Category: Books (Page 2 of 6)

Reviewing the latest blinks August 28

August 28, 2016 / Patrick / 0 Comments

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School by John Medina – A description of rules with how our brain works and how we learn. Our visual senses tend to trump our sense of smell. We need sleep to restore our energy and to help us concentrate. Spaced repetition is important, but assigning meaning to new words and concepts are also important to learning. Since I’m fascinated with learning and how the brain works, I’ll add this to my reading list.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity by
David Allen – Although I never read the book, I felt like I follow a similarly described organisation system. The GTD method is almost like a cult, but requires a lot of discipline for it. Unlike keeping a single list of things to do, they have a systemised variant for keeping long-lived projects and ways of managing tasks to help you focus on getting through actions. Probably a good book if you want to focus more on breaking things done into smaller steps.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande – With lots of examples from the healthcare industry, a reminder that useful checklists can help us avoid making simple mistakes. For me, the idea of standardised work (a lean concept) already covers this. I agree with this idea in principle, but I’m not so sure the book covers the negative side effects of checklists as well (people getting lazy) or alternatives to checklist (automation and designing against error/failure demand to be begin with).

Connect: The Secret LinkedIn Playbook to Generate Leads, Build Relationships, and Dramatically Increase Your Sales by Josh Turner – Either a terrible summary or a terrible book, this blink gave advice about how to use LinkedIn to build a community. Although the advice isn’t terrible, it’s not terribly new, and I didn’t really find any insights. I definitely won’t be getting a copy of this book.

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action by Simon Sinek – A nice summary of leadership styles and rather than focusing on how something should be done, and the what, is starting with the why. I liked the explanation of the Golden Circle with three concentric circles draw within each other, with the Why being the starting point that leads to the How that ends in the What. It’s a good reminder about effective delegation and how powerful the Why motivator can be. I’ve added this book to my reading list to.

Book Review: The Phoenix Project

April 3, 2016 / Patrick / 0 Comments

It has been a while since I read The Phoenix Project and I am glad to have reviewed it again recently. Described as a business novel, or The Goal for the 21st century, the book focuses on a story that large organisations need to realise when they feel they need to transform IT.

The book focuses on a company in crisis – a company that is trying to complete lots of software projects, has a terrible number in flight and grapples with the problems many companies have – lack of visibility of the work, dependency on key individuals, marketing lead promises and IT treated as a cost-centre attitude. Bill, an IT Manager is one day promoted into a higher role where he is responsible for turning around and dealing with all the critical issues. He is given access to a mentor who introduces him to the “mysterious Three Ways” that are slowly uncovered throughout the book.

What I liked about the book

Business novels are refreshing to read as they feel less like reading a business book and sometimes makes picking up the book less of a chore. The authors manage to talk about generating insights and explaining some of the tools from a number of angles (Bill’s thoughts as well as from other characters’ perspectives) as well as relating it to existing material such as Theory of Constraints.

Like all good books, you follow the exciting story plot that descends into what seems like an insurmountable situation, only for the protagonist to find ways of overcoming it. For those who have never been exposed to visual ways of working (like Kanban), or understanding Work in Progress, Queueing theory and how IT capability matters to business, there are many useful lessons to learn.

What would have made the book better

Although the book has several characters who behave in a negative way, and pay for some of thoese consequences you don’t hear about the attempts by the protaganist which end up failing (with their consequences) unlike the real world. I also felt that the pace at which things changed seemed to occur at an unrealistic rate – but that’s proabably the downsides of a business novel versus what might actually happen in real life.

Conclusion
I would still highly recommend this reading if you’re interested in understanding about how modern IT, interested in how DevOps culture operates and some tools and techniques for moving IT management into a more responsive, flexible but still highly controlled manner.

Running a Personal Retrospective for 2015

December 30, 2015 / Patrick / 5 Comments

It’s the end of yet another year and a great time to reflect and put your Personal Retrospective hats on. I mention using Personal Retrospectives in my book, “The Retrospective Handbook: A guide for agile teams” because I find them powerful tools to celebrate the past year and to establish new goals for a new year.

This year, instead of simply stepping through questions on paper or on the computer, I decided to use sticky notes and activities I would use with a larger group. In order to keep flow, I wanted to prepare appropriately. This meant I:

Made a plan for the exercises I wanted to run;
Prepared the activities in advance so I could focus on gathering data/generating insights and reflecting instead of thinking about the process;
Had a set of questions prepared in case I got stuck;
Put on some background music – a quick search on YouTube found this spiritual landscape music; and
Had water and coffee ready so I didn’t need to leave the room.

Here are the activities I used this year and that you might find useful for your own Personal Retrospective.

A year in tweets

Using very small stickies to simulate the 140 character limit (I’m guessing I had ~50) trying to generate a number of small tweets about how I felt about 2015.

Personal Retrospective Activity: A year in review

Generating a timeline of events

I find the timeline a very powerful way to reflect on the year’s events, and to celebrate their significance. I first brainstormed memorable events before I attempted to nest them into the timeline. I the checked my personal and work calendars, realising that the human memory (or maybe it’s just mine!) is quite bad at remembering the order of events.

I found this blog, my twitter stream and my slideshare page useful sources to remember other significant events.

Personal Retrospective Activity: Timeline

Constructing the timeline took the most time of all exercises. Partly because there were lots of significant events for me, and I wanted to appreciate how much had occurred in this year.

4 L’s (Liked, Loved, Lacked, Longed For

I don’t normally use the 4 L’s exercise but figured I would give it a go. It seemed to work well in terms of framing insights but I found I needed to reflect deeper in some of the initial ideas I wrote up. Having an independent coach/facilitator would have been useful but I had to play this role myself.

Personal Retrospective Activity: 4Ls

Goals for 2016

After looking back at the timeline, and reflecting on how the events made me feel and what impact they had, I brainstormed some goals for this year. My focus for this first round was to generate all possible goals I might have, even though these long term goals would not meet the SMART criteria.

Personal Retrospective Activity: Goals (Before Actions)

In the second round, I went through each of the different goals, generating some concrete next steps to move me towards each of those goals. My intention is to revisit the goals throughout the year and to take other actions to progress them further. The orange-coloured stickies in the picture below represet these next steps linked to the relevant goals (in green).

Personal Retrospective Activity: Goals (Next Step Actions)

I also spent the time digitising the outputs into a A3 Personal Retrospective report and have made the template available here if you want to print it instead.

Have you set aside time to reflect on 2015? How did you run your Personal Retrospective? Leave a comment and let me know.

If you liked this post, you might be interested in The Retrospective Handbook: A guide for agile teams, also available in print.

Book Review: Difficult Conversations

August 3, 2015 / Patrick / 1 Comment

Conflict, negotiation and difficult conversations are hard, but there are plenty of good books help. I often recommend Crucial Confrontations, Getting to Yes and Getting Past No. Someone recommended Difficult Conversations, a book that I recently finished reading.

Difficult Conversations

Where the other books I read tended to take a more mechanistic view of steering the conversation, I really appreciated the slightly different take with this book, which I felt more humanistic because it acknowledged the emotional side to difficult conversations. The authors suggest that when we have a difficult conversation, we experience three simultaneous conversations:

The “What Happened” Conversation
The Feelings Conversation
The Identity Conversation

The “What Happened” Conversation

We often assume we know what happened, because we know what we know (Our Story). The authors (rightly) point out, that our story may be completely different from the other person (Their Story). A good practical tip is to focus on building the Third Story as a way of building a shared awareness and appreciation of other data that may make a difference to the conversation

The Feelings Conversation

As much as we like to think we are logical, we are highly emotional and biased people. It’s what makes us human. We manifest this by saying things based on how we are feeling. Sometimes we don’t even know this is happening. The book helps us understand and gives us strategies for uncovering the feelings that we may be experiencing during the conversation. They also suggest building empathy with the other person by walking through the Feelings Conversation the other person will be having as well.

The Identity Conversation

I think this was the first time that I had thought about when we struggle to communicate, or agree on something, we may be doing so because have difficulty accepting something we may not like, or something that threatens our identity. This is what the authors call out as the Identity Conversation and is a natural part of successfully navigating a difficult conversation.

Conclusion

I found Difficult Conversations a really enjoyable read that added a few new perspectives to my toolkit. I appreciate their practical advice such as stepping through each of the three conversations from both your and the other person’s perspective and avoiding speaking in different modes. I like the fact that they address the emotional side to difficult conversations and give concrete ways of understanding and coping with them, instead of ignoring them or pushing them aside.

Talking with Tech Leads now available in print

July 21, 2015 / Patrick / 0 Comments

Late last year, I announced the release of “Talking with Tech Leads,” which was then available in a variety of e-book formats including PDF, mobi and epub. Although e-books have their place, I know how important it is for some people, to have a real physical book. After all, it’s very difficult to physically gift something to people, when it’s on a tablet, or computer.

After some more work on the physical aspects of the book and many draft copies back and forth from the, you can now order your very physical copy of Talking with Tech Leads. You can order copies depending on region including:

What people are saying about the book:

Your book has really helped me find my feet – James

This book is a well-curated collection of interviews with developers who have found themselves in the role of a tech lead, both first-timers and veterans – Dennis

The book is well-organised around a number of themes and I found it very easy to read and to ‘dip into’ for some inspiration / ideas. – Gary

Book Review: Managing Humans

June 29, 2015 / Patrick / 1 Comment

I remember hearing about Managing Humans several years ago but I only got around to buying it and getting through reading it.

It is written by the well-known Michael Lopp otherwise known as Rands, who blogs at Rands and Repose.

The title is a clever take on working in software development and Rands shares his experiences working as a technical manager in various companies through his very unique perspective and writing style. If you follow his blog, you can see it shine through in the way that he tells stories, the way that he creates names around stereotypes and situations you might find yourself in the role of a Technical Manager.

He offers lots of useful advice that covers a wide variety of topics such as tips for interviewing, resigning, making meetings more effective, dealing with specific types of characters that are useful regardless of whether or not you are a Technical Manager or not.

He also covers a wider breath of topics such as handling conflict, tips for hiring, motivation and managing upwards (the last particularly necessary in large corporations). I felt like some of the topics felt outside the topic of “Managing Humans” and the intended target audience of a Technical Manager such as tips for resigning (yourself, not handling it from your team) and joining a start up.

His stories describe the people he has worked with and situations he has worked in. A lot of it will probably resonate very well with you if you have worked, or work in large software development firm or a “Borland” of our time.

The book is easy to digest in chunks, and with clear titles, is easy to pick up at different intervals or going back for future reference. The book is less about a single message, than a series of essays that offer another valuable insight into working with people in the software industry.

Book Review: Software Architecture for Developers

April 28, 2015 / Patrick / 1 Comment

Simon Brown’s book, Software Architecture for Developers has been on my reading list for some time. I am aware of Brown’s talks that he gives at conferences, and his very good workshop on describing how to draw more effective diagrams as a communication mechanism for developers to other groups, but I wasn’t quite sure what his book was going to cover.

This weekend, whilst travelling, I had a bit of airport time to do some reading to plough through his book.

What I enjoyed about the book
Architecture is a touchy subject, and Brown doesn’t have any problems raising this as a contentious topic, particularly in the agile community where it doesn’t have an explicit practice. Some XP books explain the role, but mantras like “Big Design Up Front” and “Last Responsible Moment” are often (wrongly) interpreted as “do no architecture.” What I liked about Brown’s approach is his recognition of the Goldilocks approach – not too little and not too much where he provides both points of view and some concrete practices.

Brown covers important topics like quality attributes (Cross Functional Requirements), what the role of an Architect is (and that it is just a role, not necessarily a person). I am biased in the opinion but I enjoyed Brown’s perspective about whether or not architects should code, and it aligns well with my own point of view that for a Tech Lead (or Architect) to make effective decisions, they need to have empathy and understand (live, breath and sometime burn for) the decisions they make.

I appreciated the way that Brown puts “Constraints” and “Principles” as key factors that aren’t necessarily represented in the codebase and are unlikely to be easily discoverable for new people. Both are things that I have done when leading software teams and are things I would repeat because I find it helps people navigate and contribute to the codebase.

What I found slightly strange about the book

I believe the book is really strong but there were a few sections that seemed slightly out of place, or not yet completely finished. One was around the “Sharepoint projects needs architecture too”, which I don’t necessarily disagree with but could easily be extended to “Any software product extended to build an application needs architecture too” (cue s/Sharepoint/CMS/g or other examples).

Conclusion

Software Architecture for Developers is a very accessible, relevant and useful book that I do not have any problems recommending for people looking at how to effectively implement Software Architecture in today’s environment.

Book Review: Waltzing with Bears

March 3, 2015 / Patrick / 0 Comments

I read this book very early in my career, and I thought it would be useful to read it again as a refresher to risk management. Waltzing with Bears is a book that focuses on the identification and management of risks within the software industry. It’s filled with a number of stories answering the question, “Why should we care about risk?” as well providing a number of strategies and tools for handling risk.

Although a lot of the advice is still applicable today, I think it is true that some of the recommendations are commonplace today. They recommend, for instance, an incremental delivery approach to software (Hello agile software development!) without a specific reference to a methodology as a way of mitigating risk.

They also present the idea of estimate (un)certainty and using the idea to make better commitments to others. They also warn against default behaviour that is still rife in our industry: e.g. making a commitment to others based on an optimistic estimate hoping for a series of breaks when it is clearly high risk, which later leads on to the project death march, or a huge loss of quality.

Reading the book the second time around, I picked up a few other interesting models I don’t remember so clearly from the first time around including the use of probability profiles (a graph that shows the shape of our estimates and the uncertainties) to understand when and where to give estimated dates. There’s a useful section around risk-storming for people who have never been to a risk brainstorming session, but that wasn’t particularly new for me. Another one is the use of the Monte Carlo simulation for calculating the impact of risks. After reading that section however, I feel like I still don’t fully understand it and I would need to practice applying it for me to fully understand how that works.

Although the examples used in the book are relatively old now, there are still powerful stories about how people failed to manage risk, what they could have done instead and what the consequences were (e.g. Dallas Airport Baggage system!) I also like their practical experience shared when they talk about the cultural side of risk (e.g. how transparent or open and organisation is) and when it’s dangerous to share your view of risk. This sort of advice is often missed from books where the authors provide a very one-sided dogmatic approach without the consideration of contexts.

Overall this is an easily digestible book that introduces the idea and the importance of managing risk together with tools to help you achieve it, all set in the software industry context.

Book Review: The Lean Enterprise

February 9, 2015 / Patrick / 1 Comment

This weekend I finished reading a copy of The Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky and Barry O’Reilly.

Top level summary: If you want to learn about the truly agile organisation, this is the book that shows you what it looks like.

I have read many books about agile, lean and organisations that build software, but this is the first that really brings it all together. Other books tend to be either too theoretical (founded from either Drucker or Taiichi Ohno) or with a very practical toolkit in a very narrow domain.

This book is aimed at executives and managers or organisations – the people with the authority to change to change the system. We know from W. Edwards Deming:

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

Like a book that was actually test driven by real-life questions, it provides answers to questions executives and managers ask time and time again.

The book is packed with information and provides solutions to problems that organisations, doing agile software development, struggle with in other parts of their organisation. Better yet they offer many examples of companies who are doing it right, proving that it is not just theory and that it can be done in many ways. There are many great stories from many industries demonstrating how different approaches can be yet still exhibit the lean attitude and culture that is so essential to success. I am also glad how much the authors focus on the importance of culture (and what people can do about it) and not just a single focus on either theory or tools.

The authors have done their research well, with excellent, tangible examples of lean concepts, practices and tools linked to much more detailed reading in a referenced article, paper or book. I would almost buy this book only to give people the reading list in the back – it is really that good. I have read many of the books referenced, and I remember how they challenged and changed my thinking in a positive way. After this book, my own personal reading list is also much richer.

What makes this book especially stand out for me is the pragmatic nature of the book. Even though, to many readers, the contents may appear idealistic or too unrealistic, the authors have given many examples of companies doing it, refer to many case studies or experiences where they have seen the practices and principles at work and shown their own insights into the challenges or dangers that lie ahead. This last part speaks volumes to the authors sharing their experiences about the questions some organisations have not even asked yet and advice on how to solve it. One good example is the paradoxical nature of balancing exploration through prototyping (discovery) against the disciplined nature of continuous delivery (e.g. additional work of well refactored code, tests and scripted deployments).

When I got to the end of the book, I knew that I would need to re-read the book for a deeper understanding because it is so rich with concepts and tools – some I have not had the chance to try out.

A perfect match for the target audience it was written for and a book that will continue to be relevant for many years to come.

From Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/susivinh/7019888809) under the CC licence

Book Recommendations for a Tech Lead

October 24, 2014 / Patrick / 3 Comments

I gave several training courses on being a Tech Lead and found myself giving a number of book recommendations. Although books are no substitute for experiential learning and close feedback cycles, they are useful as ways of introducing some key skills developers rarely practice in their day-to-day tasks.

Dealing with people

Tech Leads are leaders for an engineering/development team and will need to learn the right skills to deal with the unusual world of people. People are different, unique and have their own styles which may or may not align with your own.

Leading Snowflakes is a good e-book, aimed at Engineering Managers who need to deal with different situations. Although it goes beyond just the people aspects, it is still a good book that focuses more on the people side.

Managing Humans (3rd Edition) is written by Rands & Repose author, Michael Lopp. It’s a humuour collection of stories describing the weird and wonderful world an Engineering Manager may find themselves facing. Most, although not all, of the stories will be relevant for Tech Leads. Thanks to Alex for this book recommendation.

Turn the Ship Around is a great leadership story that talks about how leaders should be enabling other leaders using an example story of how a certain leadership style turned around one of the world performing US navy ships into one of the best. Thanks to Joe for this book recommendation.

Negotiation

A Tech Lead represents both the technical perspective to outside stakeholders, and often carries a business perspective back into the technical team. Conflict is inevitable and understanding how to negotiate to an optimal solution for two parties is a timeless skill.

Getting to Yes was one of my favourite books. It’s short and insightful. The book describes the different between Positional-based negotiation (typical) vs Interest-based negotiation. Thanks to Jo for this book reommendation.

Getting Past No (Fisher) is the sequel to the book above that describes getting through more difficult conversations. Jason Yip recommended this book.

Crucial Conversations is a great book talking about how to have conversations when the stakes are high. They also have another great book called Crucical Confrontations that shows you how to have those difficult conversations that matter. Thanks to Clay for this book recommendation.

Facilitation

Meetings. Meetings. Meetings. Three dreaded words that a developer doesn’t want and often can avoid. A Tech Lead often dreads the numerous meetings as well, but will be often expected to contribute. Most meetings will be poorly planned and facilitated, leading to even more drawn-out meetings. In my experience, when done well, meetings can be focused, short and fruitful when they are well-facilitated. Facilitation skills are also useful on a day-to-day basis when ad hoc meetings between team members occur, or when a particular topic needs to be discussed.

The more collaborative a team becomes, the more useful facilitation skills are to the Tech Lead as they blur into the background to all voices be heard.

The Skilled Facilitator (Schwartz) is the first book I recommend to new facilitators. I find the book easy to read and is comprehensive in its explanation about the role of the facilitator.

Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (Kaner) is a more focused book, covering how to have group discussions, balance hearing all views and to converge into the best outcome.

Collaboration Explained (Tabaka) is written by an agile practitioner who I trust dearly. I have see her facilitate, and her wisdom is captured in this book that will be highly relevant to particularly agile teams.

Secrets of Facilitation (Wilkinson) is a book recommended by Jason Yip.

Risk Management

With authority comes responsibility and the Tech Lead suddenly sees risks everywhere. Or worse, they don’t see any risks at all.

Waltzing with Bears (De Marco and Lister) is the timeless book that talks about risk management in the settings of software development. Although some of the examples may feel a bit outdated (death march projects), our industry still has plenty of them and the lessons are still relevant for today’s style of software development.

The Failure of Risk Management (Hubbard) is another book recommendation from Jason Yip. Now added to my reading list as it’s one I haven’t yet read.

Not just for Tech Leads

Unsurprisingly the book recommendations above are not only relevant to Tech Leads, but to anyone who may find themselves in a leadership role. There are plenty more skills and books to recommend, but these are a good starting set.

If you liked this article, you will be interested in “Talking with Tech Leads,” a book that shares real life experiences from over 35 Tech Leads around the world. Now available on Leanpub.