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Microsoft Project for Agile?

Kerika, Technology,

On LinkedIn’s Scrum Alliance group someone recently posed this question:

Which is more effective agile software project management tool MS Project or a agile software project management tool for implementing scrum?

Here’s my response:

I started using MS Project around 1989 — must have been close to v1.0, I imagine — and even back then, when it was a relatively simple tool, it never delivered enough utility to warrant the immense hassle of trying to keep it updated so that it actually reflected the reality of a fast-moving project.

The phrase that came to mind often was “I have to feed the beast again“, i.e. I have to spend hours each day trying to map all the real-time changes that were happening in the real-world to the fake world modeled in MS Project.

The MS Project world wasn’t fake because I was incompetent: it was fake because it was always instantly out-of-date.

And as MS Project has gotten larded with more bells and whistles, it has never been able to address its fundamental shortcoming: it is a theoretical model of what you would like your project to be, rather than a practical/actual reflection of what your project is.

So, even back in the 1980s, before people were talking about Agile and Scrum, we were all actually living in an Agile/Scrum world; we just didn’t have that realization, and we didn’t have the appropriate tools to deal with a fast-changing project environment.

At  Kerika, we live and breathe in a distributed Agile world: our team is spread out between Seattle and India, which means we never have any overlapping time, but by using Kerika scrum boards we are in perfect synch with each other.

We know exactly what everyone else is up to, and we are able to process, on average, 10-12 cards per week, per person, on a sustained basis.

Kerika also has a whiteboard capability so we are able to do brainstorming and design work.

Is MS Project useful for anything at all? Yes, if your project…

a) Is considered immutable from the very start.

An example would be a government contract which is negotiated up-front in painful detail, and your success is defined only in terms of whether you delivered exactly what was specified, not whether the final product was useful. (Business-as-usual for most Federal contracts.)

b) Every aspect of the technology has been prototyped, tested, and proven already, so uncertainties are minimized.

This is an interesting use-case of mixing Scrum and Waterfall that’s not explored very often, where you use Agile to do your R&D and figure out workable solutions to your biggest uncertainties, and then use Waterfall to build the final version.

We released Kerika+Box today!

Kerika

At long last, and with considerable effort, we finished and released Kerika+Box: a seamless integration of Kerika with the Box cloud storage platform.

Kerika+Box works just like Kerika+Google, the old integration of Kerika with Google Drive: both offer a complete work management system that works seamlessly with your cloud storage platform of choice.

We are really excited about this new release; we have found that there are a ton of advantages to using Box as a cloud storage platform:

  • It’s free for personal use, which means it’s easy to get started.
  • You can sign up with an existing email address: you don’t need to get a new ID.
  • It’s got the best security and enterprise management features of any cloud storage platform out there.
  • The company is very accessible and offers great support.

We have also updated our website, to make it more responsive (i.e. display better on mobile devices), and we have included a number of customer profiles to give you an idea of the very broad range of people who are using Kerika.

Check it out!

Signing up for Kerika
Signing up for Kerika

 

LinkedIn endorsements: revisiting the long tail

Ephemera

Eleven months ago, somewhat bemused by the surprising number and variety of LinkedIn endorsements I was getting, I wrote a blog post graphing the “long tail” of these endorsements:

Arun Kumar's LinkedIn endorsements
LinkedIn endorsements (August 2013)

At that time, I was astonished to find that I had a total of 251 endorsements across 35 categories of skills!

I was fairly certain I had maxed out, and was sure that the entire practice of LinkedIn endorsements would die out altogether since I felt the currency had become already become devalued: LinkedIn was aggressively suggesting endorsements to all users, pretty much every time they logged into the site, and this was creating an inflationary bubble.

So, 11 months later, what does the picture look like?

LinkedIn endorsements (July 2014)
LinkedIn endorsements (July 2014)

What had previously seemed an unrealistic set of numbers (251 endorsements across 35 categories), is now 411 endorsements across 50 categories.

The tail is even longer, as you can see: 10 categories where I have 1 endorsement only in each category, and 15 categories where I have just 2 endorsements each.

Last year, the top 5 categories represented 55% of all my endorsements; this year, the top 5 categories represent 50% of all my endorsements — more proof that the tail is flattening and lengthening.

And in my previous post, I had argued that LinkedIn was hair-splitting: too many categories sounded like they were the same.

This year, the effect seems even more pronounced; here are categories that I would recommend be collapsed together to provide a more coherent picture of a person’s skills:

  • Entrepreneurship, Board of Directors, Board of Directors Experience (really?), Startups together as “Entrepreneurship”, because all of that relates to the startup world.
  • Cloud Computing, Scalability, SaaS together as “Cloud” because all that relates to, well, cloud.
  • Online Marketing, Go-to-market Strategy, Competitive Analysis, SEO, Product Management: all this is part of “Marketing”.
  • Program Management, Project Management, Software Project Management, IT Management, PMO, SDLC together as “Program Management”.
  • Strategy, Strategic Planning, Management Consulting, Consulting together as Strategy.
  • Enterprise Software, Integration, Outsourcing together under something I would prefer to call “Big Company IT”.
  • Management, Executive Management, Team Leadership, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Leadership, Communication Skills all are part of “Leadership”.
  • Business Process, Process Improvement and Business Process Automation could be just “Business Processes”.
  • Analytics and Business Intelligence could be together.
  • Acquisitions and Mergers & Acquisitions should certainly be together!

If I normalized this data, it would look like this:

Normalized LinkedIn Endorsements
Normalized LinkedIn Endorsements

Now my top 5 categories account for 66% of all my endorsements, which would give you a much sense of my skills!

Maybe I should award myself an extra endorsement for “Analytics”?

 

A case study in building an Agile PMO

Agile & Scrum, Team Collaboration, , ,

Will Treinen, founder and CEO of Treinen Associates gave a presentation at the 2014 IPMA Forum describing his experiences in building an “Agile PMO” to handle the extraordinary growth of his consulting business (600% in the past year!).

Will relied upon Kerika to create the perfect collaboration environment for his distributed teams of project managers, business analysts and business development staff:

How can you handle defects that are found after a user story has been accepted and released to Production?

Agile & Scrum, Technology

In a recent post on the Scrum Alliance forum at LinkedIn, a member asked this question:

How do teams handle defects that have been found after a user story has been accepted and released to Production?

My first thought was to just log a defect against the user story, but that screws up reporting as it removes the Accepted status. Executives do not want to see that. I am thinking we should just create a new user story and slate it for the next Sprint. ?

My answer:

Defects are bound to be found after a story has been accepted and released to production; that’s just a very normal part of software development, so it makes sense to add them to the Product Backlog to prioritize for a future Sprint.

There isn’t any need to take the “Accepted” status off a story that was already considered done within an older Sprint: “Accepted” doesn’t mean “super-excellent and done for all time”; it just means it was considered good enough by the Product Owner at the conclusion of the Sprint, and therefore accepted.

To “un-accept” stories post facto would not just screw up your reporting; it would start to create an unhealthy dynamic between the Scrum team and the Product Owner, where the Product Owner starts to believe he can reject stories post facto.

For Scrum to work well as a process, you need to get everyone to buy into the core idea that stuff gets done in iterations; new stuff gets done in new iterations; old stuff gets improved in future iterations.

On a more tactical level, Kerika lets you link together individual cards or even entire Scrum Boards, because every board, every card, every canvas has a unique URL that you can reference anywhere in the system to create dynamic links between stories and boards.

So, if we find a bug in a previously accepted story, we create a new card for that and simply reference the old card in the new card’s details.  Here’s a video that shows how that’s easy with Kerika.

Consider killing some of your bright ideas

Technology, Usability

Something that we have learned in the course of making Kerika the best designed tool for work management: don’t rush to implement all of your bright ideas!

When we observe a usability problem, we tend to get riled up rather quickly because we take such pride in our work.

The result is a bunch of really good ideas about how to fix the problem.

And to improve the fix.

And to make the fix even better.

(You can probably see where this is going…)

It’s really easy to over-fix a usability problem, by applying too many fixes, too fast.

Here’s another approach you can try:

  • Collect all your bright ideas.
  • Sort them, so you have only really good ideas.
  • Now, implement the smallest change that you think will fix the problem.
  • And then, eat your dogfood: use the improved product for a week at least, and see if the small change was sufficient.

We have found this is a good remedy to the more common problem of over-designing a solution: rather than build an unnecessarily complex change, or one that creates its own usability problem — often by making a subtle change in the UI metaphors that the user has already learned by mastering other parts of the product.

Is Kanban a better way to manage support/maintenance work than Scrum?

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, Technology, , ,

Hi folks!

I recently offered my thoughts to the Scrum Alliance group on LinkedIn, on the discussion thread on whether
Kanban is a better way to manage support/maintenance work than scrum. I thought you might find it interesting:

Kanban is generally a better model for support/maintenance: these tasks tend to trickle in, so trying to handle them with a conventional Product Backlog is often awkward.

Support/maintenance tasks are also usually unrelated to each other: one bug fix may have nothing to do with another.

This makes for a different metaphor than Scrum/Product Backlog where there is some presumption that user stories and tasks, while perhaps independent, are at least part of a larger product or release theme.

If you did support/maintenance tasks in a Sprint, that Sprint would have no overarching theme which I strongly believe is essential for success with Scrum teams.

And if any team doing support/maintenance with Scrum will quickly realize their Sprints are unlike those of other teams that are doing product development with Scrum.

I would view your questions about swimlanes as arising from a misfitting metaphor: instead of using swimlanes, you would be better off using tags, and then filtering your board as needed to see all support/maintenance tasks related to a particular subsystem or process or person. E.g. “show me all the tasks related to the database schema”.

We use our own product (Kerika) of course, and we do all of our new product development with Scrum Board, and support/maintenance with Kanban boards since Kerika lets you easily have both kinds of boards.

We use multiple tags on each card on both the Kanban and Scrum Boards, so we can filter and search, e.g. “show everything related to our Google Drive integration”.

These filtered views are much more effective and flexible than trying to organize your board with swimlanes, because each card can have multiple tags, whereas with swimlanes a card would be in only one swimlane at any time.

Also, this arrangement gives us flexibility to move from Kanban to Scrum and back: for example, if a support/maintenance card that originally landed on a Kanban board is later deemed to be significant enough to handle as part of product development, we can just cut-and-paste that card from the Kanban board to the Scum Board, and Kerika brings along all the content, history, attachments, chat, etc.

A new look to our website and blog

Kerika,

(Finally!) we are updating our blog and website to use a “responsive” design, which will make it easier to view on mobile devices.

Note: this doesn’t affect the Kerika application itself, only this blog and the kerika.com website.

This work had been pending a long time, but it kept getting pushed off while we devoted all our time to the Box integration.

Now that Kerika+Box is almost done, we are ready to update the website as well: a nice new format that works well on mobile devices — we used custom Bootstrap code for this — as well as new content that helps users understand that there is now a Kerika+Google product and a Kerika+Box product!

Our website updates tend to be in the same release cycle as our software updates, so we probably do fewer website updates than some other companies.

That’s because we use git for managing all the software assets: not just the code for the Kerika application, but also the website pages.

When we expect to do a lot of website updates, we put all those changes in a separate git branch, but that’s rare, since website updates are generally tied to software updates.

Updating the look-and-feel of this blog was much easier: we just switched from a custom WordPress template that we had built about a while ago — that was nice, but unfortunately not responsive — to the standard Twenty Fourteen template that comes with WordPress.

A few tweaks, and it works!