to understand the vibe of the group if you weren’t there. It was a problem that could not be solved so why even bother trying to solve it. They would just have to understand the impact and it doesn't matter too much anyway because we always have most people in the room so it’s fine.
Well, looks like I don't have a choice anymore. Not only is this something that needs to be addressed now, it might be the way forward for a long (if not permanent) time. So what are the rules that need to be in place for this to work? Well if we are going to make sure that we can communicate effectively we need to be able to see each other, that means video. There is something about looking someone in the eyes that makes communication easier. It also forces focus, if we are all on video we are obliged to pay attention. It’s easier to pay attention when you know all eyes could be on you. Another thing that we can do with video that is more effective than audio alone is interact. Just because we are not all sat in the same room doesn’t mean we can’t do physical things. Doing things like getting people to stand up and jump about a bit and being able to see each other do this is fun and you can all laugh about it together like you were in the same room. So it’s not the same but it’s not an excuse to have a dry boring retrospective. There are a few video conferencing tools out there but I like using Google Meet https://meet.google.com/ as it’s free and comes with most of the features that paid video conferencing tools come with. Collaboration is probably the most important part of Agile. So video is a good start but we need to be able to share things in real time. When we are sitting in a room one of my favourite bits of kit is a whiteboard. The ability to write things down and share things instantly with the team is very effective. Losing this ability in a Retrospective is very disruptive to the flow of the meeting. After searching high and wide I have finally settled on a whiteboard that I find great for sharing online, Whiteboard Fox https://whiteboardfox.com/. Multiple people can all share and contribute to this in real time which is great for when we want to work together on a problem. Taking this one step further and using this on a touch screen makes it much easier to use than with a mouse. Another great tool that helps with collaboration is Slack https://slack.com/. Being able to use something that we can share links and other text on is a very useful tool. It can also be used for writing down and sharing as you would normally do with Post-It Notes in an in-person Retrospective. Slack also integrates with a lot of other tools you might be using to run your development like JIRA, GSuite, Trello and many more. So in conclusion, yes doing Agile ceremonies in person is always going to be easier but in reality it should not be an excuse for making them any less engaging and interactive. There are many tools and techniques out there that can be used and built on to make the experience a positive one, so have a look and see what works best for you. “I’ve always done it like this”, the dreaded words I’ve heard far too many times when training for a new job. Blindly following what came before, never questioning because it’s easier that way. I’m amazed that people will just do something because they are told, regardless of how illogical it sounds. Sometimes even they themselves question it but refuse to pursue their inquisition. I used to get up at 5:30am for a job that involved manually processing trades. Sometimes when I got to the office there weren’t even any to process but I had to be there just in case. On a typical day it took hours to manually process and review all the work . When I asked why the process was manual, I was told it had always been this way and it won’t change. I was determined for it to change so I taught myself to code. Within a couple of months I had automated the entire process from processing to review and had reduced a manual 4 hours process to an automated 15 min process. Ironically before I could enjoy the extra time in bed, as the process was so efficient it was migrated to another area of the business so we had more time for other manual processes (a theme which seems to have continued throughout my career).
In our new world we find ourselves in, we can no longer go blindly into the night. It is our job to question everything we do. Like Elon Musk questioning every dollar spent when building a spaceship from scratch, we must not accept things just because that is how they are or used to be! SpaceX would not exist if they copied NASA. Times of hardship usually bring innovation and creativity. There is a need to do something different. An opportunity to dig into the ashes and find something that has been missing, something that has been needed but we were too lazy to look for or too comfortable to realise we should do something about it. I hate change. I love comfort and routine. Yet I will not accept something being illogically wrong. I will go out of my way to change things to ensure they are the best comfort and routine they can be. To this end I am always changing, as is my routine and I am always out of my comfort zone. If you spend enough time out of your comfort zone, it becomes your comfort zone. 2 years ago I hated flying. It kept me up at night. It would ruin the build up to a holiday. It would ruin holidays. I would survive flying with diazepam and champagne, a zone where very little bothers me (except screaming children). Due to work and holidays, last year I flew 15 times. Being forced to do so made me create a new routine for it. Although the early mornings will always suck, you can make things comfortable. Due to Covid, this year I have flown twice. I really miss flying and I cannot wait to get on a plane. If you’d have told me that 2 years ago I would have laughed at you! So we are all being impacted right now. No matter who you are. We are all on a detour until things start to head back to something like we remember. Embrace the detour! I hate being stuck at home but I’m using the time to refine myself. I never thought I’d be writing that’s for sure. I haven’t written since I was a teenager writing for snowboard magazines. Yes when the pubs and football stadiums open again I will be there (I may move in initially), but in the meantime as I have plenty of time to reflect I will continue looking at myself and asking why I’ve always done it this way. Everyone knows what Agile is, how it should be used and why we use it, so why do we all do it so badly! The basics are just that, basic. We use Story Points because estimating in time cannot be used effectively without pre-allocating work yet people still insist that we have to use time to estimate. We then complain that the work wasn’t completed in the time estimated, guess what, it was never going to be because we’re Agile, we brought the Story into the Sprint with unknowns that do not allow 100% accurate estimates!
Another thing that leaders don’t seem to get, and this usually is reserved for the large corporations who have just swallowed some project buzzword bingo rubbish (at the same point that they start trying to Burndown bugs coming into a Sprint so they have something to measure - think about it! Burndowns don't work like that) is when they start getting confused with a team using Agile and a team being agile. I really don't think they appreciate there is a difference. They talk about the company's agility like the Daily Stand Up is a yoga session. These are the same leaders who have bought their department a foosball table that is quickly collecting dust and want to know how long it will take to deliver the entire Backlog without realising that half the features in it are complete garbage and were written by the 17 different Product Owners (and Doris the tea lady) that at some point were running the show only to realise that they were glorified PAs organising their manager’s diary! All this pales in comparison to the stupidity that is the “Test Sprint”. We all know it, it’s the Sprint after the Dev Sprint where we test everything that was in the previous, wait, no sorry that’s something else… yes it is, it’s Waterfall idiot. Yes, that’s right. If you are not testing in the same Sprint you are developing then you are not doing Agile. I don't care what your excuse is, lack of automated testing, you don't want developers sitting around at the end of Sprints doing nothing, or just complete ignorance to Agile, this is not Agile, it is Waterfall, however you dress it up. You're just calling your project phases Sprints. Other spectacular achievements in the I’m doing Agile, honest I am include; We’ve not finished the work in the Sprint so we’ll keep it open until we do. Compounded by the, equally stupid or worse, lets open another Sprint with the next set of work at the same time so we don’t lose momentum! I mean come on, whose arse have you pulled this second Sprint’s team from. Oh, what's that, the same team is doing both, genius, this must be that new steroid Agile we’re all talking about! You couldn’t finish one Sprint, what makes you think having two open is going to help in any way! This is also connected to the, we’re not ready to release yet so we’ll keep the Sprint open another week. Why? I mean really, why? In what world do you need to align your release and your Sprint? Have you not heard of Continuous Integration. That is a different type of CI, Continuous Ineptitude I believe. This is also known as phased-gate release AKA WATERFALL. Next you’ll be telling me that your team is so good that you don’t need Retros. Oh wait, what was that, you don’t have them because they are a waste of time and the team doesn’t need them. Brilliant, so this list of issues and gripes the team has, when and how were you planning on dealing with these? Probably after the testing Sprint while you have lunch on the foosball table, right after your Daily Yog-Up! |
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