I wish the Certified Scrum Master was not a certification at all. Maybe the introductory 2-day course just does that. I wish the words Certified and Master was used a little bit more sparingly. Perhaps the Practitioner certification should be the equivalent of CSM.

On a not so unrelated topic, the number of times I have changed my mind about new ideas, the number of times certain things work in one project setting but not another makes me realize that there is little that I know with certainty. I can only use my experience and my judgment to analyze the project setting and decide how to adapt all that I know about Agile or Lean to best suit that setting.

I have had some projects, like now, where we don’t have planning sessions, or demos or sprints. Not the way its prescribed. But I believe that we are Agile. I have had projects where the stories were written in great detail and others where it was very lean.

CSM is really an introduction to Agile. It’s after you apply it a few times that you master it. And I am not in any way stating that I have mastered it. The word master means just that. I don’t wish to dilute it.

I don’t know if its the dearth of good testers that causes this. But, I sort of get this feeling that there is some implicit assumption in the industry that a tester or a QA is someone who automates tests. This doesn’t resonate with my experience with that role. A QA is not a BA with automation skills. They do a lot more. This is one specialized role.

I have to share this link from Evolving Excellence. Anything can go wrong when managing a project, or running an organization. It could be internal or external. In many cases you don’t have a way of predicting what might go wrong or when. But it helps to be prepared, not by some superfluous risk management system that is half baked because the process demands it, but by creating a culture that absorbs it.

Toyota will be affected by the downturn in demand, but they will also be the best equipped to weather it. The primary reason for this is that for them people come first. Yes, everyone says that. But not like this. It is not just that people come first, it is that other people come first. Working together with other people in a culture based on individuality does not help organizations. Ego comes in the way, and it is this that causes us to create a structure that feeds this ego.

Performance reviews that are individual based. Salary structures that assume that somehow the head of the company is worth a thousand times more than a worker that actually touches the product. Hire and fire policies that treat labour as an expense and not an asset. Decision making that is top down, with little thought given to its impact.

Working together creating a symphony requires a deep understanding of the other artists around you. A mistake by any one can spoil the whole experience, but at the same time, you can do a lot more as a team.

Perhaps this downturn will cause more firms to move to Lean.

If you incentivize a person, you have to be ready for that person to try her best to maximize her incentives. Its natural. This is why you have to ensure that your incentives benefit the system as a whole. Individual incentives don’t necessarily benefit the greater good.

This is a paragraph I read today:

“Mitchell said ACORN threatened to close the office if he and his team didn’t meet their quota to register 13 to 20 voters a day.”

Let us pretend that the sentence read as follows:

“ACORN gives their employees a quota of registering 13 to 20 voters a day”

What do these sentences tell you about this organization? What are your concerns? Would you give a developer a quota of 50 lines of code a day? Are we living in the 21st century? Are you comfortable with even the second statement?

Look at Deming’s 11th point:

11a. Eliminate work standards (quotas)

11b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

If we introduce incentives that make little sense for the organization as a whole, eventually, the organization is bound to suffer. The leaders are at fault here. Not the workers who had to stay within the system.

What afflicts us at the moment is a lack of ethical leaders who value honesty, openness and integrity. Let us make the difficult decisions and the difficult choices so that we can create a culture that enables the organization to last beyond a few years.

I have found Product Owners disinterested, almost, when we ask them for priorities at a story card level. This is usually because its too low-level. Its more important for the Product Owner to first prioritize at a theme level.

Whats a theme? A theme is a business process that can later be broken into story cards. For example a theme for a retailer wanting to go online might be “A user can checkout a product on my site”. This theme can be broken into dozens of stories, “Add a product to cart”, “Checkout a product”, “Provide Shipping and Billing Address”, “Provide Billing Information”, “Google Checkout”, “Paypal”, “Visa”, “Mastercard”, “Bill Me Later”, “Save profile”.

Start with a list of themes and arrange them in the order as above. Then start with the mandatory themes and break those down into stories. Stories can then be ordered the exact same way as above. Mike Cohn’s presentation at Agile 2008 explains the way themes can be bucketed really well.

Note: A theme is not the same as an epic. An epic is really a large story. The advantage of this approach is that its very clear which themes are important and which stories within those themes. There is no risk of stories slipping through.

From the Curious Cat.

Interestingly the most number of winners of the Deming Prize since 2000 are from India.

A quote from Deming:

“In Japan when a company has to absorb a sudden economic hardship such as a 25% decline in sales, the sacrificial pecking order is firmly set. First the corporate dividends are cut. Then the salaries and the bonuses of the top management are reduced. Next, management salaries are trimmed from the top to the middle of the hierarchy. Lastly, the rank and file are asked to accept pay cuts or a reduction in the work force through attrition or voluntary discharge” He then states that the pecking order in the United States is the opposite.

At Semco, employees are asked to leave only when all other options are exhausted. Even then, those with the least social impact are asked to leave first. They are not asked to leave as in “walk him to the gate”. An effort is undertaken to find him another job.

I got my first “job” as a trainee. The company planned on a product and I planned on learning. It was an unpaid job and I eventually found one that paid me (very little). I remember the reluctance I had to resign from a company that wasn’t paying me. I was naturally attached to this place, and they were to me (?). How could I face up to them and say that I was leaving? Silly me.

My observation of companies in the United States has disappointed me. They seem trigger-happy without due consideration to the person’s social position. Hire without restraint when demands are high and fire easily when there’s a slump.

I know that this notion of allegiance to an employer or an employee is scoffed at. To many people this smacks of socialism. To me its a natural human trait. We need to belong to a group that has a purpose. We need to feel that we are positively contributing to society. If those ties that bind us are weak, there is a lack of fulfillment. This has now become a norm. We have moved backwards and because of that both business and people are suffering. The reason that this is not acknowledged is that there is no place for empathy in the corporate world anymore.

Is the title of Chapter 3 of Deming. What are the Diseases?:

1. Lack of constancy of purpose

2. Emphasis on short-term profits

3. Evaluation of performance, merit-rating or annual review

4. Mobility of Management

5. Running a company on visible figures alone

6. Excessive medical costs

7. Excessive cost of liability

I’ll write a post on obstacles later. I do have a comment to make on #2 and #3. We might not realize this now, but being profitable is only as important as keeping the company alive.