An Agile look at the Olympics.

The Olympics bring out the sports nerd in me.  I can sit for hours watching events I never get a chance to see.  I fell in love with curling watching the Olympics, and I never miss an opportunity to watch fencing when the summer games come on.  My fantasies of being an Olympic athlete are unrealistic, but I learn lessons of determination, leadership, and character from these elite athletes.  Today, I would like to share a few of those lessons.    

As a coach, listen to your team members.

Simone Biles was having concentration issues when she was qualifying during the games, but something was wrong when she got lost in the air during a vault.  Biles talked it over with the coach and said she could not go on.  The coach listened and agreed.  When someone comes to you with performance issues or problems with focus, the best you can do is listen.  Once you have heard someone out, take the best action for that person and the team.  I believe Biles coach did that, and Team U.S.A. won a silver medal.  

Being a champion is more than finishing first.

Kevin McDowell ran the race of his life in the Men’s Triathlon.  At one point, he was leading the race.  The cancer survivor gave it his all and finished the race in sixth place, the best Olympic finish by any U.S. male.  While running the race, he grabbed water for other competitors who could not reach it.  His battles with cancer and the sportsmanship he showed on the course make him a champion to me.  A person like that on your team is going to inspire and elevate everyone around them.  If you had to choose between winners and champions – pick the champions.  

Leave everything out on the field.

I watched U.S.A. softball play Japan in the gold medal match.  Everything which could go wrong for team U.S.A did.  One player hit into a freakish double play to end a rally.  When it was over, the U.S.A. won silver instead of Gold.  Pitcher Cat Osterman’s interview moved me after the game.  She said she left everything out on the field and was proud of the team. She encouraged younger players to stick with the sport and aspire to become future Olympians.  Your team needs to take pride in their work and do their best each time, even if the results do not lead to immediate success.  

Excellence is everywhere

We often have a skewed version of success.  Top salespeople sell more than others.  Broadcasters with ratings are more respected than those with personal integrity.  We value the winners who are the most visible and public with their accomplishments.  A person has spent years perfecting air pistol at the Olympics, someone has been weight lifting anonymously in the Philippines, and a mathematician peddled 85 miles for a gold medal.  The quiet dedication to craft and excellence is everywhere.  As coaches and agile practitioners, we need to encourage and recognize this kind of accomplishment. 

I have another week to nerd out about the Olympics, but the lessons will last a lifetime.

Until next time. 

Is your business ready for the next SharkNado.

Are you ready for the Next SharkNado Attack

It you missed it last week of the biggest events on Twitter in a long time was the premier of the B-grade monster movie SharkNado on the SyFi channel.  As the title implies, it was a monster movie featuring man eating sharks which sucked up by a tornado and then dropped on the unsuspecting population of Los Angles.  News anchors from cable television, celebrities of all stripes, and political figures chimed it to remark how awful the film was.  It generated so much buzz that the network decided to rebroadcast the film early because the overwhelming demand.  There is a lesson here for any business person.  The web and social media can be a powerful thing creating demand for your business.  In this blog post, want to encourage you to be ready when the next SharkNado hits.

The universe of social media is composed of many services; Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit being the largest and most influential services on the web.  Facebook acts as a global community for everyone from your parents to people who are interested in dressing up as cats to go for contact.  According to Yahoo news, about 1.1 Billion people call Facebook the place they go to share information with friends and family.  Twitter is known as a micro-blogging service and users can only type 140 characters at a time.  What makes Twitter so popular is the speed of how information is shared and it is also relatively unfiltered so it is the tool of Occupy Wall Street and rebels in Turkey.  Rumors and misinformation swirl about but within this river of information are plenty of nuggets of information gold.  Watching Samuel L. Jackson root for team USA during the Olympics was extremely funny and I highly recommend Jack Tapper’s feed from CNN.  Finally, Reedit acts as a clearing house of blogs and photographs on the web. They also have an “Ask Me Anything” or A.M.A feature which has become the place for politicians and other thought leaders to try out new ideas.  For the sake of disclosure, I use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn as my social networks to promote this business.

So what does this mean to you a small or medium sized business? It means you also need a presence on social media web sites; at the very least Twitter and Facebook.  You can promote specials and talk about your business in an unfiltered manner.  If people like your content they will share your tweets and Facebook messages extending your reach.  It is also cheaper than advertising on radio, television, or newspaper.  This makes it a low cost means to promote your business.

We at E₃ systems understand this strange world and would like to help you.  We leverage Facebook and Twitter and can show you how to do the same.  Please contact us and we will show you how.  So the next time a SharkNado hits you will be able to use it to boost your business.

Until next time.

Why We Believe in Agile

Agile, is swift, strong and a little sexy.

I spend my days toiling in an anonymous cubical at a large company during the day while by night and on weekends I toil for my own start up.  It is thankless work.  I do it because I believe that there is a better way to run a business and serve customers.  I do it because I believe in agile and its principles for the modern business.  This week I want to talk about agile and why I believe in it so strongly.

When Frederick P. Brooks wrote, The Mythical Man-Month back in 1975, he was talking about what it took to write the OS/360 computer system.  When I picked up a copy of the second addition in 2009 many of the problems that Brookes wrote about were oddly familiar.  Projects run out of control.  Communications becomes a huge challenge and project managers who treat people like machines stumble across the Brooke's Law which states, "Adding man power to late project makes it later."

Except for being able to smoke in the office and the use of punch cards, many of the sad realities Brooks observed in software development then are still happening today.  Projects are flying wildly out of control.  Customers are not satisfied with what is being delivered and millions of dollars are being squandered needlessly.  This is why I was so attracted to the Agile Manifesto and Scrum.  With Agile a developer was judged on working software instead of how much documentation they wrote.  Being able to adapt to change was more important than following plans.  Finally, the people building the software had some say in what they were doing in and how they were doing it instead of having it dictated from above.  It was liberating and when I got the hang of it I was an eager convert. 

Still, I have discovered that Agile even though it has been around for over 10 years is still considered a fad in some business circles.  I discovered why when I read Len Lagestee's inspired blog: 5 Must Ask Questions for Leaders.  Organizations, especially large organizations, may not have the correct workforce and be unwilling to trust their employees completely with the changes which are necessary.  Finally, business leaders who model themselves after Donald Rumsfeld won't understand the quantum shift necessary to switch from command and control to servant leadership.  I live that reality each day in my day job.

I know there is something better out here.  I know that a company can be nimble responsive to client needs and treat its community with respect and dignity.  I know that Microsoft tools can build fantastic business applications for the cloud.  I also know there is money to be made in the unglamorous world of infrastructure and logistics.  This is what drives me.  Business for too long has been more concerned with its own power and influence instead of what really matters which are the customers and the community they serve.  This is why I am a believer in Agile because I feel like it can not only build a better piece of software but it can also create a better business. 

Find out what I am talking about by contacting us. 

It is time that business starts acting like it is in the 21st century instead of the 19th.  I hope my little startup is part of a trend which will make that a reality. 

Until next time.

Olympic Perspective

Technology has grown by leaps and bounds over the last twenty years.  In 1992, you couldn't follow the Olympics online.  Tim Berners Lee who invented the HTML was still pioneering ideas which today we take for granted.  If you even knew what on-line was back then you had to settle for Prodigy service on a 1300 baud modem or if you were lucky on 2600.  Gosh how times have changed with live feeds from NBC, the BBC and countless tweets and updates over the web it was difficult to escape the Olympics.

These changes took place because of the hard work of countless engineers, scientists and shulbs like me who spend their lives creating and taming the digital wilderness.  The change is moving faster all the time and the next great frontier is going to be mobile devices.  What hammered that point home for me was an article my friend posted on Google plus.  He mentions that over 5% of web traffic comes from iPhones and another 3% comes from Android phones.  This is doubling the web traffic of this same time last year.  I anticipate as this trend continues that by the Olympics in Rio in 2016 those figures will be about 25% for the iPhone and 15% for the Android system.  I also think that Microsoft is going to be a huge player with Windows 8 but I just don't know where they are going to fit into this growth. 

All of us at E₃ systems are excited to ride this wave of innovation and have written programs which work on PC's, tablet computers and mobile devices.  We are particularly proud of how we use the Microsoft Tag technology to get your mobile device to communicate with plain pieces of paper to bridge the gap between the digital world and the real one.  Our Sully Inventory Management system makes that possible and you can find out more clicking here.

I can't wait for the next twenty years and what we are going to accomplish.  I hope you will be along for the ride. 

Until next time.