I’m looking for companies to interview for a book I’m writing titled “Standup And Learn: Lessons For Real Life Agile.” Here’s the pitch:

Standup And Learn is a compilation of the real life lessons from those that have implemented Agile successfully, and those that have not. You’ll learn first hand specifically how people like you have dealt with very real situations – what worked well, and what didn’t. In the end, you’ll have a reference that will help you successfully implement Agile in your business.

I’m looking to interview companies that have first-hand experience implementing, or trying to implement, agile techniques. At the risk of sounding like an ass or a hypocrite- no consultants please. Part of what I want to discover with the book is the experience companies had with using or not using consultants. Based on my survey results, people are asking for information straight from the horses mouth, so to speak

If you’d like to be interviewed for the book, please fill out the application below. Your interview will remain 100% confidential unless you want your name or the name of your company included. I intend to be non-denominational, with preference not given to any particular agile method.

I look forward to speaking with you!

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Would you buy this Agile book (that I’m thinking about writing)? Please let me know by filling out this short survey.

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Have you ever changed the theme of your WordPress site only to find that ALL of the SEO goodness you’ve worked hard to achieve is now gone? Well that happened to me two days ago. But no longer.

Now you can migrate your SEO goodness and other meta-data from one theme or plugin to another WordPress theme or plugin with our Metathesis-Export WordPress plugin – and it’s open source.

Here’s the rundown:

Easily export the metadata stored by one plugin or theme to another plugin or theme.

Data Portability is important. Data Portability allows you to easily move from one system to another and take your content with you. Metathesis allows you to do just that.

This plugin provides an easily extensible system for registering import and export sources. Out of the box it exports the Search Engine Optimized Title, Description, and Keywords data stored by the Thesis Theme a CSV file. It also ships with a second and third adapter to export the Thesis SEO data to the All in One SEO Pack plugin and vice versa.

More adapters are planned, and new ones can be written very easily by extending the Metathesis class and registering your adaptor via a WordPress filter provided by Metathesis. (Documentation forthcoming).

So, if you change your theme only to find that your SEO goodies are done, use Metathesis- Export to get it all back.

Happy WordPressing!

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Researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University created a visualization from tweets showing how Americans feels throughout the day.

From what I can tell, people are happy until they get into work. From there it goes downhill until later in the evening, perhaps when people go out with friends and family. Later in the evening, when the geeks come out to work, the mood is good until the Red Bull and coffee wears out and coding gets hard again. One all those folks go to bed, the cycle continues as the 9 to 5ers get up and going.

Here’s a link to the full monty – a high-res PDF of the data along with a time-lapse video and some further analysis: Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day inferred from Twitter

What does this info tell you?

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or, The Future of IT As I See It

My background is in corporate IT. I had the MCSE, the A+, the N+. I’ve set up large multi-site networks, SANs, firewalls, assorted appliances, and more. About seven years ago I transitioned into software development and never looked back. I got out of IT because I felt that, even though the companies I worked with and for relied heavily on computers to operate, IT was still treated like the red headed step child – tolerated, but never understood or fully respected as an equal part of the business.

I always wondered why, and how we could change that.

I love software – it’s creative, and you get immediate gratification from the creation itself along with the client being able to see results quickly. Being able to take an idea out of my head and make it a reality is, in a word, awesome.

About three years ago as I was looking for a better way to develop software, I was introduced to agile methods, including Scrum and Extreme Programming. I fell in love with them both, and immediately added parts of each to our development process.

Fast forward to today.

I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of companies, helping them to implement agile practices. I’ve met a lot of great people in the software industry, and learned a lot more. I have a Scrum certification, have attended a Kanban Coaching Workshop with David Anderson, and attend as many agile conferences as time and budget allow.

What has not changed though, is the gap between what people inside of many companies refer to as “the business” and “IT.” I’ve asked anyone who would talk to me what they feel is the best way to bring these two worlds together to a greater extent. Is it a matter of IT people (which includes software developers,) taking the initiative to learn more about business, and being able to speak the same language? Or is a better approach to help business people understand IT people – what it takes to develop software and keep infrastructure going?

What I’ve come to realize is that I’ve been looking at the entire thing incorrectly.

Enter this book -

This book was recommended to me by Mary Poppendieck, and once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. The description tells it all:

Ian is a Chief Information Officer (CIO) who is about to go on a journey of change – whether he likes it or not.  He will be expected to explore, challenge and radically recast the complex, often hostile relationships that can exist between a business and the people in its Information Technology (IT) department.  On the way, Ian, his Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer and other key stakeholders, experience a transformation in how a business needs to think about the value of its IT people and the work that they do. This results in some truly groundbreaking innovations in the scope and contribution of Ian’s role as CIO, the people that work for him and the strategy that he leads.

This book pretty much answered my question of how to approach this issue. It isn’t a matter of one side understanding the other. That’s the wrong approach – it pits people inside of a company against each other, which ensures that they will never be aligned. It’s really a matter of whether a company that is not in the business of IT should be doing IT. If you’re core competency isn’t developing software, should you be hiring software developers, designers, and everyone else that’s required to do it correctly, and investing in the infrastructure to ensure quality? And furthermore, how do you know if your company is getting the value that you want or need from these projects?

From the business standpoint, and a point brought up in the book, IT is simply one aspect of a project. Let’s look at an example to see what I mean.

We’re building a new application – Convergence. To bring this application to life and get people to use it, we need to:

1. Build the application (software developers)
2. Make it look good and to be user friendly (web designer, UX specialist)
3. Write the copy for the marketing pages (marketing)
4. Write the customer profiles for our “target market” (marketing)
5. Write advertising copy for ads, tweets, and other advertising efforts (marketing)
6. Keep track of all the costs involved in the project (accounting)

That’s at a minimum. Before that could happen we had to determine if the idea is worth investing in, if anyone would use the application once we launched it, and determine the specific value we’d get from doing the project (i.e. revenue protection and growth). All of that is done by a business function, not an IT function.

Let’s take a look at another example – email. Today there are mainly two ways you can go with email, which also now includes calendaring:

1. Set up an email/calendar server internally using Microsoft Exchange or Linux
2. Use a hosted email service, either through your web hosting company, or a company like Google

I’ve set up Exchange servers in the past, and it isn’t cheap to purchase or maintain. Regardless, if you do it yourself, you need:

1. The email server software (Linux can be free, Microsoft not so much)
2. A server to run the software
3. Someone to set it up
4. Someone to support it (often the same person as #3, unless you’re larger and have a consultant set it up for you). Support includes handling issues when they arrise, end-user support, upgrading the operating system on the server, and updating the email server software
5. If you have a ton of email, perhaps a storage area network (SAN) to store it on as well. These can also be very pricey.

All of the above would typically be purchased/setup/maintained by an IT person. Now, if you use a service like Google Apps For Your Domain, you get (for free):

1. Email, calendar, docs, and sites for 50

Now I’ve never had to call Google for support for GMail, so I don’t know how that would work (and I don’t pay to get it), however I’ve never had to call Google for support. If you do want that and more, you can pay $50/user/year, and that’s it.

So as a business person, when you have these two choices, knowing that you need email and that it does provide some level of value, which would you choose? I can tell you that I use Google mail. It’s true that email is part of today’s business infrastructure, however there is not enough value to me by doing it in-house to justify doing it in-house. I can get the same level of value by purchasing email as a service.

As a business owner, there are many IT services that I routinely purchase as services.

Here’s an example from one of my colleagues. Their IT department determined that the impact of a permission change in SharePoint was minimal (without talking with anyone else involved), so they (IT) put the ticket in as not urgent. Because of this, the company was unable to starting building a new workflow system. While a permission change may not seem like a big deal, this one permission caused a week delay in presenting something important to devision presidents (i.e. the people making decisions).  The way my colleague put it to me was,

The business impact should be determined by the business units, not just a canned matrix that serves the IT infrastructure.

That comes from someone I went to business school with, and someone I highly respect as a forward thinking individual who respects people that develop software and do IT – something he doesn’t know how to do.

So what’s my point?

I am not here to blame business or IT people. But what I am here to do is say that I think things are going to change, and most likely the way they changed in fruITion. I think the approach of helping business people and IT people better understand each other isn’t the best approach and in fact maintains the existing rift.

I believe that the onus is on us as software developers and firms to extract usable and testable requirements from our clients, not have them write them up in a certain format. I believe that it’s up to the people funding projects to determine what value they want to get from the projects. I believe that it’s the job of executives to set the vision and ensure everyone understand the direction a business wants and needs to go in, and make the necessary changes to see it happen.

I see the future of software development as freelancers and software firms being hired by companies to develop applications for them, rather than companies hiring software people. I see these firms working to improve their craft and becoming more effective at delivering quality products to their clients. I see the days of developers saying “my boss doesn’t allow time for me to test” go away because the boss understands software development and why we need testing. I imagine no longer hearing things like, “my manager didn’t include me in a meeting with the customer when I really needed to hear about this one feature, ” because that person’s boss knows that developer needs to speak directly to the client so that what is delivered is what the client needs and wants.

I believe that by bringing IT out of companies that don’t do IT, a better and more clear understanding of the value provided by IT people will be gained.

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That is the wrong question.

Yesterday I was speaking with a gentleman who had been confused by two very different posts of mine – the first from 2008 where I stated that we loved fixed-price contracts, and then another from this year where I said that fixed-price contracts fail clients. His company is adopting a more agile method of development, and he was concerned that their current method of billing – using fixed-price contracts – wouldn’t jive. He wanted to know my final answer on the matter, and what advice I might have for his situation.

As we were talking and I was going through my standard response, I realized that the standard arguments of why fixed-price contracts don’t work on agile projects aren’t enough. In Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath talk about how there are two sides to people – the elephant, and the rider. The rider is the logical and analytical side of us, where the elephant is more emotional. To successfully change things, we need to appeal to both the rider and the elephant – getting one and not the other leads to fatigue and ultimately missing our target.

The standard arguments against fixed-price contracts on agile projects – at least the ones that I put forth – appeal only to the rider, our logical side. To be more successful we need to get the elephant going too.

So I changed my modus operandi in mid-stream and posed the following questions:

1. Who decided to go with the fixed-price model?
2. Are you losing money on projects? If so, can you back that up with numbers?
3. During the sales process, do the sales people lead off with the fixed-price, or are customers asking for it?
4. How are the sales people compensated, and does that compensation change based on the total amount of money brought in by the project, or is it fixed at whatever percentage or amount they get when the project is sold?
5. When the scope of a project starts changing, how do the sales people handle that in terms of talking again with the client?

The questions to those answers can help us determine a course of action that appeals to both the rider, and the elephant.

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The schedule for Acts As Conference 2010 is posted, with details on the talks coming soon.

This year we have three days of workshops, sessions, open spaces, lightning talks, fishbowls and more focused on Ruby on Rails and software craftsmanship. It’s going to be an awesome year.

As a preview of some of the talks we have, topics cover:

• Innovation games
• Introduction to Ruby on Rails
• Managing requirements
• Billing models for Agile projects
• Testing, testing, and more testing
• Building an awesome team
• And much more. Oh yeah!

A big thanks goes out to all of the sponsors that have gotten on board to help us out so far. All of our sponsors are showing that they care about helping us all to improve our craft, and be better business owners. Shout outs go to:

• New Relic
• Freshbooks
• Doctype
• Apress
• Lunar Logic Polska

Registration is open. Tickets this year are $395, which includes all three days of development goodness, and of course food, and lot’s of coffee. Looking for a discount? Well, if you can get to the other side of this QR code here, you will find the golden ticket.

I’m super excited about the conference this year, not just about the content but about the group of speakers we have coming (did I mention that Rachel Davies is keynoting?). There is a lot we can learn from these folks, and I fully intend to pick their brains on many, many topics.

I’ll see you all October 28-30 in Orlando, Florida.

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(more pics on Flickr).

The space is awesome – three floors of coworking goodness full of great people that do Django, WordPress, Rails, marketing, and more. I had a great time, and Golden’s Deli down the street has an awesome fish and chips.

Later that day I headed over to Practical Agility, a Twin Cities based group of pragmatic practitioners gathering to discuss evolving agility formed by a friend of mine, David Hussman of DevJam.

Frankly, I would have been extremely happy just to have the chance to pick David’s brain about all things agile, however as I scanned the audience who did I see but Mary and Tom Poppendieck, and Esther Derby!

How did I not know that these folks lived here?!

After a great meeting consisting of 6 lightning talks followed by a fishbowl discussions, I has the great fortune to speak with Mary for about 45 minutes or so.

(Mary taking us to school)

Here are some of the lessons I learned in this conversation (paraphrased):

1. I’ve been asking the wrong questions and need to talk with more people to learn better questions to ask (and keep reading more books)
2. When talking with a company looking to implement Agile, we first need to ask if they know if they are building the right product, then if they are building the product right (testing, continuous integration, per the requirement), and then finally if they have the support and ability to make it happen.
3. The issues that arise between IT and business typically come down to a few things, one of which is that business is not sure of the value or return that development provides. However, if there is not a clear vision and strategy for making that happen, the value may never be know.
4. Before embarking on any business effort, we need a clear definition of success, and everyone needs to know what that definition is.
5. Companies like Google do not view lack of success as failure, they look at it as a lack of success, a missing of the mark. This is a very important distinction, and one that permeates a culture. If you are taught that failure is bad, then you will do your best to avoid it. This can manifest in ways including (and definitely not limited to): extending release cycles, endless planning, meeting after useless meeting with decisions never being made, lack of innovation, etc.

There were more lessons learned last night however those are the biggies. Thanks Mary!

Thoughts

What Mary confirmed for me is that a company can have all the Agile, Scrum, XP, Kanban, or whatever else it wants and can get nowhere because they lack a clear vision and a strategy to get there. Also, companies that view failure as failure rather than a lack of success (when success is clearly defined) create a culture of not failing, which in my opinion is the wrong way to look at it. If you don’t try anything how will you learn? Success yesterday does not ensure success today, nor tomorrow, and what worked before doesn’t always continue to work.

Focus on company culture – the one piece of advice that Tony Hsieh gave to entrepreneurs when I interview him – is so important. It can create or kill success. It can empower or emasculate. It can cause people to play it safe and do nothing extraordinary, or it can create world-changing innovations.

Where you work, are you given or provide clear and measurable metrics of success? Is there a clear vision for the company, and do you know how you fit into that vision?  Do you know the value that you provide? Do you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, not just what you’re doing?

I hope you can answer yes.

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I’m happy to announce that I’ll be speaking at Agile Eastern Europe in Kiev, Ukraine in the beginning of October. I’ll be joining an awesome lineup of speakers that includes Mary Poppendieck, Henrik Kniberg, Paul Klipp, J.B. Rainsberger, Jurgen Appelo, and many more. I’ll be speaking in the first slot (very well scheduled at 10 AM) of day 2 – October 9th. Click here for the full schedule.

I’ll be speaking about creating high trust distributed, multicultural agile environments. Here’s the full description:

Building trust in new relationships can be difficult enough, and when we’re working in a distributed environment with teams from multiple cultures, there can be significant barriers. However it is more than possible, and with understanding of who we are working with, their goals and their expectations, we can use Agile principles and techniques to overcome cultural hurdles and become a single, trusting team.

Drawing on his experience of working from the U.S. with clients and teams that span the globe, Robert Dempsey will delve into how Agile teams, regardless of location, can use Agile principles and practices to increase the communication necessary to build trust between customers and teams, and within teams. We’ll look at solutions to common issues that arise in distributed Agile environments, and specific techniques and tools that help build the necessary trust.

Tickets are on sale now for $200 for the first 50 attendees. They go up from there so get them while they’re inexpensive. This is going to be an awesome conference. I’m looking forward to catching up with a few peeps that I met at Agile Central Europe and Open Agile Romania while I’m there, as well as seeing Kiev.

See you in the Ukraine in October!

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At Atlantic Dominion Solutions we’ve been doing globally distributed agile development for a number of years. We have a team we work with in the Philippines, I’m now working from New Ulm, Minnesota for a bit, Justin is in Florida, our design firm Domo is in Seattle, Washington, and we work with contractors throughout the United States and abroad. It’s a model that works very well, and a model I see more companies moving to.

Geography hasn’t been a barrier for sometime. However, I do see two main barriers to distributed agile teams.

First is keeping the communication flowing. However that isn’t too much of a barrier anymore either. We have video conferencing, Skype, instant messenger, online project management systems (like Scrum’d), phones (Vonage is great if you work from home), and many others, making global communication instantaneous and easy. Other forms of communication exist as well to get our code talking, including continuous integration servers and source code repositories. One lesson here is that more documentation does not count as increased communication.

The second barrier is mindset. I know some managers and small business owners that have literally told me that they need to physically see their employees working. For me that’s a trust issue. I’m no psychologist, however I don’t think I’m too off with my assumption. It takes trust to have your people working off-site and allow them to manage their own time. But we’re all adults here aren’t we? We all know the expectations of our employers, and the consequences of not meeting those expectations don’t we?

As Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson said in Rework (a great book I recommend), you want everyone to get together at least 2-3 times per year. Currently there is no solid substitute for face-to-face communication, however we can come pretty darn close and have great relationships with our team members in between face times.

Thank you Internet, for making this possible.

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