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Unlearn What You Have Learned

Ten Habits You Must Break To Be Successful with Scrum

In the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back when Luke Skywalker tries unsuccessfully to rescue his X-wing fighter from the swamp and gives up, Jedi Master Yoda has these words of wisdom for him:

Do or Do not, there is no try! You must unlearn what you have learned!

Scrum is no different! It is a new approach to building and delivering Products and Services. It is an approach that is relentless in creating VALUE for customers. In Scrum, you go to your Customers with a Product Increment, often and with regular frequency.

At the core of it, Scrum requires mental shift! The successful adoption starts with us unlearning the old habits and approaching with new, fresh eyes! You have to be willing to step out of the box, step out of your comfort zone, and be willing to try and form new habits.

Here are ten habits that I believe we must unlearn to be successful at adopting scrum:

  1. Create email trailsunlearn what you have learned - make the shift - makeTheShift
  2. Use Command and Control
  3. Create disciplines and silos
  4. Be a Hero
  5. Sign off on a detailed requirements document
  6. Stick to the iron triangle
  7. Be plan driven
  8. Be IT driven
  9. Have a big bang delivery
  10. Tell teams “How,” not “What”

Remember, these are the ‘bad’ behaviors, bad habits that we must break! We must unlearn what we have learned over the years, flush them out, and start on Scrum journey with a fresh approach!

[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@beyondCSM”  remove_hidden_urls=”true”]Succeed at #scrum? Step out of comfort zone & unlearn what we have learned! #makeTheShift[/tweetthis]

The original article that I wrote and is published by Scrum Alliance can be accessed here

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Crazy Idea: Add more Memory than Apple recommends for your Mac ?!

Thinking of adding RAM to your sluggish Apple Macbook Pro?

I have a mid-2012 Macbook with 4Gb of RAM (2x2Gb). I have had it for a while and have been extremely satisfied with it, until recently.

MacBook with Spinning Wheel

Seeing the dreaded ‘Spinning Rainbow Wheel’ more often since some of the recent updates. Now, I don’t know if the slowness was due to the updates or other apps that I might have loaded since I bought it. The RAM upgrade was overdue for this Mac anyways. So, I started looking into it figuring I might be able to get some good deals on it during this festive holiday season.

Revelation

I looked at Apple website, and it recommended maximum up to 8Gb RAM for this Macbook. I was looking for more horsepower than what they were recommending. So, I started looking at other options and ran into Crucial’s System Scanner tool that can ‘review’ your configuration and recommend the right kind of memory for your Mac.

Running that utility on my Mac, it revealed that I can add onto 16 Gb (2x8Gb) on my machine. I was baffled! Apple, the manufacturer of the machine suggests unto 8Gb only. What’s going on here, I said 😃

Crucial RAM Memory recommendation for mid-2012 Apple MacBook Pro

I digged little deeper and had separate conversations with both the vendors: Apple and Crucial. Apple rep ‘un-officially’ confirmed that the 16Gb would work on my machine. Plus, he also made a comment that I was getting a very good deal on the memory when I mentioned the price tag from Crucial.

Taking the Plunge

On the other end, Crucial guaranteed that 16Gb will work as they had already done tests on similar machines. Crucial also offers 45-day return policy with no restocking fee! Armed with that information, I decided to take the plunge!

The Flying Machine

The memory showed up in my mailbox within two days, and I did not have to pay for shipping either. [Thanks Crucial, it was an awesome experience buying this item from you] With the new memory, I took my Mac on the operation table, not knowing what to expect. My son assured me that it is easy to replace memory, and volunteered himself to play the ‘doctor’. Within 10 minutes he declared victory!  The new memory was installed and was working! [Check out this video on how easy it is to install it. Here is another similar video.]

He had installed the new memory in a jiffy! My Mac recognized the 16Gb RAM, and with that much horsepower, it is a flying machine now!

Yes, folks, your Mac can accept more memory, more than what Apple recommends!  You don’t have to live with the beautiful but annoying Rainbow Wheel!

Apple Mac Configuration-16Gb RAM

Go ahead and put some juice on your Mac!

[bctt tweet=”Crazy Idea: Add more Memory than Apple recommends for your Mac ?!”]

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Who else wants to shrink their Time to Market?

Use Agile - the 'shrinking' Agent!

Time to market refers to the time it takes for an organization to take a raw Idea, build the product or service and take it to market. We all want to shrink ‘Time to Market’, and Agile can be a big ‘shrinking’ agent.

Reduce Time to Market by focusing on Concept to Cash - illustration by Nimesh Soni

Use Agile and shrink your Time to Market
illustration by Nimesh Soni

The illustration above shows this ‘Concept to Cash cycle’ in Agile landscape. Let’s visit each one in little more details.

  1. Idea

    Everything starts with an idea!  It could be an idea for a new product/service offering, or it could be a new market opportunity that you want to pursue, or it could be that you want to fix all the ‘holes’ in your existing product in order to gain better market share. Bottom line is that it all starts with a seed that we call Idea!

  2. Visioning

    Remember, you are not alone working on this idea! You will have teams working on this idea to drive it towards (becoming) a reality. You should be able to convey your vision about the product/service. We use this special format to describe your vision.

  3. Story mapping/brainstorming

    Now, armed with your Vision statement, you can start pulling all the right parties, the stakeholders into a conversation. You can lead a brainstorming session to uncover, unearth the work that needs to be completed in order to make this vision a reality. Don’t overwhelm yourself with a lot of details. Key here is to stay at 50K ft and capture high level (slices of) work that would need to be completed (don’t worry about how, when, who does it. For now, the focus is on WHAT.

  4. Roadmap

    Now that we know what work needs to be completed (based on the Story mapping exercise), we can start putting them together on a roadmap that will help us make the product a reality. At this point, we want to focus on next 6 to 12 months, and create a product roadmap; what features would be built, and when we would like to release them to the market. As we do this, stay focused on creating value with each product increment that we push to market.

  5. Release Plan

    With the roadmap in place, we can start pulling in all the teams that would be working on them. Complete some dependency analysis, identify all the teams, and get them into release planning session. Here, we are focusing on next two to three months, and what product increment we can work on and get it out to market. All the teams can discuss these features and functionalities, what it will take (effort) for them to make it a reality, what are the dependencies, and how they may impact the “Push to Production” effort. At the end of this session, these teams come out with an intended plan of HOW they will build this product increment.

  6. Sprints / Iterations

    Based on the intended plan that came out of the release planning session, teams go into individual sprints, get into more details as to what tasks need to be completed. Here, we focus on next two to three weeks at a time.

The key to success here is not to get hung up on getting the product to be ‘perfect’ before you go to market. WE focus on creating a version, an increment of the (ideal) product and push it to market; identify the minimum viable product (MVP) with which we can go to market. And, then repeat this cycle on a smaller feature sets, smaller increment of the product (that builds on the increment that we released to market earlier).
 
[tweetthis hidden_urls=”pic.twitter.com/0CPiBFi5Mb”]Identify appropriate MVP & shrink your Time to Market!  #Agile[/tweetthis]
 
How long is your Idea to Market cycle? How long does it take for your organization to take an idea to market?
 

Republished with updates. Original post was published on April 2014.

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#agileReleasePlanning wall

Each column represents a Sprint in the release cycle. Each row represents a team that will be participating in this release planning exercise.

Agile Release Planning Wall

 

Based on the history, makeup of the teams, and what is needed for the functionality, the Chief Product Owner (CPO) may decide to pre-assign some of the work slices (open for discussion and negotiations with the team later on).

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Agile Data Warehouse series: What it is? – the workflow

 

In my previous post, I announced my intention of writing a series of posts talking about my recent experience with data warehouse build out in an agile transformation of EDS for a Fortune 100 company. Let’s continue our discussion on this interesting topic. 
So, what exactly it is? What do I mean by agile data warehouse build out? 
 
First of all, let’s talk about Data Warehouse in general. A data warehouse initiative typically involves building out data structures in the enterprise data model, pulling data from multiple sources, doing some (data) transformation, and then ‘parking’ them into the target data structure. Sounds about right? 
 
At a high level, at least, this is the work flow for a data warehouse build out. To get to next level of details, your data warehouse builds out includes:
  • Identifying the data elements and sources for that data
  • Coming up with logical data model that will support the business’s analytical needs
  • Often, getting this logical model; or as technical teams would say LDM (Logical data model) approved through some governance body in the organization
  • Getting the physical data structures, PDM (Physical data model) created
  • Extracting and transforming data from various sources to load into the physical data structures

To summarize, a typical data warehouse build out contains following workflow (of events):

Typical workflow for a Data Warehouse build out
Typical workflow for a Data Warehouse build out
[Please note that we will be modifying this as we discuss the topic further]
 

Now, let’s talk about Agile data warehouse (ADW).  By ADW, I mean:

  • We build the data warehouse in increments
  • Delivering Potential shippable increment (PSI) of the data warehouse at a regular frequency [and not have customers waiting to get the data warehouse as one big-bang delivery]
  • Involving customers through the build process 
  • Understanding customers, and their needs – what are the business reasons for them to request this data warehouse
  • Focus on creating customer value incrementally, and not the technologies or the implementation of it. Shift your focus from technology (and data elements, data structures, primary key, foreign key, etc.) to customers needs. 

Often times data folks are so focused on their tables and primary keys that they start driving the build out from that vantage point only 🙁

Let the customers’ need be your guiding beacon! 
 
[Next post: Know thy customer!]