Archive for August, 2008
I’m on a new account this week and my colleague Julias Shaw coined the phrase in the title.
We have been trying to get our client to realize that the solution to people not reading huge requirements documents all the way from development to QA to support is not more documentation, but more communication.
We are all for documentation, but only the kind that people will actually read.
Joey at 7 Years By Ruth
Last night, as I sat with my grandsons reviewing their five and seven year old accomplishments, I was drawn again to memories of my own childhood experiences. Joey, my seven year old, proudly displayed his ability to write in handwriting, which had mostly been learned through self teaching, some of his capital letters. This, despite the fact that his mother was repeatedly requesting that they say goodnight and get ready for bed. “Let me show you a capital T, Gramma”, he said, laboriously outlining his project. “Oops!” I remarked, “You shouldn’t have crossed the T, honey, that makes it an F.” There was a stricken look on his face, and with an “Oh no!” he left the room. He returned shortly with his specially wrapped gift for his parents which had a large beautifully made capital F in “Fo Mom & Pop.” I whispered to get an eraser and we would fix it and he went and desperately began searching the drawer where such things were kept. Mom, by this time, and not knowing what was going in, demanded that bed time was now! And she forcefully directed him toward the stairs. The enormity, to him, of his predicament, started a totally frustrated cry, but he went upstairs. When she returned I briefly told her what was happening and went to call the sobbing child for just one minute. I explained to him that if he added a small “r” to the “Fo” it would change the word. With brimming eyes, and a moment’s thought, he realized it would say “For” which was perfectly acceptable. Tears stopped, the correction was made, and a true weight had been lifted in his young mind.
It is the tendency of busy adults to forget the importance of the little tragedies that are as monumental to a small store of experiences in children as larger ones are to adults. Showing them how to deal with and minimize error is one of the best and kindest tools to give them. The humiliation and lack of self esteem that comes from not doing what is acceptably correct can leave a scar no different than the scar an adult gets from the same type of things. The child has within him the adult he will be. Treat him with the respect you would afford, and the kindness you should use, in your dealings with all people.
The enormity of unresolved calamities of my own childhood, though they are small by adult standards, still come back to haunt me. Not that adults were uncaring, but there was an opinion that because children were small, their feelings were relative to their size. Not so! The adult is wrapped in a small confining package, straining to find answers to enormous complexities in the child’s body.
I miss you Grandma.
When you have to evaluate someone, it is easy to err on the side of being nice. When you really like the person outside of work or they are your friend, it becomes doubly hard. It is still important to be honest with feedback for someone so that they can improve and important for future teams so that they can make sure the person is the right fit.
I tend to use a lesson learned long ago to escalate problems I’m having with people.
First, talking to the person is often the earliest and easiest way to give someone feedback. Often people will not know something is wrong and are more than willing to fix it.
Second, if the person doesn’t respond, let them know you will take your feedback to their boss if needed. Give them a timeframe to improve and tell them what you will do if they don’t.
Third, evaluate how the person is doing and possibly even get a second opinion.
Finally, putting honest feedback into a review will help teams evaluate the person’s strengths and weaknesses for the future. Even bad feedback with a good outcome can help someone’s review for the future. Who doesn’t like to see someone improve?
When you sugarcoat a review, you hurt the person by not letting them improve and future teams they will work with by not letting them see where they need to cover or help someone.
I’ve seen many teams using Mingle as a card wall instead of using real index cards. Usually the teams are distributed, so real cards wouldn’t help anyway. They all run into the same problem that Mingle doesn’t have a feature to automatically refresh a page throughout the day as the team updates cards. I’ll show you a few simple solutions you can choose from to refresh Mingle automatically.
A quick and easy solution is to use a Firefox extension that can automatically refresh any page called ReloadEvery. This is probably the least amount of work and works just fine.
I’ve also created a small bit of HTML that uses Javascript to refresh an IFrame that takes up the whole page. Just change the google URL to whatever page you need to point to and the amount of seconds you want it to refresh (set to 5 right now). It works in all of the browsers I could find.
I had a client almost two years ago that was plagued by meetings. Many employees would have back-to-back meetings lasting all day. All of the common symptoms were there: unessential people, no agenda, no clear goals or tasks at the end of a meeting. I remember being annoyed by this the whole time, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was having back-to-back meetings about the same thing.
We coined the term MDD or Meeting Driven Development for them and helped eliminate a huge percentage of their meetings with a few simple rules and tricks to show them him much a meeting really cost them.
First, if there was no clear agenda over email at less an hour before, there was no meeting, period. Initially it was just the consultants that wouldn’t show up, but the full time staff eventually did this too. Often this would eliminate meetings entirely as questions could be answered over email.
Second, we set up a mailing list for people to post to on topics that were relevant to the business including off-topic boards so people could have fun and not clog inboxes. This helped kill meetings by giving them a searchable repository of knowledge.
Third, a wiki was set up with many common threads expanded in a more readable format. Wiki pages were updated and constantly referenced in the mailing lists.
What was the result? More productivity due to more time not wasted in meetings. People actually had time to do work again.
People often wonder why consultants can be so effective at a client site. There are many reasons, but a good one is not being subject to all of the administrative tasks and processes that an employee is put through. Sometimes it is simply that consultants cost too much for the client to be willing to foot the cost of a distracting meeting. Employees are no less important.
Note: agile principles dictate people over process which encourages talking rather than documenting. I’m not against all meetings, only unimportant ones that are wasteful of everyone’s time. Don’t invite 10 people for an hour when 2 for 5 minutes will do just fine for now.