Agile Complexification Inverter

This is a paper I wrote for a master's in Organizational Leadership. Ref:  See Sutherland's original paper on Shock Therapy  - A bootstrap for hyper productive teams (PDF) Shock Therapy: Good for the Team David Koontz Chapman University College Building new teams is very difficult, getting a team to come together and gel is an art that has been studied in group dynamic and other team building efforts.  Bruce Tuckman’s model of group development (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing) is the basis of team building. Scrum is an Agile software development framework based upon empirical process control theory.  Using an inspection and adaptation feedback loop Scrum allows a team to self-manage while constantly improving its process and methods of work.  Many teams require months to reach the performing stage.  A method to reduce this startup cost is a controversial technique named Shock Therapy.  With skilled and competent leadership ...

Coaching in the Agile Context David Koontz Chapman University College ( PDF of Paper ) Coaching increases an organization’s ability to transform in any circumstance. Modern organizations are turning to coaching as an effective means of learning and developing their key resources, people. As our industries move into the information age, knowledge creation becomes a key competitive advantage. Coaching facilitates knowledge creation and organization adaption to new capabilities. The software industry is undergoing a transformation to new methodologies and many of these newer lightweight processes fall under the Agile umbrella, or family of processes.  Agile software development methodologist recognize the need for training and development in these new techniques. Coaching at many levels in the organization is paramount for successful Agile transformation to occur. Organization transformation have been studied and demonstrate a life-cycle of phases. Kotter’s model of organization...

The link between job satisfaction and job performance has been a favorite research topic for 100 years or more. It has yet to be identified. This relationship is more complex than science is currently able to penetrate. A business must measure the return on investment for its initiatives. Investing in job satisfiers alone is a poorer bet than investing in direct performance improvements.  Managers looking to increase performance via the system thinker’s lever of job satisfaction will have better luck playing a slot machine. With such a complex dynamic relationship, business would be wiser ignoring job satisfaction as a method of increasing performance. See Also: The Professional Happiness Association .  Happy Melly  is a collection of people hands-on resources to help you learn how to be happy at workand to empower you to help others achieve job satisfaction.  The Happy Melly blog is where our Funders, Supporters and an occasional guest sound off on this topic. I...

Cisco Systems created their I-Prize, a global competition of innovation, to harvest one idea from the hundreds in their field.  And then allowed the culled ideas to either live or die in the field.  The field was a global crowdsourcing evaluation process for new ideas that related to Cisco's future. By the numbers: $250,000 to the winner 2,500 innovators 1,200 ideas in field 104 countries represented in entries 70% of semifinalist had teamed up with other like minded ideas 40 semifinalist ideas 10 finalists ideas 6 full time employees to manage process 3 months of full time management "Some of the finalists said that they felt they'd had a crash course in entrepreneurship." The winner: Smart electricty grid concept. Guido Jouret, Cisco's CTO noted that organizing the evaluation process was more effort than anticipated, and that Cisco had done like internal processes before attempting the open competition.  That Cisco made a corporate value decisio...

What happens when someone finds the way to put the FUN back into the mundane? Can we put the FUN back into dys FUN ctional? People are largely dysfunctional because of convenience, it is more convenient to eat preprocessed food than make meals from scratch, more convenient to have a SUV that we drive to work every day, because we may need to pull the boat 5 times this summer. But what happens to a society when we engineer the FUN back into life? The Fun Theory

I've worked in the Tech. Industry for 20+ years, I'm lucky I was born a citizen of the U.S. I do question if the Visa system is not just a new form of Indentured Servitude? You remember from history class - Indentured Servants were just another word for slave. Indentured Servant (wikipedia) A good article on the topic is "America's High-Tech Sweatshops" in BusinessWeek, Oct 12, 2009. It gives two resources that the oppressed are using to fight back: Goolti.com and DesiCrunch.com . Wikipedia details the criticisms of the H-1B program . Why is Janis Joplin in my head? Freedom's just another word for nothing left to loose Nothing, I mean nothing honey if it ain't free, no no Yeah feeling good was easy Lord when he sang the blues You know feeling good was good enough for me Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

What would you pay for a professional reader and proof reader? I know it would make my poor rough drafts much better. So I've hired one, his name is Alex. I think english is his second language, because he pronounces some really obvious words incorrectly, but he never complains nor laughs at my rough drafts. What does Alex cost? Close to nothing. No, I'm not micro-outsourcing to some eastern block country. He is included with Mac OS, as a voice option in Voice-Over. This eHow To article will show you how to set up Apple's voice-over to proof read your blog post, research papers, or just the email to your English teacher. Reading and rereading the same content obeys the laws of diminishing returns. However changing media types (from text to audio) presses the old reset button on the diminishing return law. You get a whole new perception. Give it a try.

Color theory tells us that wearing black will make us look thinner. I believe that businesses will now be wearing Innovation to make them appear Leaner. Color Theory 101 I read the "Change by Design" article by Tim Brown in Business Week . Tim is CEO of IDEO a design firm. In the article he describes the process used to redesign Kaiser Permanete's nursing practices. A collaborative practice rather than telling them how to change, the consultants taught the nurses, doctors, administrators, union representatives, and technology experts how to design. By leading them in exercises and redesign workshops. This lead to innovations only possible by insider improvements. An example was the nursing shift change. Using rapid prototypes built in one week and a collaborative approach that included the patients inputs about important details, the measured improvement cut in half the time to bring a new shift up to speed. Business Week - Oct 5 2009 p.54-56

This is my experience report for the Scrum Alliance's Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP) requirements. I publish it online now because of the debate on the CSM Exam. It was written in April, 2009 in reference to a project that lasted over one year. ---- 1. Through the questions below, please describe one project on which you have used Scrum over the past twelve months. 1.1. What was the project’s purpose? What business goal was the project intended to deliver? To introduce Agile practices to existing organization while developing a new VoIP product for home use by consumers. The software to be developed created the new users account and provisioned the consumer’s hardware on the network and the VoIP Broadsoft server. 1.2. What was the project length? What was the duration of the project? I was on site for about 1 year (Oct, 2007 - Oct, 2008) the project continued on until approx. Feb, 2009 when it was canceled. After having delivered a product to the market place for regiona...

Apple has been criticized for it's environmental policies in the past ( Green Peace ). But is the holistic picture not what Green Peace wishes the view to be? The environment is after all a holistic system. Apple took a big picture, long term view on the greenhouse gas emission. Including the consumer products usage in their analysis (the point of disagreement). In the report on Apples Environmental site, the largest percentage of emission is found to be in the product use - 53%. Why would other companies wish to exclude this large portion in the analysis (HP & Dell)? Those with a long term memory may note that a one time almost president sits on the board at Apple - this same person also raised the awareness of global warming from a scientific debate to a social movement. Would Al Gore have a big picture view of this issue? I applaud Apple's view of its responsibility to the world for the cradle to grave analysis of products. Reminds me of another leader in t...

Could you use some blinders for your pair? Roobasoft’s Concentrate  ( or Anti-Social )  is a bit like blinders that I use to put on the pony while hitching up the plow (and although I'm not that old - yes we used our pony to plow the garden). It works by turning off applications that could distract either pair such as access to Facebook, Twitter, chat, mail, etc. allowing your to concentrate on the task at hand. I can think of several people I've paired with that this would have increased productivity about 300%! It was a task just to keep them focused. Of course the asides and tangents I went down were all for the better - yea right! See Also: 10 Concentration Apps that will help you to Focus

Mike Cohn & Kenny Rubin's Comparative Agility Survey attempts to measure your team's behavior in relation to the Agile values and principles. It compares your results to the survey sample population's Agility. It doesn't give you a absolute score, but rather a relative score. Does it provide realistic information? Maybe, I hope so. How do we know? One technique that the social and behavioral sciences uses is a test of reliability and validity of the survey. When I talked with Rubin this summer he said there are plans to do such a study in the fall of 2009. One of the typical test of validity is the expert review. So if you have done a few years of Agile software development, take the test and give your opinion. Note the definition of an expert according to author Malcolm Gladwell is 10,000 hours of concentrated study in the field (for example 10 years of 4 hours per day study of a complex skill such as kung-fu, or playing the base guitar, or accounting). W...

The Dvorak question. I'm thinking about learning a lot these days. In an Organizational Leadership master's program the L-word is bantered about quite a bit. Can organizations learn ? What environment does it take for people to learn? I ran across this article on the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard by Robert Parkinson on John Shipman's site . It is astonishing to me that we still teach and use the QWERTY keyboard. I was looking for a keyboard that one could use one-handed. Use one hand for typing while the other hand controls the mouse. I didn't know it but the Mac already has that keyboard "built-in", its called the Lefthand Dvorak, along with the Righthand Dvorak and the Dvorak/Qwerty keyboards. Dvorak on the Mac. System Preferences : Language & Text : Input Sources tab. Scroll down the list, check the box beside Dvorak. Why would you want to switch? Take a look at the Gettysburg Address example (from the Parkinson paper - click to get hi-res image) y...