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I'll be posting at the Modus Cooperandi blog on a regular basis, so you might like to add it to your RSS reader.

"You cobble them all [athletes and staff] together, give them a good environment, you push them, make them not scared to fail," said Brailsford.

 

"And you say 'Let's end up all over the track having tried to win rather than play safe and get a silver or bronze'. You remove that fear from the athletes and off we go."

Time and again, I find it difficult to find better management and leadership advice than Deming. I find that creating a failure tolerant, fear free, innovative culture is the key to creating continuous improvement and ultimately achieving world class performance. It's remarkable how well this advice holds up across so many walks of life: manufacturing; sports; and knowledge workers professions.

Currently, that means planning the forthcoming APLN Leadership Summit in Seattle.

I'm also going to be redesigning my blog and starting a fresh Channel APLN with a separate RSS feed. Look out for that soon.

I'm really happy with how the APLN is developing and the new focus we've brought to the organization this year. The APLN (note: we've more or less completely dropped the full name, Agile Project Leadership Network, in favor of a rebranding around the initials) knows what it wants to be now, a not-for-profit dedicated to bringing better leadership and management to knowledge worker industries with an initial focus on the IT sector and software development.

The APLN now has a clear focus around 3 main activities: Leadership Summits - these regional conferences provide learning opportunities for attendees and bring much needed funding to the APLN to support the other two activities; learning through a Wiki of Knowledge (LWOK) - if you like, a crowd-sourced alternative to other bodies of knowledge around project management; and a social networking and social media program designed to bring the community of leaders and managers closer together and provide transparency in to their achievements, learning, recognition and skills.

You'll be hearing a lot more about these APLN activities as the year unfolds. I'm proud to be part of the APLN and find the challenge of bootstrapping and developing a nascent, startup, non-profit organization, fun and engaging.

Related Posts: Digital Whiteboard Experiment, Return of the Sticky Buddy, Do you have your Sticky Buddy?

We've occupied the offices of Jim's old business Gray Hill Solutions on Seattle's Lake Union and we've opened up shop offering consulting on agile and lean enterprise transitions and training classes in Agile Management and Kanban. We intend to be leading the move to a more collaborative, higher trust, more open, more networked, more socially connected way of working in the 21st Century.

If you've been reading this blog for a while and wished, "if only we could hire David to come and help us..." or "I wish David taught classes in this stuff..." then your wishes have been granted. If you'd like to talk to me about helping you and your business be more successful, click the Hire David link on LHS navigation bar or drop me an email.

Please support the APLN by signing up for the conference and coming along to see Chris and I present in Dallas.

Purging the backlog is similar to a bug triage effort. You simply need some criteria to decide whether something stays in the backlog or is dropped. It could be very simple. For example, "anything over 6 months old is dropped." This simple rule fits with the real option theory nature of kanban pull prioritization. If something isn't important enough to get selected over a 6 month period, it probably isn't important enough - period!

Naturally, a more complex set of criteria is possible. You might want to assess the alignment with strategic, operational and tactical objectives of the business. You might want to assess alignment with particular customer segments or even specific customer orders. As we do, you might want to consider whether a change request is obviated with a forthcoming major release, or is requested on a system due to be decommissioned at some known point in the future.

Regardless, of your criteria, I'd recommend that you purge your backlog regularly, at least quarterly and perhaps monthly. Keeping the backlog healthy and relevant serves the business by simplifying prioritization discussions for kanban slots and by reducing queuing time and improving overall business agility from ideation to delivery of working software.

Related Posts: Kanban in Action, Recipe for Success Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

This was all very well and given enough time and enough focus on Lean principles we might yet have evolved to a continuous integration approach for the enterprise but it would have taken years.

For the past six months I've been lucky enough to have Troy Magennis on my staff as our Enterprise Architect. Troy brought a wealth of experience in .Net and C# and large scale Microsoft technology projects to our team. Given that we suffer numerous impacts to our productivity with the constant challenge of code line management, integration, build and environment build out and reset, Troy refused to accept that continuous integration wasn't possible, and indeed in his view it was essential to eliminating waste and maintaining a regular flow of valuable software in to our production environments.

So together with one of our architecture team and a toolsmith from our configuration management group, they spent some considerable time and effort tackling the problem of how to build our entire enterprise code base in a continuous fashion. A few weeks ago, they finally achieved it and we now have cruise control reports on the state of our enterprise code base at any given time.

This doesn't mean that our enterprise DEV environment can be pushed to production whenever we choose. At least not without successful implementation of latent code and full regression testing to show that the new code is truly latent, but the result is that we have reduced our code line maintenance to a single line for all major projects in our portfolio plus a branch for sustaining engineering (released on a 2 week cycle).

At my prompting Troy has gathered his thoughts on Does Continuous Integration Scale to Enterprise Projects? what it takes to achieve enterprise scale continuous integration and how to implement it, in a white paper available over on his blog. You can get it in PDF here. The main takeaway from this article isn't a revelation about configuration management or build tools. The key to enterprise scale continuous integration is solid enterprise architecture and enforcement of good software engineering principles of loose coupling and high cohesion across all projects in the portfolio.

Yes, all you agilistas out there! Architecture does matter, if you are to scale agile techniques to the enterprise! Technorati tag: Agile, Software+Engineering, Enterprise+Architecture

Ideally, I'd like to run a side-by-side comparison over a 6 to 9 month period to compare these two options. How are you dealing with bugs in your kanban system? Like option 1 or option 2 or do you have you own alternative approach? Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering

In San Francisco, the only North American city hosting the torch, officials shortened the April 9 route through the city and have abbreviated the ceremonies. Mayor Gavin Newsom has said no one will be prevented from expressing his views, but permits are required to gather near the torch.[Drama as torch arrival set for Tiananmen, though protests not expected]

The Chinese Ambassador to United States did not summon Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco to his office at 2 A.M. Instead the ambassador made his way to the Mayor's office in San Francisco to discuss the Olympic torch relay through the city.

Contrast it with this:

A sign of the nature of a relationship between countries is the manner in which they officially communicate displeasure. So when the Chinese government calls in the Indian ambassador at 2am, to hand her details of plans by Tibetan protesters to disrupt the movement of the Olympic torch in India, you know what the Chinese think about the nature of bilateral relationship. China might have reason to be angry. That it chose to be demonstrate unfriendliness reveals that it believes the proper way to handle India is through overreaction and bullying[Doing it at ungodly hours]

The editor of the People's Daily of Chennai must be upset that Mayor Newsom was not summoned.

Technorati Tags: Gavin Newsom, Olympics, San Francisco, India

Clifford Thomson sent me a link to a talk Dan Solove gave at Google on his new book The Future of Reputation. I interviewed Dan on Technometria a while back about his earlier book The Digital Person.

Dan's a very interesting speaker and raises important issues in his books and in this video. This is well worth watching if you're interested in the intersection of privacy and reputation in the Internet age.

Tags: itconversations reputation identity video privacy

One of the consequences of IT Conversations leaving Gigavox Media and returning to the Conversations Network fold is that eventually we needed to remove 'gigavox' from the feed name. Unfortunately, Feedburner will only forward a feed for 30 days and many RSS readers don't seem process permanent redirects well (change the URL permanently, not just follow it).

As a result, you might not be seeing updated IT Conversations shows in your favorite podcatcher. So, take a few minutes and make sure you're using this URL in your feeds:

http://feeds.conversationsnetwork.org/channel/itc

I checked the feed URL on my copy of iTunes and it seems to have dealt with the permanent redirect just fine (click on the "i" icon at the far right of the podcast name in iTunes to see info related to that podcast).

Tags: itconversations

This week’s Perspectives is a two-parter: an interview and companion screencast on the topic of cluster computing in the classroom. The interview is with Kyril Faenov, the General Manager of the Windows HPC (high performance computing) unit, and the screencast is with Rich Ciapala, a program manager for Microsoft HPC++ Labs.

The project demonstrated in the screencast, and discussed in the interview, is called CompFin Lab. It’s a system that enables professors to in turn enable their students to run computationally expensive financial models on large quantities of data. From the student’s perspective, you go to a SharePoint server, select a computational model, pick a basket of stocks, and run the model. Behind the scenes the task is partitioned and sprayed across a cluster of computers, then the results are gathered and presented in an Excel spreadsheet.

From the professor’s point of view, some .NET programming is required. But a framework abstracts the mechanics of dealing with the cluster, so the professor can focus on the logic of the model itself.

There are couple of key points about the evolution of high-performance computing that I want to highlight here. First, there’s what Kyril calls “the gravitational pull of data.” Increasingly, people and organizations are building vast repositories of data that other people and organizations will want to analyze in computationally expensive ways. It’s great to have access to a compute cluster in the cloud that can do the heavy lifting, but when datasets get really big you get bottlenecked trying to send the data to where the code runs. At a certain point you’d rather send the code to where the data lives.

A second and related point is that in our current model for large-scale cloud-based computing, there are only a handful of what I call intergalactic clusters — namely, those operated by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft. These are one-of-a-kind behemoths. You can’t replicate one of them locally and apply it to your terabytes of data. So as Kyril and his team build out their cloud-based HPC services, they’re working to ensure the services can be replicated locally.

Maybe the most optimal thing is for you to stand up a 1000-node cluster with each node having a terabyte of disk. We want to enable that. We want to be able to tell our customers: Here’s how we run this large-scale data-driven HPC applications, and here’s how, within a day or two, you can stand up one of these yourself.

The idea is that if you build one of those for your own terabyte trove of astronomical or climatalogical data, you can run your own computations against that data, and you can also share that capability with other people and organizations who want to run their code against your data.

Yesterday I posted Jane McGonigal's talk from ETech 2007 on creating alternate realities. This is the first show on IT Conversations that features our new slideshow tool for playing audio sync'd with the slides. For some talks this can make a real difference in the quality since they rely on the visuals so much. In the past we've sometimes not published good content because it relied too much on the slides. No more! Check it out and let us know what you think.

Tags: itconversations etech

Once I was sure I was really sure that I was hearing what I was hearing, I got all confused about the date. Tuesday already? Where did the weekend go?

Please, Today, don't do that to me again.

You do. And I don’t buy that you’re actually managing them, or more than one of them. Sure, you might be doing damage control, or helping people see that they have a disaster. But you’re not evaluating and managing risk. You’re not checking in the team to know what done means. You’re not seeing if what you need from others across the organization will be ready when your project team needs it. Dare I say, you’re not managing. You’re busy.  (Way too busy multitasking.) You might even be providing help to the projects, but you’re not being proactive and you’re not there when the team needs you.

I don’t buy this business that a project manager can actually manage several simultaneous projects. Even if the projects are small. You PMs who are trying to do this: your managers are deluding themselves. Your call on whether to tell them. (Don’t tell them they’re nuts, that’s a career-limiting-conversation

A while ago I wrote an alternative search and navigation interface to InfoWorld.com. The search is broken now because the underlying engine switched from Ultraseek to Google, and nobody has updated the search wrapper. But the navigation piece still works, and while it does, I want to invite some commentary because I’m thinking of doing something similar for another project.

In this model the navigation is metadata-driven, and supports views like:

InfoWorld stories tagged ‘Silverlight’

InfoWorld news stories tagged ‘Silverlight’

InfoWorld news stories by Elizabeth Montalbano tagged ‘Silverlight’

Every piece of metadata in the tabular display is active, and toggles a filter for that item. This works especially well for the tags, and enables you to cruise through the tagspace in a fluid way. For example, try this progression:

1. InfoWorld news stories tagged ‘Silverlight’

2. Click ‘flash’ to toggle it on

3. InfoWorld news stories tagged ‘Silverlight’ and ‘Flash’

4. Click ’silverlight’ to toggle it off

InfoWorld news stories tagged ‘Flash’

The same principle holds for other bits of metadata, like storytype. So for example:

1. InfoWorld news stories tagged ‘Silverlight’

2. Click ‘News’ to toggle it off

3. InfoWorld stories tagged ‘Silverlight’

4. Click ‘Review’ to toggle it on

5. InfoWorld Reviews tagged ‘Silverlight’

6. Click ‘Martin Heller’ to toggle it on

7. InfoWorld Reviews by Martin Heller tagged ‘Silverlight’

8. Click ’silverlight’ to toggle it off

9. InfoWorld Reviews by Martin Heller

It’s powerful to explore things this way, but if I did something like this again, I’d look for ways to make these filter progressions more intuitive and discoverable.

I just don’t think people expect every item to work as a control as well as an information display. And because they don’t, it may be a bad idea to do things that way. Or maybe it’s a good idea that’s still in search of its perfect expression. I’d be curious to know what you think.

I think I'm in love:

Anyone else up for it?

Not much to see, I'll admit, but I'm pleased - Matt and I made that happen.