The Archives

Viva Agilista
Joe: The Camp Counselor
03.16.08 | Permalink |

I was interviewed by StickyMinds for their Iterations newsletter.

“The last thing I’d describe my work as is ‘process support,’” says Joe who at any given time, looks after seven to ten teams across multiple locations of his company. “I feel more like a camp counselor.”

StickyMinds Iterations: Keystone People
Viva Agilista
Change: Reality Checklist
01.14.08 | Permalink | 4 Comments

Organizational transitions are hard. It really requires a lot of items to be put in place before any real change can happen. All of them are people related. 1) Risk-taking culture, 2) Leadership, 3) Coaching, 4) Team structure.

1) Risk-taking Culture
The company has to have a environment where people are free to take risks. If people who take risks are punished, the risk takers leave. You’re left with people who do not want to take risks. People who don’t take risks won’t stick their necks out. They’ll be on the far-end of the adoption curve.

2) Leadership
This is tightly coupled with the ‘Risk-taking Culture’. The leadership must at least be willing to sponsor time and training for new methods to be used with the product development teams. They need to adopt the change themselves, but they can _even_ play a wait-and-see role by experimenting with a few teams and see how it goes.

3) Coaching
Coaching and training. Learning new product development techniques is a really big mind shift. In an Agile context everyone’s world changes. Product managers need to be communicating features a lot differently than they had before, programmers need to be accustomed to requirements changing more frequently, QA needs to create more flexible testing infrastructure, user experience experts need to adopt their methods to teams working in iterations.

4) Team structure
There are two environments where introduction of Agile methods are difficult. a) A very large team (split up into multiple, smaller teams) working on a single large product that’s under the gun to deliver on time. Change is hard to manage when a deadline is looming. b) An organization which views their people as resources to get shuffled around every other month to work on new projects. When there are not stable teams, it’s hard for any change to take root.
Innovation & You
Hack Day India
11.30.07 | Permalink |

Hack Day India was awesome.

Hack Day is an event where programmers (and even those who can’t) come together to build cool stuff over 24 hours. Yahoo! supplies the venue, food, entertainment and the all important WiFi connection. After 24 hours every hacker gets to be in the spotlight and show off what they built.

Putting together the event was a whirlwind. So many people from Yahoo! mobilized to put the event together and we got a lot of help from the Taj Residency and Karpe Diem Entertainment.

Starting the night before, our IT staff got to work, setting up the networking gear to transform the 1st floor of the Taj Residency into a super-wifi, 20Mbs hotspot. Rock. The setup continued through the night and by morning we were ready to go.

The hackers were greeted to a huge open-space scattered with Hack Day India beanbags that they got to take home at the end of the event. Everyone was excited about that. Christian Hielmann and Shivku Ganesan from Yahoo! along with Ragu Rau from Adobe gave a few talks before the hacking started. Bradley Horowitz kicked-off the hacking.

With that, the hacking began! People quickly formed into teams and got to work. Hacking lasted through the night. Sid DJ-ed through the night, people took breaks to play the Xbox and the Wii. Caffeine spurred us on. Some of us couldn’t hang on and managed to grab a few zzs.

One thing that amazed me was the willingness that everyone had to help each other out. The people really made the event. Cheers to that!

Bradley Horowitz kicks off the Juding. I announce the judges. The first few hacks.

“The 9″, Maria Sansone, _hacks_ up the winners.

A few other posts on Hack Day India:
http://shouryalive.com/blog/winners-at-yahoo-hackday-india/
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/i_ogi/20071006/1191685755
http://srinix.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/yahoo-open-hackday-awesome-event/
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/08/Yahoo-holds-Open-Hack-Day-in-India_1.html
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2007/gb20071011_261426.htm?chan=search
http://www.livemint.com/2007/10/15234610/Tuesday-Post–Hack-marathon.html
http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/10/11/usa-hacked-europe-hacked-asia-hacked/