Passion

One of the other books I'm making my way through right now is Seth Godin's Linchpin. The book is about making yourself indispensable so your company can't do without you because you're so unique and valuable.

One of the topics is passion. I recall when I was interviewing for the job I have now, one of the interview questions was "what are you passionate about?" Of course I said project management.

The idea here is that if you're passionate about something, you are going to work on it not because you're getting paid but because it's important to you, the end result is you become a linchpin.

So my question to you...are you passionate about what you are doing? If not, how can you find the passion?

Are you part of the problem?

I am reading Karen White's book, Agile Project Management, A Mandate for the 21st Century. She uses the term adaptive problems to describe the types of problems our projects are meant to solve. I've see this term used before, it means our problems can't be solved by our traditional tools; we have to adapt out tools to meet the specific problem. Applying our standard approach just won't work on the complex problems of the 21st century.

This can apply whether your using agile or a more traditional approach to your projects. If you blindly follow a standard approach, you may be creating problems rather than solving them. We have to admit that we don't know the answer and be willing to learn as we progress through the project.

I've seen this with one of my clients. They were following agile and all the ceremony associated with it. They had their stand up meeting, iteration planning meeting, and even their retrospective, but I didn't see their approach evolve as the project progressed. The retrospective became a thing they had to do, because the methodology said so, but it wasn't helping them learn and adapt on the project.

So where do you draw the line? You don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water; abandoning the things that are working, but you have to be willing to adapt and fix the things that don't work. This is where you need to be a leader and help the team adapt while focusing on delivering the value your project was undertaking to deliver.

For example, if you are measuring progress through story points and you drop in the number of points you deliver from one iteration to the next, you need to figure out why and adapt so that next time you deliver more. So how are you helping your team evolve today?

Vacation

I took a few days of vacation this week. We took a family trip to Chicago. I was almost able to completely forget about work and just enjoy myself. Now I'm back at work with a little more motivation.

There was an interesting article in the March issue of Wired. It talked about how distractions such as Twitter or Facebook can actually make us more productive at work, especially when doing creative tasks. These distractions help our mind break out of a single mode of thinking, especially when they involve activities that bring about some novel information.

When I use Twitter, it's usually to find what other people are reading or writing about, some new article about Agile or Kanban or Personal Branding. According to the article, by looking through this other material, I may unlock some idea in my mind to solve some problem that I'm currently working on. So next time you're stuck, pull out that article you've been meaning to read for the last 3 months, it may help get you through your impasse.

Evolution, Revolution, At the Edge or Out of the Box

I'm reading Seth Godin's Free Prize Inside. The book is about marketing and how to get your product out to the edge so that you have differentiation from everyone else. Being a little faster, stronger, taller won't help because then it will still be a battle just on price. He uses Trader Joe's (my favorite grocery store) as an example. They don't have stuff cheaper, they have really good stuff at a lower price than brand names because they have their own label.

So I contrast this idea of going to the edge to the project I am on. We are automating a number of manual processes, but because we also have a tight delivery timeline, one of the project themes is "evolution, not revolution." In other words, we'll look for some simple improvements but we aren't trying to re-invent the organization.

One of the criticisms of this type of approach is that is stiffles that ability to think outside the box and come up with that idea that will really set you apart from the competition. So how do you decide if you should aim for evolution or revolution? The Kaizen approach would say make the small improvements, but what is your competition doing. Did Apple set out to build a slightly better MP3 player when it invented the iPod? Can you afford to make yourself just slightly better? What is your competition up to?

Pecha Kucha competition

The PMI Agile Community of Practice is running a Pecha Kucha competition, “Confessions of an Agile Project Manager”.

Submit your own video in a Pecha Kucha format telling us your story. Perhaps it was a guerrilla project conducted quietly so as to deliver value without attracting too much attention, or maybe it was an organizational transformation. Whatever your experience, we want to hear from you, the community, about your experiences using Agile.

Anyone can submit and vote on their favorite, you don't have to be a member of PMI or the Agile CoP. Most importantly, we will have cash prizes for the three best submissions!
Submissions can be made to the PMIAgile YouTube group.

Rules
Dates:
- March 5th: Contest officially begins
- May 10th: Last day to submit videos
- May 17th: Last day to vote on videos
Prizes
- 1st Place: $1000
- 2nd Place: $750
- 3rd Place: $500

Participation
Anyone is eligible to submit and vote on videos

Video Format
Submitted videos should be in formatted as pecha kucha presentations. This is a power point (or similar presentation capability) showing 20 slides that auto-advance every 20 seconds, for a video that is 6:40 in length. Videos that deviate from this format significantly, while impressing us with their creativity, will not be considered for the competition.

Science Fair

I'm at my company's annual kickoff this week. One of the things we do that is always interesting is Science Fair. Everyone has the opportunity to build a project, something they think our software can do that currently isn't in the roadmap. There have been some projects from past years that have made their way into the product. It's a good way to take advantage of people's intrinsic motivation.

I just finished the book Drive, by Daniel Pink. The book focuses on motivation. In the book, the author talks about other companies that do something similar. At Google, people get to spend 20% of their time on projects they want to. Many of these have made it to products. Atlasian software has "FedEx Day" where people are given 24 hours to come up with something, so called because people must deliver overnight (Side note - Atlasian's Jira tool came out as one of the top agile tools in VersionOne's 2009 State of Agile Development survey).

People get intrinsic motivation through autonomy, mastery, and purpose according to Daniel Pink. Autonomy is getting to choose what, when, and with whom they work with. In our science fair, people get to work on teams if they chose. Mastery is getting good at what you do, through such things as "Goldilocks tasks" that are hard enough to challenge but not so hard as to seem impossible. The purpose is why the company exists, something that everyone should relate to.

These intrinsic motivators will drive people and organizations much more effectively than the old carrot and stick approach, which we're all used to...if I hit my utilization target, I get a bonus. The carrot and stick can backfire in a number of ways, including stifling creativity. Things like FedEx Days or Science fair, on the other hand, will bring out creativity in a group of knowledge workers, leading to new products or services. So what's your organization doing to promote creativity?

More is not better

Have you ever been on a project that is falling behind, so someone up the food chain decides you need more people and then you fall even farther behind?

One reason for this has to do with communications. The more people you have on a project, the more communications channels you have. Two people, one channel...10 people, 45 channels. Agile works because you keep the teams small and keep everyone in the same room (ideally), minimizing the amount of communications you need.

Joel Spolsky recently wrote an article in Inc on this topic. He mentions the team responsible for the main menu for Vista at Microsoft, 43 people in all, or 903 communcations channels. In a year, only 200 lines of code were written because so much time was spent coordinating.

So what do you do? Think more about your communications. Don't invite people to meetings who don't need to be there. Don't send email to large distribution lists. Take a little more time planning your communications instead of blasting it out to people just to keep them in the loop.