A Little Empathy Goes a Long Way

Empathy is a big deal.

As a scrum master, one of the most important qualities you can have is empathy.  It is a special quality where you can put yourself in someone else’s situation and understand the world from their perspective.  It means operating outside your comfort zone.  Today, I would like to discuss the importance of empathy for a scrum master.

Working for a large organization is hard.  Employees often feel alienated from their work and coworkers. I think a significant reason for this situation is many people in leadership roles do not understand what it takes to provide the goods and services their organization offers.  These leaders are good at managing budgets and capacity but little else. It is where empathy matters.  As a leader, you need to walk a mile in another person’s shoes.  If a leader cannot do that in reality, then they must attempt the thought experiment to see the world from the perspective of the employee.

When a leader sees the organization from the perspective of the people interacting with customers several changes take place.  First, they see the people doing the work as people instead of resources who are disposable.  Next, they understand the systems and equipment the employees are using might not be meeting the needs of the customers.  Another by-product of this exercise is leadership understands how long it takes actually to build something.  It gives leadership insight into which deadlines are real and which are fiction.  Finally, leaders discover which activities generate value and which ones do not.

Early in my career, a mentor I respect said I should never order a person to do something I would not do myself.  I still follow those directions today.  It is why I go to meetings, so my coders get a chance to write software.  It is why I fill out expense forms and project requests; so the people doing the work do not have to do it.  It is part of the servant leadership I try to practice each day. So have some empathy for the people who work for you.  You will be surprised by what you might discover.

Until next time.

Agile Exposes the Bad Boss

A bad boss is just toxic.

I was getting on an elevator at the office and I decided to make small talk with someone as we were heading up to our respective floors.

“Ready to set the global economy on fire,“ I joked.

My fellow traveler got a gleam in their eye and said, “The flames are so colorful.”

I got off on my floor and breathed a sigh of relief.  The metaphorical pyromaniac was too eager to be pulling my leg.  The experience brought into stark contrast how tired many of us have become in the business world. The daily frustrations of working in a modern office force many professionals into the cynical behavior of inflicting harm on others as a means of satisfaction.  It is perverse, and it is wrong. The cynicism in the elevator is one of the reasons I have been such an enthusiastic proponent of agile.  I firmly believe there must be a better way to structure work so that it is sustainable, sane, and satisfying.

Inc. Magazine and Monster.com pointed out this week that 76% of bosses in business are “toxic.”  This toxic leadership is why so many people rely on jaded cynicism.  It is crucial as an agile coach and scrum master to break this cycle of toxicity.  According to the article in Inc. magazine, a toxic boss exhibits some or all of the following traits.

1. They are power-hungry
2. They micromanager
3. They are absent
4. They are incompetent

It is up to people like me to expose these bosses to the organization and coach them to be better.

The Power Hungry

Working for a power-hungry boss is a little like being a supporting cast member in Game of Thrones; you are going to wind up suffering a cruel ending to satisfy someone else’s ambition.  It surprises me how many business leaders think servant leadership is similar to the game “Masters and servants.”  The reality of servant leadership is much different.  In the end, what everyone needs to understand is a power-hungry boss is concerned about one thing; themselves.  A power-hungry boss will put personal interest over the needs of the company and employees.  Agile exposes the power-hungry because they often become impediments to shipping solutions.

The Micromanager

The hardest part of leadership is the lack of control we have over our fellow humans.  A leader can spend years training people to do the right thing and meet a certain performance level, and they can still disappoint at critical junctures.  To combat this helplessness, managers create processes and steps which they expect people to obey like robots.  It creates an illusion of control where employees do what they can to avoid hassle rather than what is necessary to succeed.  Thus, reports have perfect typography and proper tab spacing, but the data within that report shows lead conversion is falling.  The emphasis on working solutions instead of comprehensive documentation in agile should expose micromanagers.

The Absent

Over the years, we tell countless stories about military leaders who “lead from the front,” instead of from behind a desk.  I am currently reading one about William Slim who commanded the 14th Army of Burma during the Second World War.  It is easy to get caught up in the trappings of authority.  In an office of cubicles, having your office is a status symbol.  It gives you the power to shut people out and focus on administrative duties.  The autonomy and control over who has access is a powerful motivation for people to advance into leadership.  In reality, a leader has to be more visible to the people they are leading.  A leader should know about the people who make them successful.  If the leader is not around and they become distant figure the people who make them successful will ignore them in time of crisis.  Agile attempts to counter this kind of toxicity with its emphasis on face to face communication.

The Incompetent Leader

A leader should not be able to do your job, but at the very least they should understand what it takes to do your job.  What I have discovered over the years is people who have never managed a computer network or written a line of code often lead technology teams.  These people know how to manipulate budgets and control the project, but they do not know how to direct technology professionals because they think they are no different than shipping clerks or factory workers.  Agile with its emphasis on cross-functional teams and delivery exposes the incompetent.

I am a big believer in the idea that you should tell and expose the truth wherever you find it.  Sooner or later, someone in a position of authority is going to act on that truth.  I feel this way because it is how we defeated leaded gasoline and paint.  It is how we have reduced smoking in the United States by half since 1964.  It is an approach which led to the birth of agile.

If we are honest with ourselves, we should acknowledge the power-hungry, micromanagers, the absent, and incompetent and expose them so their toxic effect on the workplace can be mitigated.  It matters, and if we are not successful, all we can do is watch the pretty colors as the world burns.

Until next time.

Experience Matters in a Scrum Coach

Leadership experience is not pretty but necessary

Plenty of issues crop up in the day to day life of a scrum master.  Impediments need to be resolved and each day you are a living example of how Scrum is supposed to work.  As a fellow coach, Ryan Ripley remarked on how some individuals with little experience with agile are marketing themselves as coaches.  Ryan feels pretty strongly about the subject, and so do I.

There are two lines of thought about leadership.  The first school is called the “great man theory.”  This school firmly believes that great leaders are not made but are born.  This notion has been used for generations to support monarchs and other forms of tyranny.  For each leader born into greatness, there are numerous counterexamples of individuals who fall woefully short.  There is also an elitism and snobbishness associated with this school of leadership which says that only specific groups can aspire to leadership.  I also find this type of thinking has plenty of sexist and racist baggage associated with it.

The second school of thought is the notion that leadership can be taught just like any other skill.  I am a firm supporter of this idea.  When I was a teenager, I benefited from leadership training from Boy Scouts of America and Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps.  I had the Boy Scout Law ingrained into my personality at an early age.  The outdoor activities forced me to learn to help younger scouts cope with being alone and away from home for the first time.  Being caught in a rainstorm surrounded by wet and tired twelve-year-olds is a good measure of your leadership skills.

Marine Corps JROTC taught me self-discipline, my left form my right and that leadership is more about credibility than shouting at people.  I met some remarkable people.  David Ogle was a survivor of combat around the Chosin reservoir and a USMC boxing champion.  He served in Vietnam and became a Sergeant Major.  Richard Weidner was a company commander in Vietnam and taught me about the less than glamorous things leaders have to do.

Together, Boy Scouts and Marine JROTC gave me a good foundation from which to build.  I took that knowledge with me into the sales profession, the casino business, radio, and finally into technology.  I am entering the fifth year of being a scrum master.  The experience of shipping software at the end of each sprint changes a person and their style of leadership.  Working with offshore teams changes how you relate to others.  Those experiences make you a better scrum master and coach.

We can teach leadership, in my opinion.  I also feel experience acts as a multiplier of leadership skill.  A good leader does not ask someone to do something which they would not do themselves.  That means if you ask a developer to write a unit test you better be willing to write a few of your own.  An agile coach who has not led a retrospective or shipped code is not a coach because they lack the practical skills to make agile successful.  They are faux coaches, and you should steer clear of them.  An agile transformation is like performing a heart transplant on a person running a marathon; you would not trust that job to a first-year medical student.  Anyone can call themselves a coach, it takes time and experience to be a valuable coach

Until next time.

I would have fired him too!

Freedom of expression is not a license to be an asshole.

Plenty of pixels have been expended on the diversity memo from a Google engineer who argues that efforts to improve diversity were a waste of time.  I have been following the arguments and spoken with friends about the dust up.  It dawned on me that this is not a question about diversity versus political correctness.  The entire affair is really about teamwork and being a jerk to you colleagues.  The author of the memo is not free thinking but using pseudoscience to justify biased views.  As an agilest and leader, there is no room for these individuals in your organization.

Over the years, I have been critical of the “brogrammer” culture.  I have also been critical of engineers who think gender is a disqualifying factor to work in technology.  Last week, I further bemoaned the lack of women in the development profession.  I placed much of the blame on a feedback loop of men pursuing computer science careers and providing a leg up to other men in the industry.  It is also apparent to me that working in technology gives certain individuals the license to be an asshole to others.

One of my favorite business books is “The No Asshole Rule,” by Robert I. Sutton, Ph.D.  Sutton does a fantastic job providing a scholarly definition of what an asshole is and reasons why you do not want them in your business.  I think it should be required reading for any business person along with the “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” by Partick Lencioni.  

According to Sutton, an Asshole has two traits:

• Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the “target” feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person?  In particular, does the target feel worse about him- or herself?
• Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather those individuals who are more powerful.

Based on the above criteria, it is evident to me that the author of the Google memo is an asshole.  The author considers himself and those like him intellectually and morally superior.  Since they are superior, they should not have to debase themselves by having to educate, mentor, or collaborate with those people.  This"other" could be women, ethnic minorities, and people living different lives.

A modern office is not an environment for this kind of thinking.  Women make up a large percentage of the work force and are filling senior leadership positions.  There are also countless people of color working as professionals.  Finally, individuals who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender are collaborating with those who are not.  Anyone who considers themselves superior to others not like them is going to create tension and undermine collaboration in the office.  Eventually, behavior like this is going to trickle down to the bottom line.  From an agile perspective, individuals who feel this sense of superiority are going to be resistant to continuous improvement.  It is not a surprise the author of the diversity memo wrote this after attending a workshop on the bias.

As a manager and agilest I would have fired the author of the Google memo.  He was a distraction to the firm and advocating for a direction that the company had openly rejected.  Finally, his attitude to co-workers different than him would undermine any project he was assigned.  Better to remove a polyp than deal with cancer which could kill your organization.

Until next time.

I am taking next week off to attend the Gen-Con game fair. 

Product Owners Have the Hardest Job in Agile.

Listen to Ben, hang together or hang separately.

I have been kicking around as a scrum master for the last three years.  I have been developing software for eighteen.  Those jobs are difficult and challenging but they do not compare to challenges faced by product owners.  This week I want to talk about the hardest job in Agile – the product owner.

The Scrum Guide is pretty clear about the members of a scrum team.  They are the developers who do the work.  The scrum master is the servant leader of the team and helps remove obstacles.  Finally, there is the Product owner.  The product owner sets priorities writes stories, and acts as the liaison between the business and the development team.  What most product owners do not know is the job includes so much more than what the scrum guide says.

A product owner needs to understand the internal politics of the organization so they can work with in it and sometimes around it to get things done.  Product owners need to understand the customer.  Not only understand the customer but be able to differentiate what software improvements will add value and which ones will waste money.  The product owner is under constant pressure to write stories and to create stories which can be transformed into testable code.  It is a grind and they need to practice mindfulness to separate what is important from what is trivial.

It is not an easy job and as a scrum master or coach you need to help them succeed.  This means spending time showing them how to write user stories.  Take time out to explain the agile manifesto and what developers need to succeed.  Take time to listen about the operations of the business and the politics of the organization.

A scrum master and product owner are equal partners.  To paraphrase Ben Franklin, you will hang together or you will hang separately.  When things go wrong it is usually the product owner who receive the blame.  As a scrum master it is up to you to make sure things do not go wrong.

Business today is not easy but a successful product owner can smooth off many of the rough edges to a software development team.  That is why it is the hardest job in Agile.

Until next time.

More than the Man in the Taupe Blazer

I am a guy from a state school with a
taupe blazer.  I am going to help you
get your software written on time.

I have had a lot on my mind the two weeks.  My day job is getting more challenging and my home business is puttering along as it always has.  The most interesting thing about working in technology is the pace of change.  If you don’t like something it is bound to change in the span of a week.  This week I wanted to devote more attention to the fine article in Bloomberg Business Week, entitled “What is code?”  For the beginner in technology it is a fine read, but it does get a few things wrong and in particular they get wrong the role of the “scrum master.”

In the first chapter of the rather long article they describe a “scrum master” as “The Man in the Taupe Blazer.”  According to the article:

“This man makes a third less than you, and his education ended with a B.S. from a large perfectly fine state university.  But he has 500+ connections on Linked In.  That plus sign after the “500” bothers you.  How many more than 500 people does he know? Five? Five thousand?”

In short, a Scrum master is an eccentric person who understands software development along with project management and if a project goes south they will be able to get on with their lives while the executive who hires them will be forced into early retirement.  At first glance this is not an unfair impression.

What the article missed is that a scrum master is just as invested as the executive who hires him.  One of first things a scrum master learns is the difference between involvement and commitment.  To be committed, is to put your career at risk if you don’t succeed.  To be involved, is to be a participant in a project with no repercussions should it fail.  This gets to the classic metaphor about the breakfast shop and pigs and chickens.  In my darker moments, I joke about being a pig because I live on a steady diet of garbage, live in the excrement of other pigs, am treated with contempt by the other farm animals, and when necessary butchered for someone else’s breakfast.

I am not far from the truth.  I don’t know how many times I have had a member of my business organization look at me like I am some kind of insect because I am not as; cool, professional, good looking, or credentialed as they are.  I also spend many moments of my day slopping through the mud of my company bureaucracy and infrastructure to get things done.  I have had people lie to me and get insulted when I point out they are lying to me.  I also remember the week before Christmas 2008 when I was slaughtered because I made a mistake after 14 hours of non-stop coding.

So to be clear my executive friends, many of the scrum masters you face have seen failure first hand and they do not wish to experience it again.  They also know that their success is dependent on the same things that make you a success which is getting the project finished on time and on budget.  We are not some empty shell in taupe blazers.  We are just as invested as you are.

Where we excel is that we understand software and the people who write it.  It is not a pretty job but for every skyscraper built it requires hundreds of people who understand, engineering, construction, and motivating construction workers to get the job done.  The tower may have “Trump” on its marque but it took an anonymous engineer with decades of experience to make it rise.

Unfortunately, software development is not construction in the conventional sense.  While buildings are constructed with steel, glass, and concrete, software is built using languages and systems that often do not play nice together.  We also have differing levels of training and experience which is not taught in schools but rather learned on the job so asking a developer to do something that seems routine can be a huge suck of time and money.  Also software developers, the good ones at least, see themselves as artists.  Which means they cannot be led around like construction workers.  They have to be treated like the smart professionals they are.  Instead, they are treated like expensive pigs ready to be sacrificed when a project goes bad.

Yes, I have a taupe blazer.  Instead of a Bachelor of Science, I have earned a Master’s in Management and I have earned numerous credentials in my field to prove to executives that I know what I am doing.  I also have over 17 years writing software and learning how to adopt to the new technologies.  I am your ally.  I am just as invested in the success of the project as you are.  Finally, if you give me what I need to succeed, I will.  So have a little respect for the scrum master’s in your life executives, we are the steady hands which make software work for your business.

Until next time.

Obstacles to Agile

Courtesy of the Harvard business review.
Being a change agent is hard even for a King.

The life of an agile profession both in the corporate world and as an entrepreneur is filled with uncertainty.  Big wins are offset by frustrating losses.  Efforts to keep an even keel are quickly undermined by others and setting aside some time for lunch seems like a herculean effort.  This week I want to postulate a few things I have encountered that make the success of an agile implementation doubtful.

 Cultural Inertia-

If you run into employees or members of management who say, “We have always done it this way,” you are facing cultural inertia.  Human beings need ritual and consistency to make them feel like they belong.  Rituals also produce a sense of certainty in an uncertain world.  When an organization or individuals are afraid to change they are really asking for certainty in an uncertain world.  This is why bad processes and procedures linger.  People are invested in these bad processes and rewarded for perpetuating them.  Thus, as most agile leaders try to instigate change they are going to receive push back.

 Quid Pro Quo behavior-

This term is used in sexual harassment training but is also go for anyone attempting change management.  This is a Latin phrase which means, “tit for tat.”  Another way of explaining it is, “You scratch my back and I will scratch yours”.  A business operates through the countless interplay of people and often they do favors and collect favors from others in order to do their job.  For instance, accounts payable depends on the format of a report being a certain way and in excel.  As a favor a manager makes this happen so when they have to do an expense or provide a bonus to a valued customer, accounts payable with go along without any conflict.

This is maddening behavior for technology professionals and ageists because the obvious answer to the situation would be to automate the report with a script or some reporting software.  This solution may save time and money from the firm but it takes away influence from the manager who is doing the favor for accounts payable.  Thus, they will do what they can in a passive aggressive means to undermine the effort.  For the agilest it makes sense to understand how these little power games are played in the organization.

 People getting by on Charm-

This week, I had a conflict with an employee with seven years more tenure in my organization.  I held him accountable for poor performance and undermining a project.  I later learned that he has some protected status in the organization because of a favor he did for a vice-president five years previously.  Since then, he has been using his charm and charisma to instigate projects.  He never finishes those projects but he is always first in line for the next highly visible project which he can scapegoat on to someone else.

I did what I could and pointed out the facts which explained why a project is twelve weeks behind.  I will not be working with this person in four weeks as I am transferred to another team and group of developers.  He is now someone else’s problem and I hope that his continued negligence is pointed out.  Being charming is no substitute for knowing how to do your job or getting results but it amazes me how many people survive in business because of it.

Be on the watch for these three things in your organization because knowing about them is going to make it easier to create positive change.

Until next time.

Behold the Ninja Lion Sensei Master Cobra certification.

This guy might be a Ninja Lion Sensei Master Cobra.

It has been quite a week.  My last blog post hit a bit of a nerve and there was lots of chatter about my feeling regarding faux titles.  This prompted many people on Google plus to get together and joke around about weird titles they heard and make up a few of our own.  Today E₃ systems is proud to announce the “Ninja Lion Sensei Master Cobra” certification.

With our tongue firmly in our cheek, we created the Ninja Lion Sensei Master Cobra certification to recognize outrageous accomplishments of agile experience.  For example, if you have been trying to do an agile implementation and it has be obstructed by your executive team you might be a Ninja Lion Sense Master Cobra.

Please feel free to add other examples in the comments.

The hash tag is #nlsmc and we will have t-shirts at the Global Scrum Gathering in Phoenix.  I look forward to not taking ourselves too seriously in May.

Until next time.

You are not a ninja!

Agile professionals are NOT ninjas!

Like most professionals, I tend to get ornery from time to time.  I am beginning to think that this is a healthy response to working in present day corporations.  Human beings have gone from being hunter gatherers to living in cubical farms in the span of 5,000 years.  It does not surprise me that there is not some kind of psychological backlash to this situation.  Further changes in the professional world like the hoteling of work spaces and the growing dependency on contract workers has made life in the corporate world seem like something out a Franz Kafka novel.  Today, I want to talk about something that have been bothering me over the last few weeks.  The growth of faux titles that agile professionals are using to try and describe themselves.

My irritation began when I noticed that someone began using the phrase “code ninja” to describe themselves and scrum master skills.  I have already blogged about what I think about people who describe themselves in this manner.  Now, I am seeing terms like “Agile evangelist” and “Wizard” cropping up in some discussions about agile professionals.  I understand why people are doing this to try and brand themselves and make themselves more appealing to the market but it really needs to stop right now.

We are agile professionals.  We are not wizards pulling rabbits out of our pointy hats and summoning a Patronus when an impediment crops up.  We are not Jedi because I doubt we would ever get the licensing from Disney to use the title and we don’t have cool light sabers.  This also means we have to deal with Sith and frankly the thought of executives with the power to force choke is a little disconcerting.  We are not ninjas because even though we are highly skilled professionals we are not being asked to kill people.  Finally, we are not evangelists.  Evangelism requires blind faith, total dedication, and the commitment to orthodoxy.  That is the antithesis of Agile.

Agile requires its practitioners to try new things.  One of the tenants of the manifesto, is we respond to change over following a plan.  Pragmatism, the scientific method, good engineering, and relying on a community of professionals is what makes us agile.  Contemporary evangelism tends to shun these values.  I will concede that it does take a leap of faith to try and change how contemporary business is done but we are no different than the professionals who applied W.E. Deming’s methods in Japan or the lean manufacturing professionals currently practicing in the United States.

Finally, if you call yourself an agile apostle and you are not one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto you deserve a good dose of scorn and ridicule.  Agile was not dictated to us like the Koran to Mohamed or revealed to us via golden tablets to John Smith.  It is the product of thousands of people attempting to pull business out of the 19th century and into the 21st. It is changing and evolving and responding to change.

Drop the silly titles and let your work speak for itself.  We are Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches.  We are servant leaders trying to help others be more productive and content with their careers.  We need to get our hands dirty, refactor code, attend meetings, deal with the personal problems of our developers and try to make a difference in the lives of the people we work with.  This is not glamorous or flashy work but it needs to be done.  I you want to call yourself a ninja or Jedi then I think we are not going to work well together.  Don’t worry those of us exhibiting the quite professionalism the job requires will still be here to clean up your messes.

Until next time.

Learning to Live with the White Whale

My white whale 

I have mentioned the most difficult thing about being a technologist is when you develop a sense of competence about your skills and career something comes along which forces you to start from scratch.  I have had to relearn how to write software four times in the last seventeen years.  My over-all skills have improved but I consider myself an intermediate programmer.  This is because I once thought I had mastered web application development with ASP.NET web forms.  To my surprise, MVC came along and I had to start over unlearning all the techniques from web forms and then using my knowledge in this strange world of MVC.  Slowly, I am learning basic competence in design patterns and test driven development.  This brings me to today’s topic which is my collaboration with Intuit and their Quickbooks Online service.

This began approximately six months ago when I met a potential client who said that they entered the same record into three different systems and then entered it into Quickbooks to invoice the client. I thought it was madness.  After sleeping on it, I decided that E₃ systems would prototype a web application which would reduce the number of times they have to enter data and automatically sync with Quickbooks.  I just did not know how to do it.

The web application was the easy part where I stumbled was the communicating with Quickbooks.  A quick search revealed a tremendous source of frustration.  The Intuit Sync Manager was being discontinued and according to chatter on the web it was hard to work with.  This forced me to turn to Intuit Quickbooks API.  I would be pushing JSON and XML to communicate with their API so that it could populate a version of Quickbooks Web service.  This is when I was transformed from a competent web developer to someone behaving like Captain Ahab from Herman Melvil’s “Moby Dick”.

After reading the documentation and struggling with getting the service up and running, I began to follow the directions on how to use the .NET SDK which Intuit was good enough to produce.  It did not work.  Worse when I tried to debug the application I received vague error messages which would not help me solve the problem.  I was so frustrated, I seriously considered hacking off my own leg.  Fortunately, some folks on twitter were listing to me rant and were able to provide direction.  In addition, they were understanding of my frustration and anger with how they designed their systems.

Thanks to the efforts of the Intuit twitter team, including Nimisha and Meg, they were able to talk me off the ledge put down my harpoon and get back to coding.  It was not easy and I was prickly at times but they did the job.  Now, E₃ systems and I are developing competence in working with Quickbooks online and the web-api.  This is bonus to our business and to the good folks at Intuit who want to spread the adoption of their cloud based service.  It looked shaky at first but E₃ systems is on its way to writing web applications of Intuit.  I still feel a bit like Ahab chasing my white whale but at least I know how to use these newfangled row boats provided by Intuit.  Thanks gang, look forward to working with you more in the future.

Until next time.

Why I am learning TDD.

I am in the middle of a journey.  By day I am the scrum master for agile teams across two continents.  In the evenings, I am attempting to run a business and do development for that business.  It is not easy.  One of the hardest things about my job is that I have to improve my knowledge every 18 months or I will become stagnant.  A technology professional who does not continue to grow and develop, is someone of diminishing value.  This week, I would like to discuss that trend.

A software developer is a profession which is constantly learning and evolving.  When I began working as a software developer; Visual Basic 6 was a popular tool for enterprise applications.  Active X Data Objects were the means to connect to an SQL Server 7 database and ASP classic was just starting to supplant perl script for web development.  Today, all of those technologies are considered obsolete.  If I had not bothered to learn the newer technologies coming over my career I would be out of work today.  I had to learn Entity Framework, MVC, C#, and cascading style sheets otherwise I would be unemployable.

Fortunately, developers and other technology companies have numerous tools to retrain themselves with the new technologies as they come out.  There are educational video services, countless on-line tutorials, and numerous user groups around the United States to help software engineers keep their skills sharp and up to date.  Finally, developers are natural tinkerers and so they spend hours and even days learning to master new skills.

I am talking about this today because over the next few weeks I am going to start working on a project for work and at the same time I am going to attempt to master test driven development.  I know it is not going to be easy but I think with some hard work, I will be able to adequately author tests and help others understand why this is a good approach.  I have been putting off this learning for a long time so I hope it will make me a better scrum master and developer.

Until next time.

We need more women in tech.

Women are just as good as men in tech.

I have spent over fifteen years in the technology business as a consumer, developer and scrum master. One constant during my career is that there are not enough women working in technology. Numerous articles have been written on the subject and plenty of initiatives are bubbling up around the web to teach women to code.  Still, I want to address a few of the myths I have heard about women and technology which need to be discredited.

1)Women are not logical enough to code.

This is false.  The American Psychological Association states, “…gender differences in math achievement are largely due to cultural and environment factors” (emphasis mine).  So given and equal level of training women and men are equally good at math and by default logic.

2)Women cannot work the log hours required of programmers.

This is a cop out for two reasons.  First, working more hours does not guarantee better work.  According to the Harvard Business Review the more hours a person works the less productive they become.  Second, long hours are often a failure of project planning and business leadership. Individual developers should not have to pay the price for bad planning.

The above said, working extra hours and being involved in crunch time is a perverse badge of honor.  I like it when the Netizen Corporation Blog says, “This is a representation of failure rather than commitment.”

Having women in the office particularly women with families lives tempers this desire to work insane hours as a form of perverse competition.  When you have lives outside of work it tends to make that labor more productive.

3)Women hurt the teamwork of the development crew.

Study after study has shown diversity of gender, race and religion yields better decision making.  If anything software development is about making decisions.  People do feel discomfort when thrown together with groups they are unfamiliar but one they get over that discomfort their performance improves.

I have experienced first-hand the change which takes place when women are added to a development team.  Jokes about alcohol consumption and romantic conquests go way down.  The men on the team care more about their hygiene and appearance.  Everyone becomes more polite and professional with each other.  Finally, disagreements are worked out in a more civil fashion.  It is not perfect but it is much better than working on all male teams.

4)Women are just not as knowledgeable.

There are plenty of women in technology who have fantastic skills.  Marissa Mayer did not graduate from Stanford and become and executive at Google because of her good looks.  She was a smart and capable engineer who also brought to the table a keen sense of design and a fanatical devotion to metrics.

From a more personal perspective, Angela Dugan author of the “The TFS Whisperer” has become a role-model and big sister of sorts.  She introduced me to TFS, Agile, and better development methods.  She leads the Chicago ALM group and has a profoundly strong reputation among the development community around Chicago.  I have known Angela for over five years and I am better technologist because of it.

These two women are just some of the people I know who bring a sense of craft and commitment to their technical skills.  This just confirms to me that you do not need to have a UNIX beard in order to be knowledgeable.

Technology needs more women but some of these myths I have attempted to discredit have gotten in the way.  If this situation is going to improve men and women are going to have to step forward and quash these faux myths of male programming superiority.  Otherwise we will continue to be stuck in the same destructive patterns we see today in the world of development.

Until next time.

Ninjas, Rock Stars and Gurus need not apply.

Software is like jazz.  You better have "chops"

Being a technology professional is a mixed bag.  You are part of a social and technological wave helping to transform the world.  At the same time you are involved in petty arguments, massive egos, job insecurity and the nagging feeling that your labors are making someone else very wealthy.  You are also a rare commodity and receive plenty of anonymous job offers from people hoping to fill roles.  You also get to interact with recruiters who behave like talent agents trying to get you the next big gig, for a percentage.  This week I saw a job posting for a company looking for a “web ninja.”  It made me think about what I was going to look for when I start hiring.

The world of technology is very Darwinian.  An individual either knows how to code or they do not.  Many times I use a term for jazz music and say that a developer has “chops.”  This is because it is not easy to take a nebulous idea and transform it into working, testable code.  These individuals are rare and hard to find.  It took me the first five years of my development career to develop chops as a software developer.  Then the market changed and I had to learn how to code all over again and develop “chops” in that skill set.  It is an on-going process of learning and relearning how to do your job.  Being unable to change and adapt will doom you to irrelevance and unemployment.

This is why I found the job posting for a “web ninja” so amusing.  Some employers are so desperate for talent with chops that they will do anything and everything to make their work seem “cool” and cutting edge.  The reality in technology is that most of the work is pretty mundane.  You are helping square peg systems communicate with round hole systems.  You are moving data from point A to point B.  Finally, many of the people who use your systems are not looking for the next big innovation but rather something which works good enough.

As a software developer and entrepreneur, I am not looking for ninjas, rock stars, or gurus.  I am looking for people who can work together in a team and have chops.  These are people who are not experts but are willing to learn.  These are people willing to mentor junior developers so that they can grow to their level of expertise.  These are folks willing to stand over the shoulder of a peer so they can together fix a gnarly bug.  In other words, I am looking for professionals who get the work done with quite assertiveness and a sense of craft.

A ninja will not document code or write unit tests.  I also suspect they will use the most complicated path from point A to point B.  Rock stars will refuse to change code after a code review and insist they receive all the attention when the project succeeds.  I will not see them take responsibility when code fails.  Finally, a guru has such a specialized skill set that they cannot see other ways of solving problems.  It is the old adage that if your only tool is a hammer everything else starts looking like a nail.  This is one of the few times I will agree with Robert Heinlein, “Specialization is for insects.”  A guru is nothing more than a technological insect.

So you can keep your gurus, rock stars, and ninjas.  I will settle for something a little less flashy and more efficient.

Until next time.

Life lessons in Business and Football.

You can learn a great deal about business
from professional football.

This week was the Big Game.  I get together with family and spend time binging on food that is no good for me.  I watch the game and live tweet it for the fun and entertainment of my friends.  One of the things that strikes me about the event is that these teams have reached the biggest event in the sport and for a casual football fan like myself, I do not know the players on either team except for Peyton Manning.  This tells me that football excellence depends on many people working well together instead of superstars condescending to get something done.  This week on the blog some lessons I have learned about being a small business I received from a professional football.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that no one person is bigger that the team.  Peyton Manning may be the sole superstar who I know in the Big Game but he did not get to the championship solely by himself.  He needed offensive linemen to prevent big angry linemen from stomping on his neck.  He needed receivers who could catch the big passes when he needed them.  Finally, he needed defensive players who could force the opposing team off the field in three downs.  Without that he would go another season being unfavorably compared to his brother who owns two championships to his one.

Next leadership matters.  When Peyton joined the Bronco’s he took charge of how the team practices offense and even when it practices.  Since he has a track record of success, the others on the team quickly adopted his methods and the team went from mediocre to playoff caliber. This leadership on the part of Manning and the ownership of the team made a huge difference.

I think the final lesson I learned during this football season is that a bunch of no-name players working well together are better that superstars.  The Seattle Seahawks with the exception of Richard Sherman seem like a quiet and hardworking bunch of guys.  They do not care about their no-name quarterback or if they do not have stars on the field but together they are a defensive powerhouse.  As someone who grew up with the 1985 Chicago Bears and the Superbowl Shuffle, I can relate to this group of guys.

So, for me, the lesson of this weekend is that teammates matter, superstars are over rated and that leadership whether it comes from a quarterback or a coach is essential to success.  We at E₃ systems would love to help make your business more successful so contact us today and ask us how we can help.

It is going to be sad when football season ends tonight but when all the dust settles on Monday rest assured that we can all learn some lessons from football.

Until next time.

Making No Little Plans

Greatness means making no small plans.

Being an entrepreneur feels like being a wall flower at your high school dance.  You are lonely standing on the sidelines while everyone else is out on the dance floor having a good time.  More aggravating is that when you ask someone to dance they politely reject your advances or insult you for being so bold as to imply that you even had the right to dance with them.   By the end of the evening you have a sugar high from drinking too much from the punch bowl and your self-esteem is about two sizes smaller than the start of the evening.  I seems like it takes a little courage to show up at your high school dance.

This week’s blog post I want to talk about why we keep dealing with the setbacks and challenges to try and build this business.  I hail from the Chicago metropolitan area and one of the founding fathers of this city is Daniel Burnham who was an early pioneer of skyscraper construction and chief architect of the 1893 Colombian exposition.  He said, “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized.”

I was and am tired of making small plans in my cubical.  I want to help other small and medium sized businesses leverage the power of the web and cloud based computing.  I want to get involved in philanthropy and help others with the opportunities I was fortunate to receive.  I want to be able to own my own office and lay it out the way I want.   Some of this is ego driven and the remainder is motivated by a strong desire to make the business community in my local corner of the world better.

We think that we have the tools to make that happen.  Our Sully 2.0 software makes managing inventory and bills of lading twenty four hours a day seven days a week.  We have a broad knowledge of agile management and we have the people who will help your organization manage the transition.  We are putting the finishing touches on the Tony fleet maintenance system. Finally, we can put together QR codes for you to help drive more business to your organization and web site.  This makes us poised for growth and greatness. No little plans indeed.

Contact us today and we will tell you more.

Until Next time.

Frogy Fear and Loathing in the Cubical

French workers need better managers. 

One of the benefits of being an MBA is that you get great deals on business magazines.  Over the last year, Business Week, Crain’s Chicago Business and the Economist have become sources of information and inspiration.   Plenty of times, I receive text book examples about how to run a business.  I also receive many more examples of how NOT to do business.  I find examples of failure to be much more instructive. 

Case in point came from the November 18^th issue of the Economist.  In the weekly Schumpeter column, they pointed to the French Economy and how many people consider their workforce lazy and inept.   It made me feel bad for the French office worker.  Nothing is bigger demotivation than failure.

One could argue that France has been a case study in failure since the formation of the Vichy government over seventy years ago.  You do not hear discussion about French entrepreneurs outside the fashion industry.    Its politics are notoriously messy and riots throw into stark contrast the inability of the French economy to create jobs. 

The nation which gave us de Gaulle, Descartes, Pasture, and Sartre deserves a better reputation in the global economy.  I also believe that the French worker has been unfairly stereotyped. The grim reality pointed out by The Economist is that much of the poor performance of the French can be blamed squarely on how French businesses lead their organizations. 

Unlike firms in America or Germany, who attempt to cultivate leadership inside the firm, many French companies are led by people who get most of their experience from civil service or academia.  As explained in the article:

(snip)

“…too many big French companies rely on educational and governmental elites rather than promoting internally according to performance on the job. In the country’s many family firms, too, opportunity for promotion is limited for non-family members. This overall lack of upward mobility, argues Mr. Philippon, contributes largely to ordinary French cadres’ dissatisfaction with corporate life. A study of seven leading economies by TNS Sofres in 2007 showed that France is unique in that middle management as well as the lower-level workforce is largely disengaged from their companies.”

Since French workers have little if any chance to earn promotion or additional income because of this system, they just don’t try as hard.  French business laws also make it difficult to remove bad employees so you have the worst of all worlds for a business; bad management and workers with no incentive to work. 

I am not going to wag my finger shamefully at the French.  American business can be equally dysfunctional.  Still, it is clear to me that France offers a great example of what happens when credentials are given more value than experience and leadership.  The French worker deserves better than the French executive.

Until next time.

Veterans Deserve Better

A future vet from Afghanistan, I want to hire people like this.

Friday was November 11^th, 2011 came and went with little fan fair.  It is one of those quirky days on the calendar which reads 11-11-11.  For fans of the movie Spinal Tap, it became Nigel Tufnel day.  For others it was an excuse to start a three day weekend.  To me it was Veteran’s Day, which is a pretty important spot on the calendar. 

For American’s Veteran’s Day traces its history to the end of the First World War.  The armistice between the allies and central powers went into effect on the eleventh hours of the eleventh month of the eleventh day in 1918.  Troops continued to fight in the almost criminal stalemate up to the final minute.  President Wilson declared that Armistice Day would be a day of national reflection.  Congress later changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day so that veterans from all of America’s wars could be recognized. 

In the ninety three years since the end of the “War to End All Wars,” American soldiers, sailors, air men and marines have been fighting to preserve liberty and peace in places as diverse as the Chosin Reservoir in Korea to the hills of Helmand Province in Afghanistan.  Contrary to the opinion of a vocal minority, we have never acted as an empire but rather as liberators and nation builders.  American’s seem to invest a great deal of blood and treasure in other countries. 

No one pays a higher price than the men and women who do the fighting and the dying for us; veterans.  The biggest change for these young men and women is learning to make the transition from the military to civilian life.  For a person who understands how to fire a rifle and avoid roadside bombs, the daily grind of the business world could seem trivial. 

As a nation we have done a poor job helping these people find meaningful work.  According to business week, the current rate of unemployment for Veterans is 12.1% compared to 9% for the general population.  The figures are even worse for vets ages 18 to 24 who have an unemployment rate of 30.4%.  This is unacceptable.  Veterans have paid a steep price for our freedom; we owe them a chance to make a living in the civilian world. 

If you are a veteran from any of the armed forces, I want to put you to work selling my product.  I will not make promises because of our start-up nature but I think you can help us be a success.  Drop me a line at jobs@goeeethree.com.

Until next time.

Saying Good-Bye

Remembering Steve Job's in China

There are three types of businesses in the current economy.  The first are businesses which make their money providing services.  The second are businesses which make their money pushing paper.  Finally, there are businesses that make their money building things.  Apple Computers was one of those companies which made things and in the process changed technology forever. 

I suppose that is why there is such an emotional outpouring for Steve Jobs.  Steve made things and they were stylish, innovative and helpful.  He had a few duds along the way but no one will deny that his influence in the computer science field will be felt for decades to come.  I doubt that the CEO of Goldman Sachs will be remembered as fondly if at all.

This is why I wanted to start a technology company and go into business for myself.  Life is too short to be working for others and I hope to make things which people can use.  If I make a little money and provide employment for a few people along the way so much the better. 

Good-Bye Steve, you will be missed. 

I Am a Job Creator

During this political season there is going to be a lot of talk about “job-creators.”  I feel pretty strong about this subject but I do not think that this is a proper place or time to vent my feelings on the matter.  Suffice to say, my focus is on business and NOT on politics. 

I am now hiring sales people for my start up.  I am looking for some folks who want to change the world and get involved in a chance to provide small and medium sized businesses with cloud based software. Please send a resume, cover letter and contact information to jobs@goeeethree.com.  I am looking for people who can legally work in the United States who want to sell.  We will try to get back to you as soon as possible. 

Being and entrepreneur is a little crazy.  I am looking for a few more people to climb on to the crazy train with me and see if we can make a difference. 

I look forward to hearing from you.

Crazy and Not in a Good Way

Consider me the Anti-Carly.

Being a business person exposes you to lots of people.  Most are hardworking attempting to a make a living and support their families.  Others seem muddle along in a lazy haze and others are so cutthroat you would be nervous if you left children in their presence.  It just comes with the territory.  Still, it amazes me to this day how many mentally ill, damaged and just plain mean people I meet in the course of my career.  Usually they wind up as my managers or as a client.  These individuals take all the joy out of doing business.  In fits of despair, I cry to heavens and ask why. 

Business week gave me a little insight into this existential problem.   According to author Jon Ronson, many people who are business leaders fit the operational definition of psychopathy.  In fact, many corporate leaders score “alarmingly high.”  I suppose this is because many business leaders crave power and strive to be in charge; just look at Ken Lay, Al Dunlap and Carly Fiorina.  All of those individuals tended to view others as mere tools to be used, were concerned about their personal brand over what best for their organization and when the stuff hit the fan, abdicated any personal responsibility for what happened.  I encountered similar behavior in the advertising and gift card business. 

Business schools for the last ten years have been railing against this kind of behavior.  Two of my favorite books on the subject are Primal Leadership by Daniel Goelman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee and The No Asshole Rule by Robert I. Sutton.  Both books illustrate the damage to the bottom line jerks cause.  Still when I go out in the business community, I see an abundance of people who exhibit this kind of deviant behavior and consider it an acceptable way to conduct business.  Again, I ask why. 

I turn again back to the business week and they say researcher David McClelland divided workers into three groups:  those who need power, those who need to achieve and those who want to be liked.  The ones who excel at achievement and being liked wind up as customer service representatives while those who crave power get the corner office.  In the Social Darwinism of the office, those who need power often get their fix at the expense of others.  More troubling, when these individuals are held accountable for their actions by employees they have the power to hire and fire.  This is creating a feedback loop of fear and repression at the office.  It stinks and it explains why innovation takes place at startup companies which are purchased by larger corporations. 

I know I will be forced to be a jerk from time to time starting up my own business.  I will have to fire people for poor performance.  I will also have to make some difficult decisions but that does not mean that I have to become like Lay, Dunlap or Fiorina.  Being an entrepreneur is a touch crazy but I hope that it is crazy in a good way rather than the psychopathic fashion that is all too common in business.