Agile
How to Eradicate the Word Project (via Agile Amped)
This was an interview with John Willis and Dominica DeGrandis; I don’t think the title is correct, as more discussion was had about making work visible. Here are a few notes I came away with…
- 55-85% of Gartner survey says CIOs are doing project to product transitions
- Scope/budget/schedule replaced by optimizing for business outcomes
- Bringing work to the people (longer-lived teams) instead of dumping work to the sustainment team
- Five time thieves: unplanned work, hidden dependencies, conflicting priorities, neglected work, too much WIP
- Bring upstream rep, downstream rep, someone who knows your product, your customer… “What prevents you from getting your work done?” That will help you identify issues and make decisions.
- How long to things get stuck in queues where nothing is being done to it?
- If you track the work electronically, you can figure out how long work items spend in certain states.
4 Steps to Persuade a Product Owner to Prioritize Refactoring (via Mountain Goat Software)
- Estimate the impact of the status quo (e.g., defect count and time to repair in a particular area of the code)
- Estimate the effort of refactoring (in hours)
- Estimate how much time will be saved
- Estimate the payback period
Business
The Transforming CLO (via Harvard Business Review)
The Chief Learning Officer is responsible not only for training employees, but transforming their organization’s capabilities to make learning an integral part of the company’s strategic agenda.
When Data Creates Competitive Advantage (via Harvard Business Review)
- How much value is added by customer data relative to the stand-alone value of the offering?
- How quickly does the marginal value of data-enabled learning drop off?
- How fast does the relevance of the user data depreciate?
- Is the data proprietary, meaning it can’t be purchased from other sources, easily copied, or reverse-engineered?
- How hard is it to imitate product improvements that are based on customer data?
- Does the data from one user help improve the product for the same user or for others?
- How fast can the insights from user data be incorporated into other products?
Why Competing For New Talent Is a Mistake (via Harvard Business Review)
Employers favor hiring over training existing staff, but this move can be costly (i.e., poaching performers via large salary bumps). Training current staff who are interested in staying with the company helps younger, underserved, and underrepresented groups develop better skills.
Career
How to Leave Work at Work (via Harvard Business Review)
- Define your “off hours”.
- Be clear about what you need to work on. Have a place to track your work (instead of ruminating about it the night before), plan out what you’ll do today, then wrap up at the end of the workday.
- Communicate when your “off hours” are and how people should expect to interact with you (e.g., “emails received after 6pm will not be answered until the following workday”).
- Get work done at work. Block off times to minimize interruptions.
Culture
The New Analytics of Culture (via Harvard Business Review)
Culture is easy to sense but difficult to measure, as self-reporting surveys are often unreliable. The authors used data from company emails, Slack channels, and Glassdoor reviews to measure culture. Aim to hire candidates whose core values and beliefs about a desirable workplace align well with those of current employees. Also look for cultural adaptability, as these candidates are better able to adjust to the inevitable culture changes that occur as orgs shift and evolve. Leaders must be adept at switching between promoting divergent opinions and when execution is needed to meeting deadlines.
The Era of Antisocial Social Media (via Harvard Business Review)
Young people (12-34 years old) are less likely to be engaged in traditional social media, such as Facebook. Instead they are using…
- Private messaging campfires to connect with real-life friends (e.g., Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Text Rex)
- Micro-community campfires where people gather around interests, beliefs, or passions (e.g., Facebook Groups, YouTube, Discord, Slack)
- Shared experience campfires where a like-minded community is the primary purpose for gathering (e.g., Fortnite, Twitch)
Design
How Digital Design Drives User Behavior (via Harvard Business Review)
Many consider visual design as a garnish, however research shows that how you present information to people (e.g., selecting a healthcare plan or 401(k) options) has an impact on how they make decisions.
Process
For Project Phoenix, it’s time for a feature freeze to address inconsistent builds, outages, and the like all while trying to build trust between departments. I enjoyed our discussion today which was more about concepts and themes rather than the plot.
Technology
The Paradox of Scale (via Software Lead Weekly)
It’s too easy to look at the tech giants and copy what they’re using now, but it may not be right (or the right time) for you. Gall’s law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
On Drafting an Engineering Strategy (via Software Lead Weekly)
This article poses having a mission/vision/strategy focus around the engineering aspect of the business. These concepts help focus what to build (or what not to build) and setting the tone for priorities. The author joined a new company and described his process of creating a strategy from scratch.