All posts by cathy

A Marketer’s Guide To Agile Development – There Are No Dumb Questions – Oh, Sure There Are…

Hey Marketers – Admit it, you chuckled that time you heard your Dev team brethren talk about “sending out an email blast” and that other time they confused the terms headline and tagline. News flash — Dev’s laughing at you too. Get acquainted with Agile so you’ll know better than to ask these side-splitters:

Can you give me admin rights to my computer so I can install Agile?

Nope. It’s a process, not a product. You would no more “install Agile” than you would “install cross-branding”. Well, maybe you might need to be set up with rights to certain sharing areas, virtual meeting tools, perhaps a project tool such as Basecamp or GoPlan. But you probably will not need anything at all installed in order to get involved in your company’s Agile process.

That stand-up meeting is really messing with my schedule – can we make it weekly instead of daily?

Don’t be such a Marketer. I know, it’s early. Yes, it’s daily. But if your organization uses scrum, and you’re the business owner, you gotta be there. If you’re not, the iterations happen without you. And decisions will be made that you may not like.

Just email me that Kanban, okay?

Well, maybe. A Kanban board is usually an actual board. It can be photographed and emailed, I guess. But (a) it’s changing constantly, and (b) a key point of Kanban is the players being there to look at it. Not every Agile shop uses Kanban, but it’s useful to know what it is.

How much does one of those Agile licenses cost?

Nothing. Bupkes. Agile is a decision you make to develop software in a certain way. There’s no Agile division of Microsoft trolling around to sell you a license for it. Yet.

Can I CapEx this Agile installation?

No. If you buy special furniture to accomodate an Agile environment, you could probably take that as a capital expense. But you don’t CapEx thought.

But it’s only 2:45. The release isn’t until 4:30. Why can’t you squeeze the great new idea I thought of in the shower this morning for the splash page nav into the release?

Because. Lean requirements and documentation may make Agile seem casual, but it’s not a stream of consciousness – there is discipline in a healthy Agile shop. There is a specific rhythm to the release schedule, and that rhythm includes hard dates. Requirements have due dates, and so does code complete (which means just what it sounds like). If you know so little about the release schedule that you think this is a legitimate question, reach out to someone on the dev team to explain it to you. Or click my previous post to learn that “we welcome changing requirements, even late in the development cycle” carries a little fine print.

Agile Humor – Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

THE BUSINESS ANALYST

I have twelve meetings today, I don’t have time to get into the whole user story. But I can tell you it involves a rooster on a distributed team.

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER

So the chicken can check in and oust the Mayor of the Other Side of the Road.

THE AGILE PROJECT MANAGER

The chicken is just not going to be able to cross the road this month. Crossing requirements were due last Friday. She will have to take her place on the backlog. Maybe the chicken can cross the road in Sprint 9.

WEB ANALYTICS

We’ll need to get some tags on that chicken to be able to tell you that.

THE BUSINESS OWNER

Because I have three other business initiatives riding on the chicken being on the other side of the road that were supposed to start six weeks ago. You’re killing me.

UX

The question isn’t why the chicken crossed the road. The question is why the chicken felt she had to cross the road. If a coop’s usability issues won’t allow chickens to complete their egg-laying tasks, they’ll bail that coop and find another one that will.

THE DEVELOPER

Because the requirements said so. The trebuchet was the most efficient method. Oh, she had to get to the other side alive? Where was that in the requirements?

SCRUM MANAGER

Let’s iterate, people. Let’s get the chicken to the center line today, and we’ll talk about the rest of the way tomorrow.

More Agile Humor – Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road (2)

Twas The Night…..Agile Style

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the cubes
Every creature was coding – yes, even the newbs;
The post-it notes, placed on the kanban with care,
Fluttered as muttering cluttered the air;

The stakeholders were nestled all snug in their beds,
While the dev team toiled on in their hoodies and Keds.
The group had their Mountain Dew, Red Bull, chai tea,
their Starbucks and Dunkins, their Coke and Blue G

When out in the server room rose such a clatter,
The release manager said “FML, what’s the matter?”
He sped to the data center quick as a flash.
Which belched smoke and smelled like it threw up some hash.

The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow,
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below;
But not in the rack room, LED’s barely lit,
North Pole Ops is down! They were now in deep – um – trouble.

So too were the stakeholders – good kids in their slumbers,
This release date can’t move – the team must hit their numbers!
North Pole ops dev needs to be whistling and humming,
Come on folks, it’s time for emergency scrumming!

“Now! Herbie! Cornelius! Guys, stop your kibbitzin’,
Can’t reach hardware support- come on, put your mitts in!
Mind the blades! Prime the racks! Juice the power supplies!
“OMG, it’s working – Santa, quick – hit the skies!”

As they iterated madly to guide Santa’s way.
Obstacles, shmobstacles! They maintained SLA;
In the twenty-first century, Santa still had a map.
User stories were clear – “The big lug needs an app!”

Those old lists of toys, deeds and kids from each nation.
Really, who needs all that documentation?
Their Christmas Eve app worked through snow, sleet and ice
and dynamically segmented naughty from nice,

The GPS twinkling guided each reindeer hoof
As the Google Earth inset showed each nice kid’s roof.
It featured a chimney circumference gauger,
And an FAQ help file – lean – just a two-pager.

He still dress’d all in fur, but that sack was so last year,
The just-in-time inventory feature put it to pasture;
It displayed toys requested by each Ben, Jack and Caitlyn,
And auto-adjusted for the International Dateline:

No time for QA, yet it worked from the start
And Santa was so pleased he soon did his part.
He sent a delivery to fill the dev team’s bellies.
Warm donuts – Chocolate kreme and some glazed and some jellies.

St. Nick met his deliverables, and he sent them an IM,
“Toys are under the trees – parents won’t have to buy ’em!” :
And they heard him exclaim, “Thanks! You’ll all get advancements!
Happy Christmas to all! Hey, about those enhancements…”

Happy holidays to all!
Best,
Cathy

Agile Humor – Words To Live By

Agilewashing – A waterfall shop that throws a scrum or two onto their schedule to seem cool. The Agile equivalent of a veneer, also known as “all hat, no cattle”.

Agillectomy – Removal of a development team’s efficiency gland by the new waterfall-loving CTO.

Hubristic Evaluation – When development teams assess usability by asking themselves what they would want if they were the user.

Documutation – Transformation of development notes from multi-page to post-it size.

Lame Theory – Mathematical constructs to predict how stupid decisions multiply in a group dynamic.

Kanbanista – Someone who is aggressively, revolutionarily passionate about colored tape on whiteboards.

Scrum of the earth – An Agile team that recycles.

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Scrum Etiquette

Don’t all speak at the same time.
If the team members in your sister office wanted to dial into a daily cocktail party, they’d have transferred to Marketing.

Lose the attitude.
Don’t get all huffy and snarl “of course it’s on the documentation wiki!” at 8:03am when your wiki update is datestamped 8:01am.

Never refuse a breath mint if a colleague offers you one.
Sausage croissants smell great before you eat them. Afterward, not so much. Early morning, crowded meeting – I’m just saying.

Be on time.
Scrums are fifteen minutes long. That’s it. No wonder you’re always five minutes late for it. A grande half-skinny half-caf half-Equal split shot 1-pump mocha with room isn’t a coffee order – it’s an Olympic dive. Grab a Red Bull and make the scrum on time.

Be honest – but not too honest.
“I’m so hung over my eyelids are nictating” may be the most truthful response to the question “Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal today?” But it’s TMI – just finish the widget, okay?

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – Embracing the F Word

Marketers don’t use the F word very often. It makes them peevish and erodes their self-esteem.

No, no, no, I don’t mean that F word. Marketers use that one a lot. Like omigod, like verbal hot sauce they sprinkle over everything – more frequently than “and” or “the”. Oh wait, that’s me. But I digress.

I’m talking about F for failure. Failure is a dirty word in some organizations. You’ve all heard some of those old canards at some point in your careers:

“Failure is not an option.”

“I don’t want to hear about any problems, only the solutions.”

“The success of this project is critical to our ________ (financial goals, department’s ability to get budget dollars next year, new product launch, long-term strategy, next bonus payout, continued employment, yadda, yadda, yadda.)

“I can’t go into that conference room and tell my _______ (team, boss, department head, rival department head whose project was deep-sixed for this one, Exec VP, C-Level, board, shareholders, blah, blah, blah) that _________ (it’s too buggy to go to market by the launch date, we worked feverishly on a flawed assumption, the strategy was sound but we fell down on execution, the consultants recommended scrapping the project and starting anew, yak, yak, yak.)

“We’ve spent too much ___________ (money, time, resources, political capital, wah, wah, wah.) on this project to cut bait now.”

Failure is part of nature and part of life, but you’d never know it in some of these misguidedly rah-rah organizations that banish anything that doesn’t smell like success. People in these business environments learn quickly what’s required for self-preservation. They won’t say out loud that they tried something that didn’t work. Why is that?

Fear.  They’re afraid they’ll look stupid among their colleagues, and that will make them vulnerable. Ironically, they end up throwing stupid money at doomed efforts just to avoid looking stupid.

So they deliver an app that’s already obsolete by its release date instead of regrouping and redirecting the money and resources toward the app the company really needs.

Allowing people to admit failure is critical to success. It isn’t an excuse to be lazy, to embark on half-baked or vanity initiatives, to avoid accountability. The person in charge of a failed project is accountable to figure out what went wrong and how the business can use that learning to move on to better things. One never sets out to fail. In fact, if you have nothing but string after string of failures without a winner every so often, there’s a systemic problem. Maybe it’s a resource issue, maybe it’s politics, maybe overall company goals need some realignment. But if you’re never failing, you may be playing it too safe. There’s an old adage in auto racing “If you’re not crashing once in a while, you’re not racing hard enough.”

Some thoughts on avoiding this no-failure-allowed trap:

Be realistic about your odds of success – most businesses don’t have enough time or people to bring everything they want to do to fruition. Working smarter has its limits. When you can only push out a finite amount of product, every initiative becomes critically important – and it’s an easy mistake to mandate that each has to be a winner. That’s just not reality. Some will be black truffles, some will be turds. Making your people call the turds truffles… well, you don’t really want to go there, do you?

An Agile development environment will help you. Its iterative deliverables can help you discover that you laid an egg faster than other development methods – allowing you to rethink, retool, or move on.

Test. Test. Test. You engaged in initiatives on the hypothesis that completing them would improve some business results. Robust and disciplined A/B or multivariate testing will show quickly if your hypothesis is true or false. User testing (real users – not your lunch buddies) will tell you if you got the architecture and design right. Of course, you determined what the success metrics would be before the initiative began, right? Right? (tap, tap – hello, is this thing on?). And you would never be that guy who agrees on the success metrics, and when the test doesn’t support his hypothesis, attempts to discredit the test, right? (tap, tap, tap…)

If the testing shows that the initiative makes things worse and not better, then yes, you may have to throw out some completed work. Yes, it means your idea wasn’t a clear winner. Yes, it means that your development team may not get the validation of seeing their code come to life in production. We’re all grown-ups. If we didn’t have to make tough choices, it wouldn’t be called work and they wouldn’t have to pay us. Okay then. Let’s learn from this and try another idea.

So you didn’t find the black truffle this time. The truffles are out there. And you won’t find them until you pick another tree.

Agile Humor – Agile Billboard Top 10

XP Can’t Handle Me – Flo Rida featuring David Guetta
Teenage User Stories – Katy Perry
Take It Off (Debug That Mess) – Ke$ha
Like UAT Test07 – Far’East Movement featuring Cataracts & Dev
Love the Way You Scrum – Eminem Featuring Rihanna
Cooler than Marketing – Mike Posner
Just the Way You Code – Bruno Mars
F*** You, Forget You (Waterfall Remix) – Cee Lo Green
Scrum Master Got Us Fallin’ In Love (Pair Programming Remix) – Usher Featuring Pitbull
If I Had Requirements – Adam Lambert

A Marketer’s Guide to Agile Development – 3 Lessons from Today’s Workday

Lesson: Even if you have a Dremel rotary tool hanging in the garage, sometimes that old putty knife in the drawer can still come in handy.
Today I took my department offsite to grok out a complicated analytical task. It had a lot of moving parts. After examining all the analytical and sharing tools at our disposal, SPSS, SQL, Meetingplace, Sharepoint, Wikis, KJ technique….I confidently selected the right tools for the tasks. The winner: MS Excel and a screen projector. With the addition of some comfy chairs and quality snacks, it got the job done.

Lesson: Know the difference between minutiae and details. You can probably get away with ignoring minutiae – not so much on the details.
The facility at which we held the session failed again and again to sieze opportunities to help us work efficiently. They sent us up to a room they said was open and wasn’t. Fifteen minutes lost there. The whiteboard and phone were there as promised, and the comfy chairs too. Good. Uh oh, electrical outlets 12 feet from the table, no power cords anywhere. Twenty minutes lost there improvising a new set-up. Tasty lunch, all the orders gotten right, on their seventy-five minute pacing instead of our forty-five. How many times have I seen my beloved Red Sox hit the ball well enough, but rack up enough errors to lose the game? It felt a little like that today.

Lesson: The most unlikely things can make the difference between victory and defeat. Despite the challenges, we got it done. Why? We’re professionals. We’re motivated. We genuinely like each other. We kept the process simple enough so we wouldn’t get lost in the weeds. And we had snacks. One place this facility overdelivered on was the cookies. Okay, they overdelivered them twenty minutes after we finished lunch, but they were better than… a lot of things in life. They injected the sugar rush that got us to the finish line. Who knew? Well, I did. Cookies and Excel. Sometimes it just works.