by on

As a student getting a good pair of shoes was always a three way decision between cost vs comfort vs life of shoes. Often the comfort factor will be sacrificed to get a new pair and then the trouble starts, I will spend good enough time to adjust to the new pair. Not a single day will pass without the shoe bites bothering me, but the flip side is that I will take good care of my shoes. Whenever I pick it up to try to make any adjustments I also end up polishing the shoes. Once my feet got adjusted to the new shoes then I would stop giving a second thought about them, the last time I would have polished it was when I tried to make some adjustments to it. With less care given to it after it started fitting well, the shoe usually needed replacement well before its lifetime because of less care given to it.

The case is also similar to how people are treated professionally or personally, there is a tendency for people to devote attention to fix relationships with trouble makers and toxic people; but not give enough care to the ones who are fitting in to our sphere. There was an article from Forbes that people who stay at the same company for more than two years earn lesser than job hoppers whose performance was poor.

legs-434918_1280

Why does this happen? We are not consciously geared to this behaviour, most of the time there would be short term priorities that will kick in which will grab more of our time that needs fixing; resulting in a state where the ones that are working for us well aren’t the one getting the attention. The squeaky wheels gets the attention, the aching body part gets the balm, the biting shoe gets the polish. Eventually we will get more reactive, rely on noise and markers to effectively function which is a very expensive lifestyle instead of preempting something and making course corrections.

We should aim to keep things noise free; be it people, career or possessions. Getting things done was one book which helped in channeling the energy to find the list of things that I had in mind and keep track of them. The five step process described in the book helps to move the chaos into order. Learn to capture all that needs care, clarify if there is an action needed, organize and review the priorities periodically and do things as per your priorities. Keep it stress free, you will learn to care for your shoes even when it fits perfectly.

by on

buddha-231607_640Still at my home town some people equate being fat to prosperity. A fat person is someone who had steady access to food even at times of drought and famine, hence dying of hunger was ruled out. People ate whatever they can so that starvation does not kill them. Food revolution increased the availability of food and people started to eat well; when the life expectancy of every one improved, obesity became an issue. People were now dying because of overeating, unhealthy snacking and not maintaining a healthy life style.

The same is applicable to information, the differentiation between wise and knowledgable is not understood well. Just few decades ago in India, information was flowing slowly through government run TV channels, newspapers and books. The commute times were shorter with predictable work schedules, leaving more time for interaction with people and also enough time to read. I vividly remember the elders at home reading a novel in the evening, weekends or while standing at a long queue. There were reading desks at home where people read something and make notes.

If you summarize a book, often you will end up with a few lines which was the message from the book, but it will have a deep meaning to us if we had come up with those lines after reading and summarizing our thoughts, than those lines arriving in tweet.

french-fries-461705_1280We are right now in the era of information snacking where we are increasing our knowledge to a great deal, learned to drink it out of a firehose but not able to apply it effectively when needed. More and more people are addicted to ‘pull to refresh’ and snack on one liners, emails are annotated with TL;DRs and prefer to read a lot of tweets than read a book.

Manage the distractions before you are ruled by them.

TV was cloud-709148_1280one big distraction which was overtaken by social media, staying away from this for quality information consumption and time for family is a difficult but not an impossible thing to do. It is like going to gym toning up the body complemented by a healthy diet. Start slowly by turning off all notifications, keeping only one or two channels like telephone as an instant communication system; in other words change to a pull mode than being pushed with information. Dedicate slots for reading books, newspapers or other things which has long text, periodically clear out the social media backlog; indulge yourself once in a while but come back to a healthy routine.

book-419589_1280Why read long texts? Reading has helped me gather thoughts, play thought experiments, ability to write & articulate well; beyond that it took my mind of the constant buzz that follows a work day. Maintain a list of books to read, motivate other friends to read and share your learnings and stories. There are so many books that are rich in content and only limited time to read, sharing the book experience with others is rewarding as we get lots of information from others in a condensed but more interactive form as well as encourage us to read more and share. Stay away from information snacking, it just feeds empty knowledge. Consume information with a planned diet.

 

by on

Requirements

Release planning is largely an empirical activity. Capturing the requirements effectively is the first step. Capture the thoughts of product owner or client in a free flow, map them to user journeys and fine grain them to small requirement statements. Each of these granular requirements which can be expressed in a sentence or two will be the basic building blocks of the final product. It is popularly called as stories and getting them right is the first step of a successful release planning.

Visual triaging

sticky-note-681016_1280

Write each of the stories on to index cards or stickies, preferably colour coded based on parent features and put them up on a wall or a large table so that you can see all of them at once. This helps to see the spread of the requirements and allows to dive into deeper details for ambiguous entries.

If the ambiguity does not resolve with deep dives we quickly get the developers to do a spike (proof of concept) to validate our understanding. The proof of concepts have to be very quick but deep enough to provide us an understanding to estimate the effort involved.

Sizing

When talking about sizing, people immediately try to force fit their stories into fibonacci series or arbitrary small, medium, large. Instead we need to create a real world analogy for sizing the stories as mentioned in one of my previous posts. The last few years I have been using Scooter, Car and Bus as my sizing references for stories; and as I expected most of my sizing meetings have shrunk to less than half of what it used to be when using fibonacci or t-shirt sizes. If you have outliers which do not fit in any of the categories we temporarily park that in a trailer or ship category if very large or in bicycle if it is too small. The outliers are revisited and the stories are rewritten to see how they can be fitted into the sizing slots. The very large stories always have been unpredictable and skew the time taken for a point metrics, so we have to break them before the end of the sizing phase.

Velocity estimation

Remove the sizing details from the stories, pick developers in a round robin fashion and let them pick what can be done in five ideal days. That is there are no meetings on that day, no holidays, high availability of all machines and tools, no dependencies.  The developers each should do around 5 iterations of picking stories and the result has to be captured like below.

Developer 1

Week 1 S,S,M
Week 2 S,S,S,S
Week 3 M,M
Week 4 L
Week 5 S,L

Developer 2

Week 1 S,S,S,M
Week 2 M,S,S
Week 3 M,S,M
Week 4 L,S
Week 5 M,M

When we collect all the developers’ estimate and average out, we will be able to come up with the ratio of S,M,L like 1:2:4 , 1:3:7 or anything but not necessarily fibonacci. If we had taken fibonacci there would be too many arguments whether a story is a 2 or 3, but we avoid that argument if we let the velocity estimate give us the ratio. The ratio then becomes the points for a size, if the ratio turns out to be 1:3:7 then our S is 1, M is 3 and L is 7.

Realism infusion

It is not possible to plan for work in ideal days; there will be meetings, holidays, sick time, vacations, down times etc. We need to account for those. If the velocity estimate which we can call it as raw velocity comes out to be 10 points per week then we deduct the appropriate numbers to get a highly probable velocity. Typically this works out to be around 70% of raw velocity but it purely depends on the teams.

Prioritization

Clients will always say that they want all the features they have envisioned, but there are many stories where an app ends up where most of its user use only the 20% of it, the remaining is a long tail with very little returns to the effort involved. The product owner has to come up with the must haves for an initial set of features. There are many popular techniques used, MoSCoW prioritization method is one that is frequently used. If there are many people who will prioritize then each of them should come up with their own priorities and the chief product owner takes a call with a common denominator. The explanation is simple but most of the clients struggle to come up with a prioritized list as the illusion is every thing is a priority.

Sequencing

The stories are sequenced against a weekly timeline put up on the wall or a large table. The stories are then picked up in the order of feasibility with priority given to difficult and important stories. This step will give us lots of options on the number of parallel streams of work that can be run, what are the dependencies between stories, the order in which the features can be completed, the team ramp up and ramp down plans. The kind of mix and match we can do depends on the granularity of the stories and the amount of dependencies between them.

After the last step has gone through few rehashing we will be able to come up with an initial release plan to start with, this plan should always remain as the reference and re-planning has to happen on a monthly or fortnightly basis to keep adapting to the learnings we get as move along. Many people treat the initial release plan as a sacred rigid plan but that was just a guideline to tell us how to approach development. It is a waterfall project if the initial release plan was delivered as is.