A bit more to IT

Lean thinking has long been an influence on Agile but over the last couple of years we are seeing the links being made more often and by an increasing number of people.  The fact that Scrum owes much to Lean thinking is pretty well known but I suspect that we will be hearing a lot about Lean Software Development and Kanban in the near future.  I don’t really want to discuss Kanban here save to say that I’m interested in it though I have to confess that, as yet, I don’t know very much about it.  The presentation that David J. Anderson gave to Agile Scotland at the end of 2007 about his experiences with Kanban was inspiring and marked it out in my mind as a good way forward.

While an increasing number of folks are investigating the potential of Lean for software development we don’t necessarily want to get into a situation where its Lean Vs Agile.  Martin Fowler has written that the opposition Lean Vs Agile is a non-starter because the two are actually very deeply intertwined.  In saying that, however, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is much that Agile can learn from Lean.  Perhaps the most important thing to be gained from Lean is a proper appreciation of what Kent Beck calls the “social purpose of work”.  It may be that Lean can help address the persistent criticism that “software development often seems to occur in a purely technical context devoid of business or social purpose”.

Richard Durnall, another ThoughtWorker, has suggested that there are four main contexts in which Lean can directly contribute to Agile.  All of these are interesting but its the first and last ones which really ring true for me.  His first idea is that Lean can be used as a metaphor for Agile when trying to explain the benefits to executives.  The argument goes that it is all the easier to put forward an idea when one can compare its benefits with, for instance, the Toyota Production System.  But its his final point that is most significant for my interests.  Lean has a long history of successfully introducing large scale change into organisations and this is something which, Durnall points out, we could do with in IT.  The wider and more holistic perspective which Lean brings is very often missing from Agile as it is practised by many teams, though this almost certainly doesn’t equate with what the originators of the methods or the signatories of the Agile Manifesto intended.

My main research interest has been distributed Agile and in this area we can see that a narrow focus on team and task that characterises some methods, and particularly XP,  wouldn’t be appropriate.  My research has shown how large and small teams are successfully adapting Agile practices and principles to suit their particular circumstances and levels of distribution.  However, this adaptation only works where certain guiding principles are followed but unfortunately up to now there has been little direct guidance on what these core principles actually are.  Experimentation and experience are being used to discover what these are in a process which owes a great deal to the philosopy of learning by doing.  Could it be that Lean thinking is what is required to make this quite haphazard endeavour more systematic?

One of my colleagues writes a tech blog, and very good it is too, where he often discusses the finer points of java development.  Anyway, he has been doing a spike here at work looking into the JBoss Seam framework and thus far its all looking very promising.  He’s been able to iron out many of the major difficulties and happily we will soon be in a position where we can use this for our developments.  JBoss seam is relatively new and as such there aren’t many good short introductory guides to help folks with the practicalities of getting it working.  To remedy this situation my colleague has been blogging about his experiences and writing up some beginners’ tutorials.

Now quite a few people are looking at these posts and my colleague is beginning to get some comments asking for detailed answers to problems including a few emanating from the Indian sub-continent which all seem to have an air of urgency about them.  This scenario will be doubtless be familiar to those folks who write tech blogs or indeed anybody who reads techy forums.  One guy, having followed the steps in one of the tutorials, was having issues with his build, a problem largely resulting from a rather opaque error message (isn’t it always!).  The commenter was very keen to get this problem fixed and stated that if the answer was not forthcoming then they would consider that the “article is only literature for us”.  A choice of words and analogy which left my colleague at first struggling to understand the commenter’s meaning and later imagining his work sitting on the shelves of the library between such literary luminaries as Descartes and Dickens!

At the moment I’m preparing two presentations for quite different audiences based on my dissertation about distributed agile.  One group knows a lot about agile and its basic concepts while the other probably knows very little, you get the gist.  I think it is safe to assume, however, that both groups will not know very much about outsourcing past what they have read in the popular press and possibly the trade papers.  The problem is that much of this stuff takes a very pro or anti outsourcing stance depending on who is writing.  Thankfully there is a body of research which one can draw upon to obtain a more balanced perspective on what is understandably very divisive issue.  In this regard I’ve found the work of Erran Carmel, among others, to be particularly valuable.

Now as I was finishing off my brief history of outsourcing for one of the presentations I realised that I should bring it up to date by considering the impact of the credit crunch.  At this point I hit upon a bit of a snag.  The credit crunch is such a recent phenomenon that the only commentary available is from the press or trade papers whose analyses and vested interests I’ve already found so unsatisfactory.  Therefore the answer to my post title question is its very difficult to say right now.  More rigorous and balanced viewpoints require a bit more time to complete than a quickly penned commentary and quite rightly so given the fast pace of events in the economy over the past year.

Now you may be wondering what all this has to do with distributed agile.  Well if the amount of outsouring increases as a result of the credit crunch then I fully expect there to be greater emphasis on agile as companies try to gain more responsiveness from their offshore vendors.

My pal Clarke Ching is going to publish a short business parable next year called Rocks into Gold - A credit crunch parable for people who build software for a living. He’s going to give it away free online and also publish it as a paperback.  I’ve recently had a read of the pre-copy edited version and I have to say that its extremely topical and very well written.  Free copies of this version are available on his blog and I know that Clarke is keen to get feedback on this.  It contains some of the ideas which are going to be in his new book Rolling Rocks Downhill which is soon to be published by the excellent Pragmatic Bookshelf.  I know that myself and many other people in the agile community in Scotland, and also further afield, are eagerly awaiting the publication of Rolling Rocks.

I was left wondering how many other software people are in the same boat as the hero of Rocks into Gold, Bob Billington, whose job is in danger because of credit crunch related cutbacks.  I’m not going to give away more of the story here because those that are interested can get a copy from Clarke.  Suffice it to say that a bit of creative and agile thinking saves the day.  My question is, do many of the folks whose jobs are in danger realise that options exist to save projects hit by credit crunch issues.  This type of easily accessible parable is sure to make the message that much easier to communicate.

My previous post mentioned my upcoming presentation to the APM.  At first the concept of this seemed a bit daunting but after a bit of thought it seemed to be less so.  I have done a few presentations and conference papers in my old job and knew that it can be an enjoyable experience if one gets it right.  Anyway, as an attempt to put a bit of effort into this I have been doing a bit of background work on presentations.  I came across the book “slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations” by Nancy Duarte.  It was a very good read right from the start so much so that I ended up reading the whole book.  Its filled with really useful ideas!  Not everybody will have heard of Duarte but most folks will be familiar with Al Gore’s film “An Inconveninent Truth”.  Durate helped put together the very effective presentations used by Gore.  If only he had access to such support in the 2000 US Presidential Election.

slide:ology

Now there are very many great points made in this book but for the sake of brevity I can only highlight a few here.  “Chapter 2 Creating Ideas, Not Slides” is probably the best in the book.  It shows how a focus on the mechanism by which we actually do the presentation, the Powerpoint software itself, can be very harmful to conveying the message.  Instead we should try to focus on our ideas prior to thinking about the implementation.  I could relate to this proposition straight away because this is a phenomenon which software people are particularly bad for.

A point made early on in the book is that an audience will either listen to what the presenter is saying or read their bullet points.  They can’t do both.  Many presentations are little more than a reading of the bullet points leading to the horrible fate which is described in the title of this post.  Duarte suggests that these bullet point heavy presentations are actually documents and the person might as well circulate them for their audience to read and not bother with the presentation at all.

Now in order to avoid the death by bullet points some authors have suggested maximum word limits for each slide.  This seems rather prescriptive in my mind but its certainly true that more effective communication of ideas is achieved with the use of diagrams.  Chapter 3 of slide:ology provides a very practical guide to creating diagrams which will be of use for all those trying to banish their bullet points.  A classification of diagrams is provided alongside suggestions as to which concepts these are best for communicating.  This has proved a excellent resource in my own endeavours to revise my current presentation.

Creating better slides using diagrams isn’t always a simple task primarily because the visual communication and design necessary doesn’t always come naturally to people in a world where written and verbal types hold sway.  However the positive benefits of having effective visual expression of ideas outweighs the effort required.  Look at what it did for Al Gore!

This book has given me a lot of food for thought and practical ideas for presentation improvement and as such I would wholeheartedly recommend it.

A few months back I was pleasantly surprised when my old tutor from Napier phoned me up to say that they had entered my MSc dissertation for the Association for Project Management Scotland Branch Recognition of Student Success Awards.  To quote from their promotional material this: “This prestigious event will celebrate the success of MSc students showcasing their talents as emerging project management professionals with creative approaches to project management.”

The date for this has now been fixed for the 26th February in Glasgow. Myself and the two other finalists from the other APM member universities in central Scotland, Glasgow Caledonian and Heriot-Watt, have to present our work to a panel of judges who will decide the winner.  Presenting seemed quite a daunting task at first because I don’t get the chance to do much of it as part of my work. However, I know the material inside out which is often the key to doing these things well. The other thing I’ve been working on is the visuals for the presentation.  I am trying to avoid the death by a thousand bullet points that most of us have suffered in presentations at some point.

What is my take on this whole thing? Well I’m delighted to be asked to be a finalist and to get the chance to present my results to a wider audience.  It will also be a great chance to network with other management folks and those in the APM Scotland group.  Its great that this is a management audience because we particularly need to raise the profile of agile within this community.  Agile has a very strong technical background but this hasn’t been matched by project management approaches.

Welcome to “A bit more to IT” a blog where I will be discussing ideas and concepts which interest me in the fields of agile, agile management and social informatics, among other things.  I hope to be able to try out new ideas here as an aid to writing and communication.  And what of the title?  Its an unashamed reference to Rob Kling whose work I really like.  It refers to the notion that we need a more in depth and critical analysis in order to understand how technology interacts with society.  I believe that we need the kind of informed analysis provided by Kling and others interested in Social Informatics in order to improve our systems design.

Rob Kling

One of the ideas which I’m toying with is to see whether some of Kling’s approaches can be used to explore/ critique the agile phenomenon.  Anyway more of that later….

Graeme Brown