Agile
Emerging From Crisis By Putting People Above Profits (via Agile Amped)
- With recent COVID-19 layoffs, Vaco partnered with GiveCamp Memphis to help charities that can’t do various tech things on their own. They paired people impacted by COVID-19 to help them network and keep skills sharp while getting some income.
- Another example… The City of Memphis was provided with about 100 people within 48 hours to answer phone lines for people calling in with questions real-time.
- Case study
- Challenges: identify people with the skillsets, manage expectations that people may be called back to their main jobs or could find full-time employment
- Trust the people you hire to make the best decisions for the people and the organization.
- What’s next? There’s a continuing opportunity to build connections through new skills on the resume, meet people, and meet the needs of the community. This work could be a buffer for people in-between contracts. Making charity needs visible is an important step.
- Formed small autonomous teams to identify people and charities. Having regular virtual sessions to sync up was helpful.
- The use of cross-functional teams is a technique for protecting revenue and minimizing costs. This is no longer just an IT thing or a Scrum-team thing. What can we offer with what we have today?
Remote Work and PSTIR (via Leading Agile)
- White paper
- Focus on how teams can collaborate and increased visibility on systems of delivery (structure, teams, process of building/delivering, measuring)
- Issues: Remote collaboration fatigue hits around Thursday. Rolling meetings leads to unreliability (bio breaks, meetings run over). Interruptions (e.g., mowers outside, pets). Technical problems (e.g., storms coming through that knock out power/Internet). Fidgety people.
- PSTIR: Prepare, Socialize, Tailor, Implement, Reinforce
- In the system of delivery — to get work done, to plan, to show health and progress — these steps help. How do we get confidence that the backlog is driving toward the outcomes the business needs?
- Roadmapping with everybody remote… Who needs to be there and who doesn’t? Check assumptions out loud more often than you normally would. Lay out as much as you can beforehand so that you come in prepared. This inherently makes for more meetings for some folks, usually product folks.
- Nemawashi
- If you’re given pre-read material, make an effort to review this before the meeting; otherwise, it’s as bad as showing up 30 minutes late to a discussion.
- “Do I work from home or do I live at work?”
- You need to spend time learning what people want and how they work. It’s important to know how to have conversations with people.
- Find people that help balance strengths. Analogy: orchestra vs. jazz band.
- Developing roadmaps needs to be a mix of synchronous (conversations) and asynchronous work (don’t waste everyone’s time moving things around in a diagram).
- Virtual whiteboarding tools (Miro, Mural, NoteApp) work so long as people invest a non-trivial amount of time (i.e., a few hours) to learn the dos and don’ts of the tools. Some orgs due to VPN settings, disclosure concerns cannot use these tools.
- You may need to start challenging the status quo on InfoSec requirements about collaboration tools, given we’re likely to continue working remote for the next 6-18 months.
- Even though you send people information (links, attachments), they may not look at it, because we’re so bombarded with information now with remote work and multi-channel communications (e.g., Slack, email, texts).
- Reinforce what we’re trying to achieve (the why).
- Extra “R”s… Reflect so you can continuously improve. Refresh to pause and catch your breath so you’re not going 100% all the time.
Culture
What Has — and Hasn’t — Changed Since “Dear White Boss…” (via Harvard Business Review)
HBR published an article in 2002 titled “Dear White Boss…” where they discussed race inequality issues. Unfortunately the article still seems relevant in 2020. The authors suggest changing high-potential leadership assessment criteria based on future capabilities (not past performance in an environment that likely no longer applies), exhibiting more transparency around the process, and reinforcing accountability at every level of the organization.
Designing a Candidate-Focused Interview Process (via Software Lead Weekly)
I enjoy learning how other people do hiring and onboarding. Some things that stood out to me for Readme…
- The manager has to have done the job for three months before hiring for it (ensure the need and clarifies what’s needed).
- The job description is written from the candidates perspective of what they’re first several months will be like.
- The activities are hands-on and relevant, as opposed to call-and-response questions across a desk.
- They look for curiosity, not correct answers.
My commentary on the Netflix film The Social Dilemma, where pioneers of social media speak out about the ramifications of optimizing for engagement, growth, and ad revenue.
Leadership
This book has some “plays” you can add to your playbook for showing up more at work (and in other areas of your life) and is applicable across industries and job titles. It’s a short book that can easily be read in an afternoon.
- Be vulnerable.
- Share before you’re ready.
- Look for opportunity.
- Ask clarifying questions.
- Highlight what’s working.
- Have difficult conversations.
- Get more agreements.
- Bring brightness to the room.
This week our book club discussed growth management and hiring from chapter seven in Radical Candor.
Is CEO a Two-Person Job? (via Harvard Business Review)
The article describes the process for getting this scenario set up, but there were two takeaways for me: 1) If the CEO is giving 110%, that means 10% fractured in eleven places; 2) you need many skills (empathy, selflessness, collaboration, expressiveness, flexibility, patience, independences, aggressiveness, and decisiveness) to be successful and rarely are those traits embodied in one person.
Process
Embrace a Little Chaos When Innovating Under Pressure (via Harvard Business Review)
- Pitfall — compress established process (e.g., Scrum) into a tight time frame
- Pitfall — attempt to fully coordinate upfront
- When under pressure we default to the mechanisms we know (and practiced); innovation can come when releasing some of those restrictions.
Society
What Role Does Luck Play in Your Life? (via TED)
I’ve posted another TED video before about how meritocracies often don’t truly exist.
- This professor talks about how there “aren’t enough spots” (e.g., jobs, college slots) for good people and “some of them are not going to make it.”
- Some colleges have raised the standards in the interest of “fairness” by not admitting less-qualified people and rejecting better-qualified people. The result is an overly anxious generation that is told that it’s insufficient to be good enough: You have to be better than everyone else.
- In a just system, people get what they deserve. This is largely untrue in reality.
- One solution is a lottery for those who would be accepted if we could accept all qualified candidates. There is still injustice — people that don’t get what they deserve — but at least it’s honest.
- “We hate that idea that really important things in life might happen by luck or by chance…not under our control.”
- See also: veil of ignorance
Technology
Are You Ready for the Quantum Computing Revolution? (via Harvard Business Review)
- This is an active area of research with significant engineering and theoretical hurdles. However, we would do well to start thinking about the impacts now.
- Quantum security — our current security protocols are based on mathematical complexity that may be vulnerable to future quantum computing
- Use cases — business leaders and experts should partner with software and hardware engineers to see what problems are solvable
- Responsible design — even our current technologies of AI and blockchain have posed social, ethical, and environmental challenges; what will quantum computing bring?