Agile Management | NOOP.NL

Join My Next Book: Management Workout

“Trust the employees”, is what Agile consultants usually tell the managers. But how exactly can they do that next Monday morning?

“Be a servant leader”, is the advice that is given to the managers. But what items should they serve to the people on Friday afternoon?

“Stand back from the team”, is what I sometimes hear people say. But how far should the managers stand back, precisely? 10 meters? 20 meters?

I have noticed that most management advice is not actionable.

The advice is well-meant, but managers have no idea what to do with it. It’s like saying, “keep your balance” to a person who is learning how to be more fit, while she’s trying to make sense of weight loss diets, fitness machines, performance metrics, and an extensive nomenclature for body parts.

The Third Book

Every time I tell people I’m writing materials for a third book, they ask me what it’s about.

Well, this is it. I’m aiming for a book with actionable management advice. Practical things that people can do next Monday morning, in order to grow an organization that is fit and healthy. And not only managers, but everyone who is concerned about the management of an organization. Because, management is too important to be left to the managers. The whole organization should participate in the workout.

That’s why the working title is Management Workout.

In my classes worldwide I noticed that concrete actionable advice is usually most appreciated. The attendees report they want to experiment with ideas I’ve collected from many sources, such as authority boards, moving motivators, FedEx days, visual goal setting, impediment doors, team values, bonus systems, and much more.

With my next book I want to give them exactly that: much more.

Workout Exercises

I like the idea of using physical workouts as a metaphor in the book. All too often the ideas of brilliant writers have culminated in a process, method, or framework. I don’t like these words. They usually lead to dogmatic approaches to their implementation. People apply the whole framework, without any experimentation, without deviating from the mantra.

With the next book I plan to give people plenty of healthy exercises. It’s going to be an organizational workout! Everyone understands there is no dogma around workout exercises. You can do one, or the other. You can do some, or you can do all. And if you don’t like them, you’re welcome to try and find others, with similar outcomes. It’s totally up to you.

It will be a management workout program.

Get Involved!

I hope the book will be ready some time late in 2013. Maybe later. In the meantime I hope to get some people involved. People who want to experiment with the exercises, who want to give feedback, and tell me how the ideas worked out for them (or how they didn’t). I hope for people to send me cool photos and inspiring stories, amazing ideas and crazy thoughts.

I hope one of those people is you.

Send me an email, Subscribe to the mailing list if you want to be involved in this new project.

 

Is Your Work an Expression of Your Life?

When people introduce themselves to others, they often deal with the question “What do you do?” And they answer it by saying, “I’m a software developer” or “I’m a social media marketer” or “I’m a management trainer”.

But is that true?

Is what you do also what you are?

The same people just as easily talk about work-life balance, separating the their public career from their private life. This indicates that what people do (at work) is not the same as what they are (at home).

I think this is sad.

In a perfect life, what you do should be an expression of what you are.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I don’t have a work-life balance. I don’t want to separate life from work. I prefer to live while I work, thank-you-very-much. My work should be an expression of my life.

If you separate work from life, you basically shorten your life span by 50%. Self-actualization has to happen in the remaining hours, away from work. Is that OK for you? Or would you like to double your life span?

I’m quite sure many of you prefer to do as you are.

That’s why I’m considering a new tag line:

Changing work into life.

Improved MLA Style Guide: Delighting the Reader

The great thing about writing is that you can make your own rules. For example, take the famous MLA Style Guide. It has an extensive collection of guidelines for citations and references. It’s great, except for the parts where it sucks.

So, as a creative person, I am making my own less-sucky adaptions…

Always include a short title

The MLA Style guide suggests using only an author’s last name as a reference, like this:

The seven authorization levels can be used to delegate work to a team, in a step-by-step approach (Appelo).

This sucks because with this reference, as a reader you still have to navigate to the bibliography to see what source I am referring to. Is it a book? Is it a magazine? Is it an airplane? You don’t know. That’s why I prefer this approach:

The seven authorization levels can be used to delegate work to a team, in a step-by-step approach (Appelo, Management 3.0).

With this alternative I add a short version of the title to the reference. Now readers can recognize more easily that I am referring to the book Management 3.0, of which the full title and other details can be found in the bibliography. (For magazine articles we authors use “double” quotes.)

The MLA Style guide suggests this expanded alternative only for disambiguation, in case a writer is referring to multiple works of the same author. But from now on I simply choose to do it always, by default. I think readers will appreciate it.

Use brackets instead of parenthesis

The MLA Style guide suggests using parenthesis around references, as shown above.

This sucks because as an author, trying to do a good job keeping everything accurate, I often have to go back and forth among my references. But references in parenthesis are terrible to find, because parenthesis are also used for other purposes. That’s why I prefer to place square brackets around references, like this:

The seven authorization levels can be used to delegate work to a team, in a step-by-step approach [Appelo, Management 3.0].

With this alternative it is much easier for me to search and find references. I’ve used this approach in my first book [Appelo, Management 3.0], which has been read by thousands of people, and not one person ever complained. At least not to me.

Am I doing this for myself? Hell no. I want my readers to have references that are correct. Making them easier for myself to find, helps me a lot to keep them accurate. (Yes, I know there are some tools out there that can help writers with this. But so far I find this much easier.)

Use letters to indicate pages or locations

The MLA Style guide suggests adding a number in the reference, when I want to refer to a specific page, like this:

The seven authorization levels can be used to delegate work to a team (Appelo 95).

This sucks, for two reasons. First of all, it is unclear to the reader what the writer means. Is it referring to page 95? Or to the year 1995? Or the number of readers who died while reading the book? Second, since many people nowadays read e-books instead of paper books, we authors must learn to use location numbers instead of page numbers. That’s why I now do it like this:

The seven authorization levels can be used to delegate work to a team [Appelo, Management 3.0 p.127].

OR…

The seven authorization levels can be used to delegate work to a team [Appelo, Management 3.0 l.2879].

When I add a p. for page numbers or a l. for location numbers I solve both problems with just one minor change. And then readers will also understand when I write [Appelo, Management 3.0 ✝623].

Include URL shortened links to online publications

The MLA Style guide specifically suggests not to include web addresses for online publications in a bibliography. Maybe because resources on the Internet tend to disappear or move around. So they say, do it like this:

Appelo, Jurgen. “Improve MLA Style Guide” NOOP.NL,
     24 July 2008. Web. 24 July 2008.

This sucks, because as a writer you should make it easier for readers to find resources, not more difficult. That’s why I started using bit.ly to add hyperlinks to online publications in my lists of resources, like this:

Appelo, Jurgen. “Improve MLA Style Guide” <http://bit.ly/LL4YXP>
     NOOP.NL, 24 July 2008. Web. 24 July 2008.

When resources disappear, or move around, I can make sure that the URL-shortened version is updated, because I can own that URL. After all, my job as a writer is to delight my readers. I see no reason to annoy people by having them do Google searches when I’m already keeping track of where to find things.

Anything else you would like?

I’m still experimenting with better references and citations for my upcoming articles and books. Is there anything else you would like me to do?

How else can I delight the reader with better references?

(photo: photosteve101)

     

Podcast and Articles

What is the similarity between Jeff Sutherland, Mary Poppendieck, Bob Martin, David Anderson, and me? Nothing! Nothing at all.

Except… each of these people were interviewed in a podcast by the Devnology guys. Including me. Nice! In the podcast we talk about the various topics addressed in my Management 3.0 book. Listen here. It's only one hour...

Another thing you might find interesting: InformIT has published a big article by me, in 2 parts, about delegation of authority and empowerment of teams. You can read about the The Seven Levels of Authority here and here.

Looking for Creative Business Partner

Sometimes you must admit that you can’t do everything all by yourself. For me, this is that moment...

It’s funny that I just wrote a 4000-word article about delegation. After all, since I quit my job 2 months ago, I have nobody to delegate to.

But now that my book and courses are nearly available, my mailbox is filling with opportunities. And I’m not complaining! But I would like to do more… People suggest I should produce videos, webcasts, podcasts, more courses, more presentations, and more articles. But I can’t. Not without somebody’s help.

And so, this is a call for help.

Or better, it is an offer to be an entrepreneur.

I am trying to build a new business around the dissemination of ideas through social networking and personal branding.

I’m looking for a business partner (not freelancers!) to start this new venture with me, and to work with me in these areas:

• Design: Designing/creating the look-and-feel of various kinds of digital content, including videos, ebooks, PowerPoint slides, and a website.
• Visualization: Creating illustrations and animations that convey a compelling story in a visual way.
• Video: Creating/editing videos, converting our ideas to interesting videos, for YouTube and other video sites.
• Audio: Creating/editing audio, converting existing materials to digital audio, for iTunes and other audio repositories.
• Social media: Marketing content and building relationships through social networks and other media channels.

The physical distance to me (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) should preferably be small.

If you’re interested in building a business with me, and if you think you have what it takes to complement the few skills that I have, please contact me.

Again: I am not looking for freelancers and 3rd-party services.
Only entrepreneurs please.

The Idea Farmer

I hope people will not call me a thought leader. That’s scary... I want people to think for themselves. I'm an idea farmer.

I read because I love collecting other people’s good ideas.

I nurture those ideas. I water them with my attention, and I feed them with my thoughts.

And after some time and energy the ideas start sprouting offspring. I let them mix and mingle with each other; I let them connect, compete, cooperate, and copulate in the weirdest ways. Sometimes they make me blush.

But the offspring is worth all that trouble. I care for these little new ideas, and I try to make them healthy and strong.

I’m an idea farmer. I grow new ideas from older ones.

And when the new ideas are big and fully grown, I sell them.

Or when they’re still young and small, I give them away for free.

Like now.

(image by Nicholas_T)

Jurgen Appelo is an award-winning speaker, trainer, and author of Management 3.0, a management book for software development. You can hire him as a speaker or trainer, to add some spice to your discussions, workshops, or conferences.

A New Project Life Cycle

I've introduced a new project life cycle model in our organization. It's an exotic cocktail, created from 1/3 DSDM, 1/3 Scrum and 1/3 Agile UP. There might even be a dash of Evo in it -- Hell, I wouldn't care if it contained a hint of coconut or pineapple. Whatever works for our projects is fine with me.

You might be interested to know how the selection took place. Well, I know that the most succesful companies create their own custom methodologies from bits and pieces of other methods. So that's what I did too.

I carefully laid out all my books on the floor, and I set my hamster George free to select some bits and pieces to nibble on. The pipeline idea (separation of design vs. development vs. deployment) was taken from DSDM. I know that most other methods express their loathing of pipelines in software development, but George pissed on those sections. I simply had no choice. On the other hand, DSDM clearly distinguishes iterative and incremental cycles, while Scrum and the Unified Process have unified these in one and the same cycle. George, being a bit simple-minded, liked that idea. So we copied it. -- George is not the rotating-wheel-kind-of-hamster. The less rotations, the better. -- However, the strictness of doing the iterations/increments in exactly 30 days did not appeal to us. George does not like to be told what to do. So, in this case, the flexibility of Agile UP (and most other methods) prevailed, and the length of the iterations/increments cycle may be set to anything between 1 and 4 weeks.

The resulting lifecycle was presented in a PowerPoint slide to one of our customers. It was hailed as one of the best things we ever gave them. Certainly better than our coffee. I'm not taking any credits, of course, since George did most of the work. The sturdy red and grey colors were my idea though.

Self-Organized Quality Improvement

Today I counted no less than four new initiatives promoted by our employees:

1. A business consultant found a good tool that could help us to create wireframe prototypes more easily than the standard tools we have been using up until now. He is assisting our functional designers in trying out this new tool.
2. One of our developers created a tiny application that wraps our web-based hour registration application and places it in a taskbar icon. Some of the other developers are quite happy with it, because they can now more easily write the hours they have spent on our projects.
3. Another consultant has taken the initiative to plan a presentation on the "brown paper technique" that he has experimented with for gathering requirements from a customer. Both the customer and our own people seem to be pleased with the results so far.
4. One of our service employees has called out for help from collegues to start with a new (internal) company blog. They are now evaluating the software that they want to use for it.

Fortunately, I can match them with another few (and much bigger) quality improvement initiatives that I am working on myself. So it appears I am not out of a job. Yet...

(Very) Frequent Delivery

The frequent delivery principle in agile methods tells us that we should deliver products to our customers frequently. Quite often a fixed release schedule of X months or Y weeks is advised.

At my company we build and maintain an intranet application that is released whenever we feel like it, sometimes as often as twice per week. It depends on how valuable the new features (and bugfixes) are to our users. Why wait for a fixed monthly release date when a new version can be deployed to users in just 30 minutes?

It now appears that our practice leans towards the "new" idea of continous production, which states that you should deploy new versions as soon as possible, and as often as you want.

Software Development Book List

I'm trying to read the most importants books on the subject of software development (and particulary the managing part of it). Research on Amazon has resulted in this short-list of 16 works by (in most cases) well-known authors in our field. Let me know if you, as a world-famous author of a major best-seller, appear to be missing from this list. I will order your book straight away! (Of course, you may also send me a free copy...)

Jim Highsmith	Agile Project Management
Tom Demarco	Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams
James O. Coplien	Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development
Craig Larman	Agile and Iterative Development
David J. Anderson	Agile Management for Software Engineering
Steve McConnell	Professional Software Development
Edward Yourdon	Death March, second edition
Frederick P. Brooks	The Mythical Man-Month Anniversary Edition
Robert L. Glass	Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
Alistair Cockburn	Agile Software Development (2nd Edition)
Mary Poppendieck	Implementing Lean Software Development
Sanjiv Augustine	Managing Agile Projects
Jim Highsmith	Agile Software Development Ecosystems
Robert K. Wysocki	Effective Project Management
Joel Spolsky	Joel on Software
Andrew Hunt	The Pragmatic Programmer

I bought myself a brand new cafetiera today, which will soon become indispensible for me. So give me just another few months and I will have read all of them!