Simplification

“It is true intelligence for a man to take a subject that is mysterious and great in itself and to unfold and simplify it so that a child can understand it.” – John H. Taylor

In a technical meeting, John, the architect, was presenting information about new feature they are bringing in a new release. After a while, Kay interrupted him and said “Hey I don’t understand what you say? Kindly repeat or can you make it more easier for me to understand”.

“Okay, let me put it in this way….” said John and he continued.

Simplification is an important & essential quality while present ideas, in which things presented in less complex or complicated way.

Simplification

- makes things easier to understand
- gives way to easy remembrance or recollection
- gives comfort
- brings positive mind attitude
- keeps the momentum
- Allows to act immediately
- gets the result
- gives happiness

There is nothing called over-simplification or under-simplification. Each one needs certain level of simplification to grasp & one person’s definition of ‘simplification’ differs from another.

Simplify your communication, work and life so that you can enjoy!

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo Da Vinci

Human Life is Scrum!

 

When I started thinking about Scrum principles in a wholistic way, I felt Scrum was closely knitted with all important life principles. That’s the reason why anyone can relate Scrum to life easily. Here are the few comparisons.

* In life what we receive as we grow are incremental effect of what we did yesterday. We build whole life day-by-day & of course one day at a time.

* One needs to remove obstacles in each challenge they face to produce the expected result.

* Retrospection of past is what more important in increasing purpose in life hence it will lead to successful life. At regular intervals, one need to list down what to be started newly, what to be stopped permanently and what needs to be continued to get expected result. We iterate those activities or behaviors what was acclaimed as good.

* One can think that entire life goals are like ever growing Product Backlog. At any given point of time we work on those highest important goals. Once we complete it we move to next. If we find the situation is not suitable, we are move it to Product Backlog and even move it to lower priority.

* Upfront planning of entire life is not possible – even planning the next day completely is not possible! Also, we will not be having complete information on life goals (yearly, monthly) when we set it. We get more details once we pick it up in hand when it pops up as highest priority one . We demonstrate the goal output to one or many people around us & take feedback on that too.

As I said, one can relate Scrum to life but similar to Scrum, adapting what is mentioned for better life is really tough.

Leadership & Management Topics Tag Cloud

 

Here is the Management & Leadership topics list that I used to categorize & generate ideas. You can see all these topics in any Self-Help/ Management/ Leadership book.
If you take a closer look at the image Leadership Rubik’s cube which is the theme of this blog, I used 9 topics from the list to build it.

Here is what you can do with this list – Just take one (and only one) topic, generate at least 4 synonyms for each of those – think what idea you have about that particular item. Each one of us have general idea about each of the item listed. The more you dwell on one topic, you develop new ideas on those & you will become the master.

Situational Leadership	Decision Making	Quality
Excellence	Standards	Transformational Leadership
Transactional Leadership	Authority	Tasks
Priorities	Style	Productivity
“Just do it” Attitude	Competency	Collaboration
Communication (Listening, Presenting, Reading)	Commitment	Influence
Monitoring	Result Oriented	Budget
Problem Solving	Trust	Relation
Recognition	Planning	Awareness
Motivation	Ideas	Development
Growth	Inspiration	Helping
Effective	Efficient	Conflicts
Dream Big	Authentic	Stewardship
Servant Leadership	Teamwork	Accountability
Passion	Measurable	Action oriented
Purpose	Empowerment	Vision
Controlling	Fun	Distributed
Intelligence (Emotional)	Coaching (Training, Mentoring)	Time Management
Humility	Culture	Traits
Ethics	Metrics	Networking
Challenge	Strategy	Learning
High Performance	Creativity	Innovation
Change Management	Knowledge	Thinking
Service	Skills	Empathy
	Risks

Excellence in Leadership

Aristotle once said. "We are what we repeatedly do . . . Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

If I post this question to you "Why are you working so hard in learning all things about your domain? What do you want to achieve in your domain?"

Most of you will say "I want to achieve Excellence in my area. That’s why I am putting so much effort."

Yes. Everyone wants to achieve Excellence. Everyone feels ultimate fulfillment of performing an activity is achieving Excellence in that. Can I say "Excellence is th ultimate Goal? No. Excellence is a “way of life,” a “way of being” – not a steady state to be “achieved.”

What do Excellence mean?

Excellence is a talent or quality which is unusually good and so surpasses ordinary standards. It is also used as a standard of performance.[1]

How to achieve excellence?

Studies have shown that the most important way to achieve excellent performance in fields such as sport, music, professions and scholarship is to practice. Achievement of excellence in such fields commonly requires approximately 10 years of dedication, comprising about 10,000 hours of effort.

But in the contrary, asked how long it took to achieve Excellence, IBM’s legendary boss Tom Watson is said to have answered more or less as follows: “A minute. You ‘achieve’ Excellence by promising yourself right now that you’ll never again knowingly do anything that’s not Excellent – regardless of any pressure to do otherwise by any boss or situation.” [3]

Here is the straight forward crispier quotes on Excellence

Excellence can be obtained if you:
"…care more than others think is wise;
…risk more than others think is safe;
…dream more than others think is practical;
…expect more than others think is possible.”

                                        – Claude Bissell

"When the country is in kiosk, everyone has a plan to fix it, but it takes a leader of real understanding to straighten things out" [4]. Because Leaders possess Excellence – talent in understanding the problem & provides solution that brings out a country from the issues. Leaders have vision – they dream more than others think is practical.

Success is a by-product of Excellence, not the means to its own end. So.. Pursue Excellence.. Ignore Success.

Reference:

1. Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excellence

2. The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue EXCELLENCE – Tom Peters (2012)

3. The road to excellence: the acquisition of expert performance in the arts and sciences, sports, tacos and games – Karl Anders Ericsson (1996)

4. John Maxwell Law of Leadership Video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70skQqbGtPs

Agile Scrum – Terms & Explanation

I will present some Agile terms & explanations in this post. Before getting into explanation, let us review couple of important questions.

Question: I know all tools, processes & familiar with practices of Agile methods. Can I go ahead and follow Agile in my Project today?

Answer: Nope. Agile is more than just mere practices & terminologies. Agile is a mindset. It requires a change in work culture which boils down to organization culture. Agile advocates bringing people together in single platform (by a shift in the mindset) than just following the defined processes.

Agile Manifesto’s first statement says “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”

Agile is flexible in terms of processes, tools and you are free to customize/tailor-made them based on your project need. But it is requires constant interaction & collaboration between people with mindset to deliver value to customer through developing usable working software. That is the complex part everyone forgets to appreciate in early stages of Agile adaption & struggle with failures later on.

Question:Why Agile is a great phenomenon you should follow in current economic trend?
Answer:

You can consider following Agile methodology due to following reasons:

1. Even if you fail, you will fail faster & fail cheaper
2. Providing value to customer by providing important features fast so ROI will be better
3. Will get faster feedback which is good to take corrective steps well ahead before it becomes blunder later on

DAILY SCRUM

“Daily Scrum” is a short (approx. 10 – 15 minute), daily recurring, stand up, status meeting conducted mandatorily during the sprint & everyone expected to attend including Scrum Master. Scrum team need to answer 3 questions -

1. What happened yesterday?
2. What is the work plan for today?
3. What are the obstacles exist?

All answers should focus on status based user story and no general discussions.

USER STORY

“User Story” is Scrum term for user requirements. It has short descriptions of user/customer valued functionality that is used for planning & act as reminders to have conversations with customers.

A user story generally has 3 sections: <Who>, <What>, <Why> of a functionality.
Example: As a <Who:Manager> I need to <What:view orders submitted to me> So that <Why:I can take action on those very fast>.

User story can hold short test descriptions that can be used to decide whether story is done. User stories are written in a card that is size of sticky notes, so it needs to have a phrase or two that act as reminders to hold the conversation & notes about issues to be resolved during the conversation. If required, team can use backside of the story card to list testing related notes.

A good user story should have six attributes (acronym INVEST) -

(I)ndependent - No dependency with other stories so that it can be executed in any order & can be prioritized based on value to the organization.

(N)egotiable - User stories are functional requirements in business terms but they are not contractual agreements. Details can be negotiated & modified in a dialogue between customer and dev team.

(V)aluable- Understanding value of a functionality is useful in prioritizing & delivering top features during initial iterations. Value of user story captured insection.

(E)stimatable – Developers need to come up with time to complete each user story, so it should be estimatable.

(S)mall – User story needs to be small enough so that it can be accommodated in an iteration. Big user stories are called ‘Epics’ that may contain a 1) complex user story 2) compound (multiple) user story. Epics can be divided into multiple smaller independent user stories.

(T)estable – User stories should contain information with which test cases can be generated without much confusion & decision of done can be arrived.

A question often arises is how someone knows whether he/she is done with writing a user story, without having to flesh out all the details, as we had traditionally done within the waterfall environment. One can stop writing the story when:

1. The user cannot decompose a story into more end-to-end stories, meaning stories that touch all the layers of the application.
2. The team can derive tasks, ranging from 4 to 8 hours, to start their development work.
3. It’s possible to estimate the “point” of the story. [5]

There are many ways to help verify that the requirements are well written, above we saw INVEST rules for user stories. Another one is known as the CUTFITrules, which we used extensively to help validate the user stories.

(C)onsistent: A consistent requirement does not conflict with another requirement.

(U)nambiguous:The reviewers of a requirement statement should be able to draw only one interpretation of it, regardless of their role.

(T)estable: We should be able to create test cases for a requirement. If a requirement is not testable, trying to determine whether it is correctly implemented is a matter of opinion.

(F)easible: It must be possible to implement each requirement within the known capabilities and limitations of the system environment.

(I)ndependent: No “user story” should be dependent on another “user story”.

(T)raceable: You should be able to link each requirement to a user and to his goals.

SPRINT

“Sprint” is Scrum iteration time length(typically 1 – 4 weeks) in which development team work on certain prioritized set of backlog items and produce some tangible value to the customer. Sprints are time-boxed & should have same length throughout till the final product delivery. Generally, no scope change is allowed within a sprint but modification user story can be prioritized and included in subsequent sprints.

Each concept in Agile Scrum has one or more benefits (of course any item in this world also have drawbacks too!!!). Here are few benefits behind timeboxing of sprint -

* As Agile focuses on delivering value to customer, timeboxing compels prioritization of work that in turn increases focus.

* Whatever be the status of user stories, sprint comes to end exactly on timeboxed end date, so team focuses on completing all user stories planned for the sprint otherwise it will be added to next sprint.

* As number of items taken in hand (# of user stories) are limited in a sprint so items under development status will also be in limited number.

User stories are planned either by number of days or story points. If total product backlog measured as 150 story points & each Sprint length is determined as 30 story points (based on team’s comfort-ability in delivering the potentially shippable product increment), then there will be 5 Sprints/iterations (5 Sprints * 30 story points) for product completion. User stories that add up to 30 story points can only be planned in one sprint. At the end of each sprint, goal set for the sprint is achieved based on agreed definition of done.

PRODUCT BACKLOG

One can give a day long lecture about “Product Backlog” as it is the heart of the Scrum framework. Let me put concise explanation about it.

The product backlog is a prioritized list of desired product functionality. It is a highly visible artifact that is accessible to all project stakeholders. A PB item can be a feature, change in existing

 functionality, defect, technical improvements or even knowledge acquisition (prototype or POC development). Most PBIs are features – items of functionality that will have tangible value to the user or customer.A good product backlog should have DEEP attributes.

Roman Pichler, and Mike Cohn use the acronym DEEP to summarize key attributes of a good product backlog.

(D)etailed Appropriately:User stories on the product backlog that will be done soon need to be sufficiently well understood that they can be completed in the coming sprint. Stories that will not be developed for a while should be described with less detail.

(E)stimated: The product backlog is more than a list of all work to be done; it is also a useful planning tool. Because items further down the backlog are not as well understood (yet), the estimates associated with them will be less precise than estimates given items at the top.

(E)mergent: A product backlog is not static. It will change over time. As more is learned, user stories on the product backlog will be added, removed, or re-prioritized.

(P)rioritized: The product backlog should be sorted with the most valuable items at the top and the least valuable at the bottom. By always working in priority order, the team is able to maximize the value of the product or system being developed.

Defining & documenting product backlog item is called Grooming. Amount of work in a product backlog is executed in multiple iterations called Sprint & sprint backlog is created with subset of high-priority items in the product backlog. At the end of a sprint, in case any item is still pending or new items found they will be inserted into product backlog in the correct order to be worked on in a future iteration.

References:

1. http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/make-the-product-backlog-deep
2. Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process By: Kenneth S. Rubin, 2012
3. Becoming Agile: … in an imperfect world By: Greg Smith; Ahmed Sidky, 2009
4. http://www.scrumsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/DoBetterScrum-v2.pdf
5. http://agilepmstudent.blogspot.in/
6. Scrum® in Action: Agile Software Project Management and Development By: Andrew Pham, 2011