Showing posts with label pirates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pirates. Show all posts

Monday, July 30, 2018

How I became a Pirate Bear

I am a pirate bear. 
If you have been following this blog for any length of time, you understand that I have been an outspoken advocate of Agile and Scrum.  It has become the central focus of my career.  I am one of those eccentric and creative people companies want but do not know how to utilize.  I am an anomaly in the business world, and I am comfortable with it.

Like any other technology professional, I spend my free time learning new skills.  In preparation for the Scrum Coaches Retreat in London, I spent some time learning how to use #slack.  To be honest, I am still struggling with the platform.  It feels alien to me.  I have not mastered all the tricks, lingo or etiquette of a #slack community.  I think the same way I did eight years ago when I started using Twitter.  I was able to master that, and I will be okay with the new platform.

When you join a new social network one of the more important things you do is choose a name where others can quickly identify you and touch base.  The same is true with #slack and since the network does not allow for duplicate names people rapidly get creative coming up with handles.  I decided to give myself the moniker “The Pirate Bear.”  I posted a color picture of myself in a fez and began my journey in #slack.  I was swapping information, slide decks, and gossip with other agile coaches for a few weeks when someone from England asked why I chose “The Pirate Bear.” I did not have a chance to answer the question then but feel compelled to answer it now.

Since I began my vocation as a technology professional, I have been heavy.  I blame this state of being on the nature of the profession and by using food to cope with the pressures most technology professionals confront.  I am both big and tall.  It prompted the woman who loves me to label me her bear affectionally.  Additionally, many of my LGBTQ friends and colleagues say that I would pass as a “Bear” in the gay community. I felt awkward about this at first, but I embraced it as good-natured teasing from friends.

Piracy has been a significant theme in the zeitgeist since Johnny Depp wore the costume in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie.  Piracy has been the banner many rebels and outcasts have embraced since the age of sail.  Illegal radio stations sailed the North Sea offering programming the BBC would not provide. It became a pirate radio which has been copied by numerous radio stations around the world.  When Steve Jobs put together the product team of the first Macintosh, he told each of the engineers, “It is better to be a pirate than to join the navy.”  The secret pirate crew then changed personal computing forever.

It sounds very glamorous. The swashbuckling and mythology of piracy is quite appealing.  The reality is that a pirate’s life was dangerous and cruel with significant shifts between poverty and wealth.  A pirate sailor often faced execution if captured and often succumbed to illness at sea.  You chose piracy for many reasons, but the main reason is that you did not fit in anywhere else.

In the sclerosis of most corporate environments, if you are going to make a change, you will have to be a pirate.  You will have to be smarter, nimbler, and more unconventional.  You will suffer from being an outcast.  You may also fail in an embarrassing and ignoble fashion.  On the off chance none of that happens, you will cut a romantic figure in front of black sails and wallow in gold and rum.

Given a choice between the routine and tedium of a professional career and being a pirate; I choose to be a pirate.  It is why I am the pirate bear on #slack.

“Roar!”

Monday, February 19, 2018

It is worth it!

The work is worth it.
I have been doing plenty of reflection.  I blame the dispiriting winter season in my hometown of Chicago.  The cold winter nights force you to confront your past and ponder your purpose.  My friends and social media contacts are asking me plenty of questions about my weird profession.  These kinds of existential moments make me want to do a little explaining.

I joined the agile reformation in 2009.  I was working as a contractor for a family run medical supply company.  I was thoroughly miserable.  I had no job security and little hope. I spent each day grinding out code for capricious people who treated everyone not family as medieval peasants.   Family disputes would boil over on to the sales floor, and anyone caught in the crossfire could lose their job.  It was such a dispiriting place to work.  I witnessed the ten-year-old grandson of the founder tease a salesperson saying, “Daddy says you are fired.”

In the middle of this night of the soul, a project manager decided the team should try “agile.”  It began with daily stand-ups and doing releases in two-week chunks.  It ended with unemployment.  The project manager left for a better job.  The IT Director realized I had more credentials than he did so I was a threat, and it made me expendable.

Between job searches, I did research and the more I learned about Agile, the more I realized it was a better way to lead software projects.  I also realized that the concepts while simple to explain were hard to implement.  Thanks to the Agile Manifesto and the early proponents of the scrum, there was a way to perform technology work without abusing people and providing better value to the business.  I would spend the next four years as a developer spreading the word about this new approach.

Things finally came to a head when I left my last role as a senior developer and became a scrum master full time.  I was no longer some developer mentoring others.  I was leading other teams and setting an example.  I thought I was ready.  I was wrong.  Over the last five years, I have been tested and challenge in numerous ways.  I have succeeded in public ways and failed in equally public fashion.  I am not the scrum master I was five years ago.  Everything I have learned along the way has made me better.

I keep thinking about a quotation from Dave Burgess I tweeted out last week.


The last nine years of my agile journey have been challenging, but it has been worth it.  I am a better leader.  I am a better developer.  The software is getting shipped on time, and the office is a little less capricious.  I do not have entitled ten-year old’s threatening to fire me, and the business community seems to be catching up to my way of thinking. 

This hard journey is probably worth it, and I am proud to be sharing it with you.

Until next time.

Monday, February 12, 2018

Flying my Pirate Flag

I am letting my pirate flag fly.
Being a full-time scrum master or agile coach is a labor of love.  An agile coach needs devotion.  The successful scrum master needs to do more than manage the version control system.  At times, they need to act like Don Quixote jousting at windmills.  All the time, they are they misfits in the organization attempting to get it to improve when inertia governs the corporate culture.  It is very lonely, and it requires reservoirs of passion which many people do not possess.  This week, I talk about the passion for being a scrum master.

It takes a unique individual to get up before the sunrise and make a phone call with a group of developers half a world away.  Additionally, that person spends hours to coordinate product owners and executives so that those developers can work efficiently.  A scrum master handles this responsibility with no authority, everyone involved has the right to say no; It takes a particular kind of person to lead and facilitate this type of activity.  It requires passion.

Being human beings, we are creatures guided by emotions and reason. The modern business has toxic emotional situations and pressures to perform.  Over time, it leads to burn out and passive-aggressive behavior.  A person does not give it their all because it will not make a difference to our bosses or the organization.  Only the application of passion can get someone through the day.

Currently, I am reading a fantastic book by Dave Burgess entitled “Teach Like a Pirate.”  Using techniques he has developed over his career as a teacher, Burgess talks about how to be a better teacher using techniques to build a passion for the subject, build rapport with students, and create situations where enthusiasm can triumph.

What is refreshing is Burgess, knows the difficulty of teaching and how high school students can be the most terrible room for any professional.  What is interesting, is that one of the first things he talks about is the need for passion.  He is also brave enough to admit that he cannot be brimming with passion every day.  He calls people who do freaks.

So unless they are all freaks, how is it that outstanding teachers can maintain a passion for what they do?  Burgess gives a simple answer, and that is to ask questions about what inspires passion in a person. The first question is what subject areas in your field of expertise excite you?  For me, it is metrics and measurement of continuous improvement.  Nothing is more satisfying than putting an easy to understand chart on the wall explaining the team is improving.

The next question is what part of your job is the most satisfactory?  It is the reason you keep doing it.  I have written about this for years.  When software ships and the team feels like they have done a good job is what keeps me taking the call from India each day.  The final question is about personal passions.  For me, it is board games, family, friends, craft cocktails, and good food.  Those things provide me with inspiration and love for what I do.

So in the lonely world of a scrum master or agile coach, it helps to find your passion daily.  With Dave Burgess and “Teach Like a Pirate,” I might have seen a means to do that.

Until next time.