Build Habits and Enjoy Life - 1

A day in December 2013,  my days started with I pushed my little girl going to kinder garden. She cried and I still tried to push because I definitely would be late. And in the office, I faced with many "urgent" issues. It made myself feel important. But there is NOTHING important which has been done. After coming, I read a story to my little girl in a hurry and try to come back either trying to catch-up in technical front or catch-up in people management books. It was a typical day for me in any day in 2013. But luckily, I start listening an audio book "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" (Stephen Covey) from audible.com. The book opens me new view about my life and with my knowledge lean Kanban, I started a journey of changing myself from January 2014.

With identify my missions, quantify my goals and measuring my progress towards goals, my life has changed a lot.

In past 7 months, I have lost 16 kg and much healthier than before. Now my day starts with waiting for my girls prepares herself for kinder garden. My job doesn't full of "urgent" things. I starts to focus more value generation instead of just solving problems. And I have more free time to improve myself and start dedicating one of weekend to my family. And I am starting to find out my dream and starting build a startup for that.










I want to share my experience with you.

Build Your Mission

The missions has guided my activity in past 8 months. The biggest benefits that I get from these is that I can prioritize things in my life very easily with these. I personally compared the ordered books from me in Amazon.com. This year's books are all about two topics. But last years, it is around five topics. Although I dont read as many books as last year, I did feel that my skills around two topics have become much better comparing with last year. In the job, I personally tried to involved less in the activities that I don't have in my mission statement. With that, I can focus on the things that I have more interest on.

And in summary, I have focus things more important for my long term goals.

With guidance from the book, I personally classified my missions into 4 parts. They are:

• Career Development and Path
• Family and its value
• Community (People around you and what is your value to community)
• Healthy and other long term goals

All of them are important to my personal growth and feelings. 

There is the tool at Franklin Covey website, http://www.franklincovey.com/msb/, which help me a lot on building my personal mission and my family mission. 

If you have any question, feel free to let me know. In the following sessions, I will share about my experience in the following topics:

• How to create quantified annual goals from your missions
• Create first milestones for you goals and how to create feedback loop
• Time management with prioritization and Kanban
• Try different solutions but keep focus
• Dont forget about celeberation

A culture of technical excellence and good design - a start post

Do you have any idea how to make technical excellence and good design happen in your business? I plan to write a blog this. Please comment below. I plan to finish it by three week with three focus 1. what is technical excellence and good design 2. What are benefits it will bring although it looks like it gona cost a lot 3. How to encourage technical excellence and good design when everything is about survive and money Please comment with your answer so that I can learn from you guys

Agility for Big Data

My LAST Conference Presentation

Agility for big data from Charlie Cheng

Three Maturity Levels for Software Delivey

I believe that there are three maturity for software delivery.

Level One is delivering software as specification;

Level Two is delivering solution to solve business problem;

Level Three is  delivering solution to deliver customer value;

To be agile, you need to be at level 3

Agile, SCRUM and Lean Overview Slide

Transition in Agile Project Life Cycle

After some reading of "Lean  Startup" and "Scaled Agile Framework", I start to think about to add "Transition" as part of project life cycle into our projects. The problems that we have been experiencing are:

• There is no feedback after projects delivered into production environment
• Lots of team members treating deploying into production as end of life cycle
• We have lots of features deployed into some of server for early access purpose, but there is no feedback loop into development team
• Difference between business values expected to delivered and business values gained, no learning gain from that

From 2 months ago, I have setup portfolio board which outline projects and BAU items in project as a business and start to have in-transition as part of process. What is most important factor we are looking for

• Mindset that project is only finished when stakeholders/customers gain values from it
• Build learning culture across business about what we have failed and been succeeded 
• Extend learning culture from Engineering team to other business departments
• Early access program which bring a safe-net to delivery team 
• Help support team and operation team preparing for production 

We are still working towards a better transition period. But most of feedback is positive and we will continue and make it better. There are few things that we have done along the way with feedback

• Build rhythm for projects in transition too like setting up catchup every week
• Setup specific page or websites as communicate tools between customers and business when projects in transition stage
• Dedicated communication channels while projects are in transition to make sure problems solved as soon as possible so that business values can be delivered
• Stories discovered in transition stage is always treated as highest priority

Please note transition is different from "harden" sprint in many ways. And if you are working towards continuous delivery, you should not have "harden" sprint at all.  At the transition stage, solution is delivered what it designed to do. But it may not fulfill customers' expectation fully or the solutions is deployed to test hypothesis. From transition, we need to learn something and business will grow with the stuff learn from it. 

Stakeholders and Business People in Your Project/Product Delivery

It has been amazing Agile journey since 2006 when I applied some general agile practice in my own business. And I have seen lots of advantage when business is small and innovative. And it fits with my personal believe that team output can be gain while empowering people. I had been working as owner, project manager and architecture designer at that time. It all works so perfectly because I always brought lead developer with me to talk with customer. As its nature of business, it is easy to get business people and client together with developers. 

But recent experience with SCRUM has given me headache. Product owner has been go-to person for questions related to business. Product owner decision is representative of both clients and business needs. Communication lost cost is high. And my experience has been that product owner acts as middle man in the case they are accountable for product delivered. I personally believe bring stakeholders including customers into table is one of the solution when product owner has decide priority and core requirement. 

What I am doing at the moment? There are few things: 

1. Identify stakeholders from internal and external in project vision statement
2. Bring stakeholders in grooming sessions to help developers understanding what customer needs
3. Product can decide whether it is in scope or not if developer think some changes may requires huge amount of work

I have been pushing vision statement and identify stakeholders for projects. It has bring lots of value into business in which we don't such doc before. And I haven't try 2,3 yet. And planning to do soon. 

If you have some way to involve stakeholders in discussion both before development and after development, please send me or leave as comment