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Showing posts from February, 2014

Examples of Visualizations

Perhaps someone has already thought about the human brain's propensity to match patterns... if this has happened - would we see a patten in this behavior?  If there was a patten, you think someone would have written a book on the subject. Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information Five of the most influential data visualization of all time   by Andy Cotgreave, Tableau Software. The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods ( aside: why people abuse the notion of the Periodic table of elements is puzzling to me - it's not just a table with iconic status - it's a predictive model in action ; ... meanwhile, back to the visualization methods... ) awesome chart with wonderful pop-ups to explain all the visualization methods. Periodic Table of Visualization Methods So let's just go right ahead and include the predictive model of Mendeleev's table. Example of the Periodic Table style applied to Scrum by my friend and colleague KaTe. by 

Fail Better - Exhibit in Dublin

I really should go to Dublin to attend this event: Fail Better - Dublin Science Gallery " The goal of   FAIL BETTER   is to open up a public conversation about failure, particularly the instructive role of failure, as it relates to very different areas of human endeavour. Rather than simply celebrating failure, which can come at great human, environmental and economic cost, we want to open up a debate on the role of failure in stimulating creativity: in learning, in science, engineering and design. "

The Scientific Process - the desire to disprove.

Watch this video ( Can You Solve This? by Veritasium ) to see the scientific process in action (well it takes a while for the people to become scientific... but they do).  My guess is that you - like me - will fall into the fallacy of confirmation bias at the first opportunity.  A phenomena referred to as the black swan fallacy. So scientific processes have a little trick up their sleeves called the Null Hypothesis .  The null hypothesis, or default answer, is generally assumed true until evidence indicates otherwise.  How often do you use this process to mutate your software development process?  How do you protect yourself from the confirmation bias during your process improvement experiments?  Do you see this null hypothesis at work in the TDD process of proving a unit test fails before the implementation code creates evidence to indicate otherwise? France is Bacon Since this scientific process is not very natural for us humans; it leaves me to wonder how we learned t

National Culture Studies

I wonder how one defines culture?  Do we define culture at a human scale or is it typically at a social scale?  What happens when we look at culture at various scales? I've heard some suggest that culture is an emergent property of a collection of people interacting frequently.  And while I agree with that, they have also stated that culture cannot be designed.  Now that's a conundrum.  I believe one can design an emergent property of a system.   Perhaps the word for this type of action is cultivation.  One could very well cultivate a culture where the best intentions of a group were positive or negative.  Looking at recent news articles and the popular opinion is that Uber's culture was cultivated, and that it may be changed (manipulated toward a better culture).  This same type of cultivation is happening in Hollywood in 2018.  Perhaps it will bleed into the USA business culture. It appears to me that there are three basic scales for culture; the national scale, the c

Do you need a Product Manager AND a Product Owner?

Research on the Scrum Product Owner role and compare and contrast to the traditional Product Manager role.  The Pragmatic Marketing framework may help to distinguish the PO role from the larger sphere of influence that a traditional product companies view of a product manager. Many Product Managers are familiar with the Pragmatic Marketing framework.  How does this framework interact with the Agile mind-set and the Scrum framework for product development? Here's a mash-up using the Pragmatic Marketing framework as a base map and the overlap of the Lean/Agile/Scrum view of the space.  ( Note: the PM framework link has nice interactive description pop ups of each cell in the framework. ) One of the best blog series I've found is by Roman Pichler - The Product Owner on One Page .  Don't let the title fool you, he has many articles linked on that one page.  Or you could buy his book:   Agile Product Management with Scrum . A list of responsibilities of eac

The First Org Chart

Real leaders know how to draw an org. chart.  When did the leaders ego grow so big as to invert the  diagrams purpose and meaning? The  first organizational chart  (How information design solved a big problem for the Erie Railroad in the telegraph age) was a tree form describing the people and roles of the Erie Railroad with the executives at the bottom. Erie Railroad Org Chart By 1917 the org chart had mutated to the now traditional pyramid shape.  See Wikipedia article . A better alternative to the org chart is the Organigraph .  "The organigraph shows how companies really work. It uses symbols like stars, funnels, tubes, links and chains—in all, there are six specific symbols that represent how a company actually works." -- Building Business Value Blog   Here's an example: The secret to Walt Disney's strategy Organigraph . So do you see how the first Org Chart was both an organizational chart and an organigraph?  And why it may have pr

Scary and Exciting - Emotion Tracking

This tech is so exciting it scares me... tapping into human emotions.... the feedback loops that could be developed.... the opportunities to learn....  endless! Affectiva , a startup, is announcing the launch of its mobile software development kit (SDK) for tracking emotions. "The company says it can analyze a user’s emotions by tracking their facial expressions, and it uses that technology to measure the effectiveness of ads. With the new SDK, mobile developers will be able to add these capabilities to their apps as well." -- TechCrunch Anthony Ha "This means Affectiva’s technology could be embedded into consumer products — a spokesperson suggested via email that the possibilities include healthcare, education, and gaming apps."  -- TechCrunch Anthony Ha See  -- TechCrunch Anthony Ha article How could we use this tech (SDK) to nurture better teams?  Reinforce positive sharing and interaction behaviors for a group of people (geeks) that love to intera

Restaurant Simulation Kanban

How would you visualize the value stream of a restaurant? A great teaching example for a team wishing to start Kanban. How do you like to visualize the concurrent activities of beverage service and meal preparations?  I like to see them stacked (not sequential). Hat tip to Derek Wade of Kumdio Adaptive Strategies  for the simulation. This Kanban works very well for the front of the house, but what about the back of the house (the kitchen in restaurant lingo)?  What would the kitchen's kanban board look like? See Also: Why I Use a Paper Kanban Board - Johana Rothman How Personal Kanban Changed My Life -LeadingAgile Which Agile Process Should You Choose? A comparison of Kanban, Scrum, XP, & other processes.

XP is the Mac of Agile

XP is the Mac of Agile   by The Agile Warrior http://agilewarrior.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/xp-is-the-mac-of-agile/ "When Apple released the Macintosh it changed the face of computing. Graphical user interfaces, drag and drop icons, clickable menus. Since it's release, the personal computer has never been the same.  The same thing happened with the release of XP. Like an earthquake, it shook just about everything we traditionally believed and practiced in software delivery down to it's core.   And then both failed." "In this article [Jonathan Rasmusson] would like to explore why Scrum has become so popular, the challenges this popularity brings to Agile, and why, like the Mac, [Jonathan doesn't] think we've heard the last of XP." "One reason [Jonathan] believes Scrum has grown so popular, is because unlike XP, it struck the right balance between maintaining the status quo and change." … read more …   http://agilewarrior.word