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The Six Thinking Hats

Friday, October 16th, 2009 by cindyedmonds

Someone tipped me off last year to a really useful technique. It may be one of those things that the rest of the world was aware of and I have been under a rock and missed it but in case there are some fellow rock-dwellers reading this blog I’m going to share the epiphany here. I’ve been working on a new business proposition over the past couple of weeks where it has been incredibly useful to apply this technique: Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.

The premise is that we all have a natural or preferred thinking style. For example, my thinking style is quite critical and ‘nit-picking’ whereas one of my colleagues is more optimistic and grandiose. When considering new business investments we need to apply both styles of thinking (and more) to the proposition to ensure we cover all bases. I’m sure everyone has worked with someone who you dread having a meeting with because they’re so negative or obstructive? I’m not saying I work with anyone like that right now but I have in the past and as a Project Manager it is imperative that I get the outcomes that I need from meetings and the Six Thinking Hats is a great enabler for this. (I have copied the following definitions from wikipedia)

  • Neutrality (White) - considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
  • Feeling (Red) - instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
  • Negative judgement (Black) - logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
  • Positive Judgement (Yellow) - logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
  • Creative thinking (Green) - statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
  • Process control (Blue) - thinking about thinking

Six Hats Thinking means that in meetings, for example, the team considers the issues while imaginatively or figuratively wearing each of the Six Hats in turn. Some people stay quiet during Green Hat as they can’t think that way and then jump in with enthusiasm during Black Hat. Genius!

Which Hat are you?

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Posted in Project Management, Strategy, Team, Tips, Uncategorized, leadership | 2 Comments »

Agile in the Enterprise

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 by cindyedmonds

There is an exciting shift in the Project Management world from focussing on teams to moving our attention to the Enterprise. I am very excited about this because over time as a Project Manager you realise that you can arm yourself with skills, knowledge, certification and techniques and you can lead your teams and equip them with knowledge and freedom to work in a focussed and directed way and still hit obstacles that invariably lead back to the organisation. Both Prince2 and Agile practitioners are starting to think about how to address the organisational issues and how to scale methodologies to the enterprise.

Last week at Valtech’s Agile Edge conference Al Goerner gave a terrific key note session on Adapting Agile to the Enterprise. In explaining the maturing of Agile practice he outlined the two generations of Agile:

1st Generation - Agile for the team

  • Emphasising the Human Factors in development
  • Emphasising Empowerment-to-a-goal
  • A Gaggle of Gurus
  • Naive Agile and Faux Agile

2nd Generation - Agile for the Enterprise

  • Emphasising Risk Management
  • Emphasising Backlog Management
  • Emphasising Visibility and Accountability
  • Emphasising the Whole Solution Value Stream

The 2nd Generation of Agile practices really resonates with me and I’m sure resonates with any Project Manager who has worked in large organisations. How many of us have wrangled with the 1st Generation ‘Gaggle of Gurus’? :-) I certainly have!

Managing risk and providing visibility and accountability is so important in the enterprise and I’m completely inspired by Al Goerner’s presentation on exactly these issues. His most important point was that Agile doesn’t mean not focussing on these things and it doesn’t mean not producing documentation and certain other claims made by the 1st Generation-ers. The key thing is to only do things that have a point, that will be read, and not just as a formality or because they’re ‘required’.

Beam me up Scotty!

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Posted in Agile, Events, Project Management, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Scrummaster reflections

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 by cindyedmonds

I am now a Certified Scrummaster which means I have done the formal Scrum training and have certified that I lead the team using the official and recommended techniques. During the course I was happy to see that we at Magic Milestones already follow the Scrum techniques closely so there was not a lot of new ground to cover. However, hearing the other course attendees describe their workplace environments, usually in the context of explaining why Scrum isn’t working so well for them, I was a little bit disheartened about certain trends. Because Scrum teams are self-organising and the teams make their own decisions there is a bit of a trend to not use Project Managers in the Scrummaster role and to use developers or tech leads instead. The main role of the Scrummaster is to remove impediments and obstacles to the team’s progress. In order to do this the Scrummaster needs to be empowered in the organisation so that they can suggest the changes that are often required in order for goals to be met. This is where I see the huge value in having a professional Project Manager in that role - someone who is experienced in working with top management and implementing organisational change to support the project and who is empowered to do so. If a developer or tech lead is empowered and experienced in these things then having them as Scrummasters is all well and good but if they are not, and if they are not interested in that element of the role, then the situation can arise where Scrum is shoe-horned into less than ideal situations.

By empowering teams to be self-organising and making their own decisions you can certainly get great software results and team cohesion. However, you can’t always get a team that is capable of changing processes outside their immediate area, such as integration testing or other third party dependencies, so that timelines are shortened and goals met. In the Scrummaster course there was a lot of discussion about when is a task ‘done’. It seems that in a lot of organisations it is hard to get to ‘done’ due to dependencies on other teams such as a QA team or processes that create delays before a developer can say that their task is ‘done’. An empowered and experienced Scrummaster should be able to suggest and implement process changes to remove these delays and integrate with other teams or dependencies. If the Scrummaster role is being performed, on a rotating basis, by developers or tech leads rather than managers with experience in process change then I think the team will struggle to get to ‘done’. Becoming self-organising doesn’t remove the need for management.

Posted in Agile, Project Management, Team | 2 Comments »

ScrumMaster success and techniques

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 by cindyedmonds

I had some surfing lessons a couple of weeks ago in Santa Cruz , Ca. and it got me thinking about success and technique. At first the challenge with surfing is getting to your feet on the board and while I was learning the techniques and tumbling into the waves it seemed impossible. The instructor taught me some basic tips (hands at chest level braced against the board, arch your back, do ‘the plank’, quickly move your feet up to the correct position on the board, and you’re up!) and soon I was riding the long waves into shore. When I had the basics and knew I could do it, once I’d caught my first wave, then I could think about technique and the improvements I could make to catch more waves and ride them longer and looking more like a ‘real’ surfer. When I had caught my first wave in to shore and felt how much fun that ride was then I was committed to paddling back out and doing it all again…and again…and again.

It struck me that surfing is one of those things where success begets success. Once you’ve stood up on the board you know you can do it again and then you want to do it again …and so you do. You’ve removed the psychological barrier of ‘can’t’ and you know that you can because you have done it and that spurs you to do it again and do it better.

I am now a few thousand miles from Santa Cruz but am finding that my surfing experiences are still in my thoughts and applying to my daily activities around Scrum. Last month the Magic Milestones team successfully launched the new look UKChina site for the BBC World Service which was our ninth new site for the 1024 project that we kicked off last November. It was a succesful project and an exciting individual launch and one of the best things about the 1024 project was that we did not encounter any organisational or individual ‘can’t’ about using Scrum.

Part of the reason for this 100% team engagement with Scrum was because as Scrummasters we had eliminated the ‘can’t’ from our minds and like the surfing lessons we were focussed on improving techniques for success and not on whether or not we could or couldn’t use Scrum to deliver. Magic Milestones had provided 3 Scrummasters for the 1024 project and we had all used Scrum at least once before, learned the basic techniques, experienced success and brought that attitude into the project. We had caught the wave, ridden it to shore and liked it enough to paddle back out to do it again. Our team members were a combination of permanent staff and contractors and were cross functional (designer, developer, product owners) and had varying levels of experience with Agile methods and the way we approached the project was new to all the teams. It is conceivable that some of them had reservations and resistance to using Scrum but I can’t say that I heard about this in my teams or noticed it in others and I think this may be because the Scrummasters were convinced about the ‘can’. Without being overt evangelists we led the teams to success in Wave 1 and we all liked it so much we did it again in Wave 2!

We didn’t encounter much fear of change or resistance to new techniques on this project By quickly experiencing success (the first site was launched within 60 days of kick off) we had buy-in and a team of winners. It must be said that the support from top management was crucial to this success and to the adoption of Scrum.

An article on the Scrum Alliance website refers to the ‘Emotional Impediments’ to successfully adopting Scrum in organisations. These are redefined in the comments as psychological impediments rather than emotional as the root cause of the impediment are not always accessible. The author (Michael De La Maza) suggests that support groups would help combat fear of change and resistance to new methods.

After the BBC experience, I feel that experiencing success is more of an antidote to fear of change than the support group suggested in that article. Committed leadership from Scrummasters can convince team members that it can be done and quick wins reinforce that conviction. This sets the foundation for longer term success. People are often afraid of their first time experience and the potential wipe out but once they’ve been shown how to do it and experienced their first wave I’m pretty sure they’ll all paddle back out to do it again.

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MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival 2009

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 by cindyedmonds

On Friday 28th August the Magic Milestones team journeyed to Edinburgh for the International Television Festival to immerse ourselves in the current thoughts and activities of the broadcast media sector. The festival consisted of two and a half days of sessions on many topics from digitizing archives, to David Simon talking about The Wire, to the James Murdoch’s MacTaggart lecture to a debate on TV and Politics and the end of the ’spin cycle’.

I’m sure each Magic Milestones team member had their own Festival highlight but for me it was hearing David Simon discuss the creative process that produced The Wire as he stressed that none of the writers involved were ‘from television’ which has ultimately lead to the creation of the second best drama series on TV (I think The Sopranos pips it to the post but it’s still excellent) and then contrasting Simon’s sentiments about the societal results of free market capitalism with James Murdoch’s lecture which posited the opposite view - that ‘the only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.’ The contrast between the two positions was also mentioned by Dominic West when he accepted an award for The Wire at the Channel of the Year award on Saturday night. The awards were hosted by Michael Macintyre who was hilarious and it’s hard to not laugh with someone who manages to find everything funny and introduced some welcome levity to the Festival. He also just looks funny :-)

Heather Brook at the Edinburgh Television Festival

Heather Brook at the Edinburgh Television Festival

Conversations about the BBC’s dominance in the UK broadcast media space and its impact and potential top-slicing plans featured strongly throughout the Festival which detracted a little from its ‘International’ title as the licence fee funding model is a strictly local issue - if such a thing can exist in our online media age. I have to mention the funding issue as it really did dominate conversations but the more interesting topic to our MM group was the changing platform of media - archiving and the complicated rights model, TV on demand and audience behaviour/expectation. The media industry is at the cusp of where other industries like banking found itself 10 years ago (and this is not a comment on the economy for a change!). Technological innovations weren’t, and aren’t, imposed upon ‘the masses’ but come from within ‘the masses’ in most cases. Ie., no-one sold ‘the internet’ to people. Users needed to be able to bank online and communicate with their banks, colleagues, friends, and schools etc. electronically and businesses adapted their practices and developed the applications that allowed the users to do that. The same thing is happening with media and users want to be able to watch TV on demand, listen live and catch up with programmes that they missed. The ability to do these things and the technology to enable it is not new (iPlayer has been released for 18 months and set top boxes were being developed at least 10 years ago (probably longer, I’m not an expert but that’s when they came to my attention in my day-to-day life) but the business model for the broadcast media is at the point where it’s desperately trying to catch up. The platform for consuming media is changing fast and the business practices of rights management and pay walls are still being thrashed out.

The digital revolution of media is also discussed (with a lot more passion) on this blog http://simsblog.typepad.com/simsblog/2009/09/top-10-lies-newspaper-execs-are-telling-themselves.html which is interesting for its tech-driven view. I don’t agree with all of the thoughts expressed, such as ‘I believe that a large percentage of online readers are content to read someone else’s analysis of the news rather than the news itself’ but it’s an interesting read for a techno viewpoint (I should probably disagree in the comments on the blog itself but I’m a bit scared by its angry tone! They might savage me and neither side of the debate is really dealing in facts, just opinion it would seem, so I’m staying at a distance :-S)

The philosophical concepts of scarcity and quality and economics of broadcast media are being debated alongside the rapidly changing methods of consumption and audience expectation and it was quite exciting to be party to the debates at Edinburgh this year.

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Posted in Events, News | 2 Comments »

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