The Critical Path by Derek Huether

Respecting Team Diversity

Derek Huether — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:45:09 +0000

I talk about team diversity in my training. With a world filled with individuals, we have to learn to respect the differences of others. If you don’t, I think you will live and work in a lot smaller world than me. More importantly, if you don’t respect the differences of others, I’m a lot less open to have anything to do with you. It doesn’t matter if we’re dealing with functional roles on a team (developers vs. QA), race, gender, or religion. Respect the differences of others or keep your narrow minded thoughts to yourself. Actually, that’s not right. Communications is good. Tell everyone what you’re thinking so we know who you are.

I have two examples where lack of respect for diversity was clear to me but not others.

Scenario 1: The Cut Scout Pack Leader

My son is a cub scout. We have raised him to respect everyone, regardless of their many differences, to include gender, color, or religion.

The other night, we received an email from our son’s Cub Scout Pack leader. It probably would not have bothered me so much if not for the fact that the pack has scheduled events on Jewish holidays and then rescheduled events around Christian holidays. Let me be clear that on a den level, the leaders have been very good in speaking to the boys in more general terms. “Be respectful, whatever your faith”. My hat is off to these fellows. I appreciate that they go the extra mile. So here is the email we got from the pack leader:

Hello Pack,

This sunday is scout sunday February 5. Please wear your class A uniform with pride in church that day. If you would like to participate but do not attend church regularly. I offer up New Market Methodist church on north alley just off 874 behind main street in New Market. Their service is at 9:30 and 11:00 am.

A scout is reverent. This is one of the points of the scout law, and the reason for scout sunday.

I read no mention of what a boy should do if he attends a temple, synagogue, or mosque. I guess they are just out of luck. I think it was the last two sentences that put me over the edge. ”A scout is reverent. This is one of the points of the scout law, and the reason for scout Sunday.”

Actually, reverent is defined as feeling or showing deep and solemn respect. Clearly something the pack leader lacks for other religions.

Scenario 2: The CIO

Back in the day, I was the Manager of Software Engineering. My team was amazing and I would do anything for them. One particular item of note was the fact that probably 90% of them were from India. Now, I say I’m German but I wasn’t born in Germany. When I say my teammates were from India, I mean they were here on H1B visas from India. Why is that important? Because, as far as I was concerned, I needed to respect their cultural differences and try to accommodate them in any way I could.

So, who was the person who lacked the respect (or understanding) of their cultural differences? The CIO just could not understand why the team would rather have Diwali off instead of Christmas. He didn’t understand how offensive it was when he said to order lunch for the team and recommended I just order “a couple different kinds of meat sandwiches”.

Do you know someone who lacked respect for diversity? What did you do?

Image Source: Pictofigo

Optimize the Whole

Derek Huether — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:35:24 +0000

I know we talk about self-organized and empowered teams being at the heart of agile practices. But sometime I see that focus from individuals and teams going a little too far. Sometimes people forget about the big picture. I believe everything we do needs to map back to organizational visions and goals. If you can’t do that, what you are doing is wasteful. For some organizations, everything needs to map back to increasing profits or lowering costs. But we have to be careful not to fall into the “local optimum” trap.

A local optimum of a combinatorial optimization problem is a solution that is optimal (either maximal or minimal) within a neighboring set of solutions. This is in contrast to a global optimum, which is the optimal solution among all possible solutions. (Thank you Wikipedia)

You can read more about local optimums in the late Eli Goldratt‘s book, The Goal. To the layman, you should consider activities and efforts that will benefit the organization or process flow as a whole, not necessarily what is best for you or your team. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but hear me out.

You’ve probably seen this local optimum in action in one way or the other. If you have a process flow, it’s happened. With a traditional waterfall application development flow, have you ever had a development team deliver features without any concern of the impact to their QA counterparts or others downstream in the process? The release is dependent on the other teams but what do they care? They were very efficient at getting their work done.

Have you ever had that boss who was utterly obsessed with keeping everyone “100%” busy rather then being focused on ensuring the greatest amount of value flowed through the system in the shortest possible time? Both instances are bringing attention to practices that happen and we just accept them. One example is focusing too much on the localized efficiency. The other focuses too much on utilization.

My Freeway Analogy

When I get on the freeway, I don’t care that I can go the speed limit for 5 miles out of my 50 mile commute (localized efficiency). I really don’t care how many cars the freeway can hold (utilization). What I care about is that I can go as fast as I can for my overall commute. That should be the goal.

I’ll close with one of my favorite quotes by Eli Goldratt

A system of local optimums is not an optimum system at all

I’m curious if others out there can give me some more examples of local optimums and how they addressed them. How did you optimize the whole?

Image Source: Awesome DC

The Dark Side of Agile Exams

Derek Huether — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:18:51 +0000

This morning I read a very interesting post over at the AgileScout website titled Agile exams fact check. Peter Saddington (AgileScout) voiced his concerns about a PMI-ACP exam prep website called AgileExams.com. Concerns ranged from questionable pass rates (97%) to testimonials from people who appeared to not be PMI-ACPs.

Now, I believe in capitalism. I believe in building products that have value and can help people. So, this morning, I went onto the AgileExams website and took a practice exam. Per my involvement with the PMI Agile Community of Practice, my involvement with the PMI-ACP exam, and someone who actually took the exam, in my opinion, these questions are not relevant to the exam. I’m not saying they are not accurate. They speak very specifically to content within the PMI recommended reading list. But the exam is not written that way.

If Agile Exams commented on the Agile Scout blog, answering the questions of its readers, perhaps this would have faded into the background rather quickly. Instead, I was cc’d on an email from Agile Exams Customer Service to Peter. Rather than, reading “Peter, we hear you and the community and we’ll make things right. We’ll be transparent. We’ll iterate our product. We’ll be agile”,

this is a snippet of what I read

Kindly remove the post or make serious revisions to it to reflect that you were wrong in your baseless attack. I warned you earlier that you were border-lining on defamation/libel. In fact, you aren’t just throwing into question the integrity of agileexams.com but also the integrity of Ravi, who does not deserve this negative attention at all! If I do not see satisfactory updates on your site, legal means will be considered.

I just saw Jesse Fewell also posted something about AgileExams. I’m also getting emails from people I know and respect in the Agile community asking questions. Curious to see how this plays out.

The Agile Scout blog post now has 29 comments and counting.

Image Source: Pictofigo

How One Group used Agile, Lean, & Scrum for Social Good

Derek Huether — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:00:40 +0000

Today I saw a link on Twitter that intrigued me. It was a video of WikiSpeed’s Joe Justice at TEDxRainier. Sure, the video is 10 minutes long. But, I guarantee it will leave you inspired. I get challenged all the time by people saying Agile is only good for Software Development. Well, watch this video and see if you don’t agree that the horizon has expanded. If you don’t want to click the link above, I’m adding an embedded video below.

PMI Agile CoP Transparency

Derek Huether — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:29:55 +0000

Back in December, the PMI Agile Community of Practice (CoP) leadership agreed we’d take steps to provide some transparency into what we are doing. If you are curious about what we’re up to, I invite you to follow the link below.

Here is the link to our board. https://pmiagilecop.leankitkanban.com

Anyone can access this Kanban (read only):
Username: AgileCOP@gmail.com
Password: GoAgile

What do you think? Is this enough transparency?

Image Source: Pictofigo