patkua@work

The intersection of technology and leadership

Category: Learning (Page 4 of 15)

Spike Showcase

September 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A key concern of mine, as a Technical Leader is ensuring that knowledge is distributed on a team. Working on a large team makes that a challenge because so many changes happen at the same time, but you’re also dealing with multiple learning and communication styles. This means that one technique doesn’t work as well as another. Due to my passion for learning, I try to keep this in mind and try to ensure we use multiple channels for getting information to everyone.

One practice we’ve been experimenting on our project is one we call, “The Spike Showcase”. Spikes come from the Extreme Programming methodology and represent an investigation into an area the team doesn’t have knowledge of. We create one of these when we need to generate options for the business, or when we are dealing with a new integration point and want to assess the quality, testability, or best designs. That knowledge is normally take on by a pair and remains dangerously siloed on a fairly large team.


Image sourced from drubuntu’s flickr stream

The pair normally writes up their outcome on the wiki (for long term purposes) and they have an area where they can check in their code for reference, yet documentation is not very engaging and I know that most people on the team won’t look at the code unless they are going to work in that area because they are busy doing other things. Pair programming solves this problem to a degree, but on a large team would take a long time to distribute the information.

Our solution has been to hold a “Spike Showcase” where the pair who completed the spike hold a session with the entire development team, talking about what the problem space is, what they tried, and running through the design and solution. Depending on the type of problem being solved, the pair will use a white board to diagram the logical interactions, or show some screenshots of what they were trying to achieve from a business sense and then they will demonstrate the spike solution in action before finally showing the code and how it all works. We then run some question and answers with the team (allowing people to pull knowledge) before finishing up.

We have run several “Spike Showcases” now and I feel they are invaluable to ensuring a large team keeps abreast of various solutions going on.

Book Review: Strengths Based Leadership

July 16, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Several years ago, I read the interesting Strengthsfinder book. Rather than focusing on personality, it spoke of understanding your signature strengths and the benefits of a strengths-based focus in your life. Since they, they released the Strengthsfinder 2.0 book and, more recently, the Strengths-Based Leadership book.

The latest book describes using your signature strengths in the context of a leadership position. They classify the 34 signature strengths into four categories including Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking. The book is very quick to read with a few stories talking about different leadership styles with different strengths at play, as well as almost half the book talking about the different strengths and tips on how to lead teams with it.

One aspect I found particularly interesting was the section where they talked about their study on why people follow. Their studies came up with four key areas that a good leader provides to any of its followers:

  • Trust – Out of the four, this one seemed the most obvious to me. People have to have trust in you to lead and it is important to maintain your integrity and keep your word. It’s hard to follow someone if you can’t trust them.
  • Compassion – Also an unsurprising basic need they describe where leaders need to have empathy and show that they care for their followers. Great leadership develop their people and demonstrate care for their followers.
  • Stability – Probably less obvious that the first two basic needs, the book describes stability along with words like security, strength, and support. My take on this basic need is that followers don’t see great leaders as ones that nurture chaotic environments.
  • Hope – This basic need is not one I would have named first, but it makes a lot of sense. I’ve seen a lot of software teams stifled because their leadership emotes so many negative emotions about their situation. It’s a bit hard to follow a vision if even the leader doesn’t believe in it. Their study also discovered that although this is a key need for followers, leaders did not spend enough time deliberately creating more hope and optimism in the future (something I am definitely taking away as part of this book).

I can definitely recommend this book as a non-nonsense book that gets into relevant matter very quickly. I think the book is relatively pricey for the amount of material it contains, but I’m guessing some of the fee goes towards maintaining the website and the code you use for uncovering your signature strengths.

Talking Feature Leads

July 15, 2012 / / 11 Comments

On my current project, I’ve tried something a little bit different inspired by the work of Feature Driven Development (FDD). Although sometimes cited as an agile methodology, my perception is that it is one of the lesser talked-about methodologies. On my current project we have been trying the idea of Feature Leads for the last four to five months, and I’m pretty happy with how it has turned out.

Feature teams versus Feature Leads
FDD often talks about Feature Teams – or a team that works on the design and implementation of a feature area. Since FDD heavily emphasises more modelling up-front, these tasks also often talk about Feature Teams leading the UML modelling and design documentation that goes along with it. In our circumstance, I didn’t think it made sense to have any real Feature Teams, namely because it was a greenfield project and there wasn’t any clear way features stayed independent of each other. I favoured the XP practice of Collective Code Ownership over what specialisation a Feature Team may bring together. I wanted the best of both worlds, so I introduced the team to the idea of a Feature Lead.

What does a Feature Lead do?
Our team had a good mix of experience, and introducing the “idea” of Feature Lead without communicating some of the responsibilities would definitely lead to some trouble. When I first introduced the Feature Lead term, I outlined a list of responsibilities that would come with it. I even printed a list to give to each Feature Lead to act as the starting point for a Standard Work checklist.

I included the following activities:

  • Explore all the use cases – Arrange workshops with the business owner to understand all business objectives the are trying to accomplish. Design a solution with that stakeholder, balancing business process supported by technology. Challenge assumptions about technology constraints and solutions, and avoid building software if there isn’t a clear need (i.e. we don’t want to build the wrong thing faster). Work with me (as the overall Technical Leader) to validate the solution. Consider the end-to-end flow including business people who need to be involved in set-up, on-going maintenance or business support as well as expected outcome.
  • Explore the impact on deployment and architecture – Does the business needs/technical solution warrant a change in architecture?
  • Identify spikes as early as possible – Are there any investigations we need to explore to create more options, or to validate assumptions before committing to a solution? Separate work that is not estimable into a spike and a story (and highlight the dependency on the spike).
  • Consider external configuration – Will this work require new configuration work? How often will it change? Where will we store it?
  • Who/where is the authoritative source? – If there is new data, or a new data store, be clear about which system is the authoritative source
  • Does it make sense to re-write the backlog items? – We had already been given backlog items broken down, but often we found them with an assumed solution in place. After exploring what the business really wanted to do, the nature of the stories would most likely change.
  • Verify assumptions against new stories – With the set of stories identified, work to validate all assumptions with the business stakeholder.

How I worked with Feature Leads

After the pair iterated over possibilities and designs, I would review their solution and stories with them, ensuring that cross-functional requirements such as security, performance, etc were all taken into account and represented. I would also work with the Feature Leads to ensure the overall design worked with the other Feature Leads and that we never diverged.

Once validated, I worked with the different Feature Leads to organise a Feature Walkthrough, talking about the business problems, the outcomes and how the stories fit together to make a comprehensive solution. This Feature Walkthrough distributed knowledge to the entire team so that they had enough context to pick up a story in any feature area and understood how it worked.

Feature Lead + 1
To ensure that we never had a bus factor of one, we always identified two Feature Leads (a primary and a secondary). Both needed to involved in the design and discussions as well as the story identification process so that if one went away on holiday, or was ill, that feature area would not come to a halt. As a fallback, I would also pick up the solution if both were away.

How has it turned out?
I am personally really proud of the team, and the way that the Feature Leads lead the design. We had some great solutions and ideas, and their outputs allowed the entire team to continue to own the codebase as a whole. There are so many other dimensions to talk about, but will get around to writing about them separately.

Book Review: Getting Past No

July 14, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A long time ago, I read the very excellent Getting to Yes (1981), a book that described the difference between position-based negotiation and interests-based negotiation. The follow up book written by one of the authors, is aptly named Getting Past No in applying the same principles from Getting to Yes but provides a different technique when negotiating with another party who is unwilling to relent.

In the book, Ury describes the conditions that prevent people from getting to agreement, including your own reactions, their emotions, their position, their dissatisfaction and their power. I like the five step series that he outlines in the book:

  1. Don’t react, go to the balcony – A powerful metaphor that describes a thinking style of keeping your reactions from affecting the negotiation. Instead of giving to natural instincts of striking back, giving in or breaking off, going to the balcony offers a different alternative to approaching the situation. Take time to evaluate the situation as it will lead to the best outcomes for both sides
  2. Don’t argue, step to their side – What I like about this book is the way that Ury describes a collaborative approach to negotiation. Stepping to their side often involves acknowledging (you don’t have to necessarily agree) with the other party’s point of view. Until the other party’s viewpoint is heard, they are unlikely to hear your own.
  3. Don’t reject, reframe – Reframing involves using questioning and other techniques to change the game from a “fixed-pie” mentality to a “win-win” opportunity. Rejecting doesn’t progress negotiations. Exploring interests can. The point of this chapter talks about avoid dismissing the other party’s position, but instead trying to understand what their motivation they have behind it and finding a solution that might solve both sets of interests.
  4. Don’t push, build them a golden bridge – Ury describes this stage as one that takes time. If you try to close a deal too quickly, negotiations will break down. During this phase, you need to address unmet interests, help people save face and involve the other side in the solution.
  5. Don’t escalate, use power to educate – This section outlines a number of strategies if the other party sticks to their position and is unwilling to relent. The key to this stage is knowing both your own Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) as well as theirs. Ury recommends executing on your BATNA as this will reduce the possibilities of future transactions, but by knowing both positions, you can explore the consequences if both parties fail to agree. He talks about strategies such as using third parties and aiming for mutual satisfaction rather than adopting a victory mindset.

Learning with lunchtime videos

February 27, 2012 / / 3 Comments

One of the greatest things I appreciate about my work colleagues is their passion for learning and growing themselves as people. As an example, one of my work colleagues, Duana (@starkcoffee), brought in the practice of Friday lunchtime video sessions at a common client of ours last year.

To make it effective, and to make it relevant to all people, she worked with everyone to brainstorm a list of videos that we could watch over lunch. We would bring sandwiches, or grab food to bring back to the office where we sat in a meeting room watching these videos over lunch. The goal was to try to watch a video that worked not just one part of the brain that we used in day-to-day programming, but to watch videos that would inspire and exercise the other half.

I really enjoyed the practice and need to remind myself of this great ritual. It brought people together from different parts of the organisations, and was great watching a number of different topics from different areas. We watched a number of videos from technical sources loaded onto places like InfoQ, or Vimeo and sourced a number of other “alternative” videos from sites like TED or Youtube. The challenge was finding two short videos that you could watch over a lunch-hour, so we tended to go for 15-20 minute videos.

Here’s a list of great videos to get you started:

Applying learning theory to a real language

August 1, 2011 / / 2 Comments

My current project work colleagues know I’m learning German while I’m here in Berlin. I doubt I’ll become fluent by the time I leave, but I feel I’ve learned plenty – even without being able to speak it full time at work, or with very few official German lessons.

I feel part of what has helped me successfully accelerate my learning is applying my understanding of learning styles to learning a “real” language (not a programming one for once!) Some of the lessons learned include:

Showing my ignorance – I talked a lot about this during my Beginner’s Mind talk. Being in Germany, I’m surrounded (mostly outside of project work) by people who are experts in the field of the German language. By attempting (and generally failing fast!), I can find out where the current limits of my vocabulary, sayings and articulation is. Trying again then lets me practice more and more.

Accepting that it is the way it is – The hardest things about learning other languages is the “nuances” that come along with the language. Real languages are “loose” with their meanings, and just because you say one thing in English doesn’t mean you can translate it word-for-word to another.

Find multiple “masters” – Just like there is no single “agile” way of working, and there is no “correct” philosophy, it’s good to have multiple teachers and sources of truths. I’d had a few official German lessons, I listen to Pimsleur audio guides, use Rosetta Stone for learning, (try to) read German magazines and try to use German where I can. Each source focuses on different things and all useful in different ones. Pretending that you can learn everything from a single source is destined for failure.

On the way to 10 000 hours – I believe learning real languages takes much longer than that, but trying to use it and practice it as much as possible has definitely improved my novice skills. Even native Germans have commented on how quickly they’ve noticed the language skills improve.

Vocabulary and grammar work as a system – Learning vocabulary without grammar makes you sound strange, and grammar without vocabulary really limits your conversations. Learning both at the same time forms an amplifying loop that allows you to learn more faster.

Align your passions – Anyone who knows me will know I enjoy my food and drink. I blog about it and love discovering neighbourhood gems in a new city. So much so my biggest asset in learning more German has been the Zitty Berlin Essen + Tricken (Food & Drink) magazine special that details restaurants, cafes, and bars around Berlin. I spend time translating each small review of each place and because I’m familiar with many of the places, I can better understand what they’re trying to say. Admittedly I’m not sure how much use all of the language is but it certainly is helping.

Three Days of Clojure Joy

June 30, 2011 / / 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, I sat in a training class run by Stuart Halloway, CEO of Relevance and who ThoughtWorks happened to bring across from the US to give us the low down of Clojure.

We covered a lot of material in the three days – covering pretty much every aspect of Clojure. We learnt all the basics such as core data types, namespaces, how to get documentation and examples, and many of the key functions that come as part of the core clojure libriares.

I appreciated the time spent discussing the background of why clojure exists, and the alternatives that are present in many other languages. It was great to have someone as knowledge as Stuart as we could ask as many questions as we like about things.

The training wasn’t just all talking and we did do a few exercises. I have to admit because I hadn’t touched any real functional programming since university, many of the exercises towards the end of the three days went over my head a little bit – a combination of needing to know some key clojure functions, and probably needing to re-adjust to a “functional way of thinking” which I think proves the biggest challenge.

In terms of tooling, we used the simple REPL and whatever environment we chose (the exercises don’t really need that much) although I learned about ParEdit that seemed to be quite useful.

I also learned about a new datastructure – Bit Partitioned Hash Trees (more here and here that I need to do some more reading around.

The course accelerated quickly, covering basic functional programming on the first day, the different ideas between state and time in clojure and then syntatic programming. Also we covered topics such as Interoperability with Java libraries and the problems that protocols address and defrecords (prefer defrecords over deftypes as the latter is now considered deprecated).

Just like any good training course, it left me realising how much more I need to learn and get my head around. This only really comes with more time and practice.

Drive by Dank Pink

June 6, 2011 / / 2 Comments

I finally picked up a copy of Drive to read. The book looked ominously big, however I found out the two hundred (ish) pages had been printed on fairly thick paper and was pretty engaging to read overall. Pink focuses on a topic close to my heart, describing the way that people find engagement and what drives people. It’s quite relevant to the way that I like to work, and what the company I work for strives to achieve.

Pink covers a lot of interesting material, including many references and backed up by a lot of research. In it, he compares classic management techniques (financial incentives) and details research that describes why they fail to achieve what they need to do. He talks about interesting research that shows that a small financial incentive helps boost short term performance (in work that requires no thinking) at the cost of long term performance and detriment to creativity. For today’s information worker, and the chaordic environments we work in, this should really be raising alarm bells. To me, it’s akin to the systems thinkers that know that measuring and rewarding workers on the wrong incentives causes lots of problems. It also rings anecdotally to what I’ve seen some really talented people who work in these financial institutions driven into strange behaviours due to “bonus schemes” and loops.

Pink reiterates over points such as once we hit a certain wealth, happiness is no longer correlated with wealth. We seek, instead greater things. He gives many examples about how money isn’t a motivator for many people citing the achievements of Wikipedia, open source communities that build software such as Firefox and many more. He talks about once this is achieved, people are driven to solve problems, and be creative. He gives examples where people are driven to complete puzzles and games, not because they are paid to do it, because of some intrinsic drive.

Pink continually describes what gap there is between research and business and provides a way forward describing a number of elements necessary to satisfy this intrinsic drive. He talks about the need for autonomy, the idea of achieving mastery, and developing a true sense of purpose as well as providing a toolkit for people and managers to achieve this. I like to think that the agile values help businesses to focus on creating environments that help satisfy this new style of management. The idea of Software Craftsmanship emphasising lifelong learning and mastery, a common theme in agile teams to be autonomous in task completion and done right with lean thinking, building the right thing for a good purpose.

Above is a wonderful RSAnimate video helping to summarise the book.

Summary of XP2011

May 16, 2011 / / 5 Comments

First full day of XP2011 was a pretty full schedule as I had to prepare for two lightning talks on different subjects. Fortunately both of the topics were very close to my heart, one about learning using the Dreyfus Model (slides) and the other about Systems Thinking (slides). The second day started off with a great breakfast selection at the conference hotel before kicking into the keynote by Esther Derby. Clearly jetlagged, Derby used a set of hand drawn slides to explain her topic, “No Silver Bullets”.

Her presentation style was very conversational and I can’t say that the crowd responded very well to this. Perhaps it was their jetlag as well, or the way the room had been set up. Nevertheless, through many of her stories, I still saw many heads nodding and a really great response on twitter to the things that she was saying.

I’ve followed Derby’s writing for years and could only wish more people would be exposed to them. As a result, I found many of the topics and opinions I found interesting reinforced, such as failing to address the management layer inevitably means agile adoption hits a hard ceiling. Or the oscillating behaviour that results when managers attempt to react to a system with long delays in its feedback cycle. I appreciated the very vivid term, “Bang! Bang!”-management style describing the style of managers who seem to have only two distinct and opposing reactions to a system, unable to moderate their use and wait for systems to find a new equilibrium. If you imagine these two opposing reactions the result of a huge iron lever being flipped, hopefully you can imagine where the noise comes from.

Derby covered lots of different areas, quoting a few people like Donella H Meadows, “The original purpose of hierarchies was to serve the sub systems, not the other way around.” And the work that George Lakoff does with word association with metaphors in our everyday use. Raising self awareness of your own in built biases and metaphors is another key thing she emphasised focusing on the judgements, habits, feelings, thoughts, mental models, beliefs, rules and values we tend to be intrinsically governed by. I particularly liked the phrase she uses to help people uncover their own and others’ mental models, “In what world would this make sense?”

She told one great story about the dangers of measurements as targets, using the example of the manager who decided to “Grade developer estimates”. This manager decided to give A’s to those who estimated on time, B’s to those who estimated over time, and C’s to those who estimated under time. Of course, you can imagine what magically happened as people’s grades mysteriously improved.

She also reminded me of the work of Ackoff, who I need to revisit, and the great work that he’s written about Systems Thinking. I have only been able to refer to the Fifth Discipline as a Systems Thinking book, but I really need to read his other ones to see if they would be of use, or are more accessible.

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur. A couple of highlights included seeing Marcus Ahnve take the work Luca Grulla and Brian Blignaut did with TDDing javascript to the next level and doing a demo of BDD.

David J. Anderson also reminded me of the importance to think in terms of the languages executives speak in order to better get our message across. He reminded me of all the great things that Ross Pettit has to say, although I think Anderson’s analysis on accounting for software development costs doesn’t seem to match with some of the data I’ve heard from Pettit.

There was so much more to the conference. Always the way great conversations emerged and the wonderful atmosphere of the hotel adding to the uniqueness to this event.

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