Goshido

Project Collaboration Overview & 7 Great Books : Siemens Talk

Posted on 12. Mar, 2013 by ger in Agile, Events, Guides, Leadership, New Ways to Work, blog

Last night in Dublin I spoke to a group leaders from Siemens at an event coordinated by WDHB.

The key points of my talk were:

• Existing tools still don’t solve the problems of communication within large organizations
• Businesses need a flexible system that can scale from gigantic to many small-informal projects
• Culture is even more important than tools. Agile ways of working & leading with short iterations and empowered teams are crucial.

I recommended a number of books that explore the last point:

• Radical Management: Stephen Denning
• Succeeding with Agile: Mike Cohn
• The Future of Management: Gary Hamel
• Management 3.0: Jurgen Appelo
• Getting Things Done: David Allen
• The Way We’re Working isn’t Working: Tony Schwartz
• What Were They Thinking?: Jeffrey Pfeffer

Other speakers at the event were Marie Wallace of IBM and Polly Sumner of Salesforce. Polly recommended a really interesting followup action at end of her talk. She suggested everyone in the room try to buy or get customer support for their own product.

By coincidence I read the following quote in the Siemens “Pictures of the Future” magazine this morning.

“Modern information and communication media promote a short attention span and a superficial understanding of the world.” — David Gelernter.

By another coincidence I read this in the Chess Media newsletter this morning.

“Communication barriers cost large companies an average of $26,000 per employee per year due to productivity losses.” — Jacob Morgan

Learn more

Try Goshido, our collaboration & project management platform. Goshido is so flexible it can be used for project collaboration in any kind of business: product development, energy, healthcare & consulting.

You can download my slides.

Dispelling common misconceptions in Lean, Kanban and Scrum

Posted on 17. Nov, 2012 by ger in Agile, New Ways to Work, Scrum

Happiness Door Scrum Training Dublin

They say teaching is the best way to learn something. Recently, I delivered a Scrum training course for a multinational company in Dublin. Afterwards I did some reading to followup on some of the questions that came up. This reading lead me to some interesting new thinking on Scrum, Lean, Agile and even running training courses. It looks like many people have common misconceptions about how Kanban and Scrum fit together.

Some background

Scrum is one of the agile project management techniques that can make your team far more productive. Most of the time I’m CTO of Goshido (cloud software for project communication). Goshido is inspired in part by some of the concepts in Scrum. Some of our customers ask for training in agile project management and Scrum in particular. Our Scrum training is unique because I am still a practicing software developer and project manager, not a Scrum-trainer who delivers training every week.

Lean is a process improvement discipline that software development and startup companies.

Kanban is one of the Lean tools, originally a card or a box used in manufacturing to signal depletion of product, parts, or inventory. It is a way to “pull” work through a system.

Overlapping phases & organizing by project

The company I was training has structured the organization based on roles and skills rather than projects. The analysts are in one team, the UX people another, the developers and testers yet another, and operations another. During the project there’s a handover from one team to another. One of the principles of Scrum is to organize teams around the work that needs to be done for a customer, to mix the disciplines together with overlapping phases. Dustin Curtis tells a great story about the magic of Penn and Teller to illustrate the point that:

Assembly lines work fantastically well for raw assembly, but they suck the life out of creative people.

Getting feedback during training

During each training day I asked people to provide anonymous feedback both half way through and at the end of the day. I applied Jurgen Appelo’s happiness door technique. I got great feedback from the attendees and was able to make adjustments both during the day and for subsequent days to make the training more relevant and valuable to the people attending.

Kaizen, retrospectives and continuous improvement

One of the technical leads was concerned about the business focus of the product backlog. How would he get technical tasks like a transition to github into the backlog? He knew this would boost the productivity of the software team but what if the product owner didn’t feel the same way?

Conversely, I’ve seen situations in other companies where technical leads have refactored parts of a system without concern for the business priorities. This in turn lead to a surprise then an overreaction by senior management who as a consequence put unnecessary controls in place to enforce visibility.

In my experience, Scrum retrospectives pay big dividends at the end of each sprint but it’s easy to let them slide. In the post “Getting Lean with Scrum”, Christine Hegarty describes how you can add a simple process to retrospectives.

She suggests capturing a single kaizen in each retrospective to be added to the next Sprint backlog as a task. I think it’s a great idea, and could balance the needs of continuous improvement and business priorities while making retrospectives more actionable.

Misconceptions about Lean and Kanban

While reading Christine’s post I also spotted a guest post by Jim Coplien describing Kanban, Lean and Scrum. I remember Jim from the early days of the software patterns movement. He wrote a pattern language for software organizations. Jim is a co-author of the recent book Lean Software Architecture. In the blog post, he clarifies some of the many misconceptions of Kanban and it’s goals.

The challenge is to develop a learning organization that will find ways to reduce the number of kanban and thereby reduce and finally eliminate the inventory buffer. Remember: the kanban is an organized system of inventory buffers and, according to Ohno, inventory is waste…

He’s also concerned it’s been missappropriated in software development.

Kanban applies to repetitive work — building the same item again and again… Not everything can be replenished based on a pull system; some things must be scheduled… That is what software is like: We rarely build the same thing again and again.

The ideal Scrum team “does a little analysis, a little design, a little building, and a little testing all at once in very short cycles”. While Kanban can be a good fit for teams that view work as firefighting…

A good Scrum team automatically enjoys the provisions of kanban when practicing one-piece continuous flow. It is a built-in way to limit work in progress while encouraging teamwork. It gives team members time-boxed autonomy to carry out their plans while enabling them to better meet their planned forecast. Such maturity may be a foundation for later addition of techniques like kanban…

Learn more

Try Goshido, our collaboration & project management platform. Goshido is so flexible it can be used for Scrum, Lean and projects with traditional work-breakdown plans. Some of our customers do all three together. They map out a long term plan using Gannt charts then each team runs sub-projects as Scrum-Sprints.

Guided Collaboration

Posted on 10. Oct, 2012 by tom in New Ways to Work, blog

At Goshido, we like to talk about “guided collaboration.”  Why?  Because work is dynamic.  A revelation, I know!  But I think it’s time to reiterate first principles.  Namely, the nature of work has changed, and so must our tools if we’re going to keep up.

Whether it’s Steve Denning writing about self-organizing teams in “The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management” or Charles Pierce writing about “The Limits of Control” in professional sports, you don’t have to look far to see examples of command-and-control failures.  Does your work ever fit together like this:

command and control

Of course not.  So why even try to structure your work in this manner?  Projects as formal entities can be invaluable, and structure is not just a necessary evil.  But hierarchies don’t adapt or evolve.  They’re static, they’re brittle, and sooner or later they break.

Many projects look more like this:

collaboration without coordination

You know the starting point, and you know the desired endpoint.  What you can’t predict is how you’ll get from start to finish.  Knowledge work projects evolve.  You can’t eliminate complexity, but you can manage it if you get the right variables — who, what, and when — together in one place.

This concept is top of mind for me these days as a great TED talk by Clay Shirky on open-source government is receiving much well-deserved attention.  What caught my eye, from a project management perspective, was his discussion of version control systems.  Feudalism vs. open-source.

We’re not trying to eradicate feudalism here at Goshido, but we are trying to help make work better.  This matters to us.  Let us know how we’re helping you or your team be more effective or what we can do better.

Try Goshido, our collaboration & project management platform. Goshido is so flexible it can be used for projects in any part of your organization.

Goshido and Jive Turn Project Collaboration into Action with !APP Experiences

Posted on 14. May, 2012 by tom in New Ways to Work, Product

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. and LIMERICK, Ireland, May 2, 2012 — Goshido and Jive Software Inc., the industry’s largest pure-play social business provider, just made business collaboration even easier.  Earlier today, Jive launched its Jive !App Experiences, a breakthrough capability that seamlessly integrates business applications into the Social Business workflow.  Goshido’s new task and project management !App allows Jive users to turn team collaboration into productive action.  It’s the ultimate project execution tool—scalable, flexible and easy to use.  The app is available now via Jive Cloud.

“Goshido is an elegant social solution that boosts productivity,” said Jive Apps Market VP, Robin Bordoli.  “It can effortlessly handle large or small projects within or across teams, functional areas or entire organizations.  Few collaborative tools enable such rich flexibility.  It’s a natural fit to illustrate the power of the new Jive !App Experiences.”

“For us, making business more agile is just the start,” said Goshido CEO Tom Brennan.  “It’s action and results that really count.  That imperative holds true for individuals and their daily to-do lists, and large groups driving complex multi-year projects.  And that’s the promise of the new !App capability.  Now, users can create and insert Goshido actions right into their Jive documents and discussions.  Then, right from within Jive, activities and projects can be coordinated, managed and implemented in Goshido.”

Built for today’s knowledge worker, Goshido is changing how people work together.  While conventional project management solutions are focused on ‘management,’ Goshido helps individual employees to ‘accomplish.’  This ‘action’ overlay is Goshido’s essential differentiator.  It’s what’s valued most by Goshido users.

With the Jive !App integration, Goshido users can:

• Create actions from within content in Jive, and quickly and easily create actions that can stand alone or be part of a much bigger project.
• Work with actions right within their Jive What Matters stream.
• Launch Goshido from a Jive Action Menu, and get right to work.

Please try Goshido, our collaboration & project management platform.  Everyone is a project manager these days.  Goshido is the best way to run any project.

The Business Value in Becoming an Agile Enterprise

Posted on 29. Feb, 2012 by ger in Leadership, New Ways to Work

In the last few weeks I’ve been asked the same two questions a number of times:

• Does this agile stuff really make a difference in financial terms?
• We don’t do software development, does agile really apply to us?

In this post, I’ll answer these questions (the short answers are yes and yes). I’ll tell you three short stories. Two stories quantify the benefits of agile. The final story is about a team who uses agile to run marketing campaigns.

What’s in it for us?

Michael Mah in “How Agile Projects Measure Up, and What This Means to You” analyzes two software projects. He compares their performance to projects of similar sizes from a large project-performance database. The projects measured lower costs, shorter time-to-market, and increased quality.

Follett Software used a technique called eXtreme Programming and achieved:

• Dramatically lower costs ($2.2m versus an average of $3.5m for similar sized products)
• Shorter time-to-market (7.8 months versus an average of 12.6 months)
• Less defects (121 versus 242)

BMC Software used Distributed Scrum. They added more staff (92 versus 40 average) to optimize time-to-market. They achieved:

• Dramatically shorter time-to-market (6.3 months versus an average of 15 months)
• Slightly lower costs ($5.2m versus an average of $5.5m for similar sized products). The extra cost of staff was offset by much shorter project duration.
• Slightly less defects (635 versus 713)

These are just two specific examples. David Rico completed a much larger meta-study looking at a large number of projects (which referenced a paper published in the EJIS that I co-authored with Brian Fitzgerald and Kieran Conboy).

Agile beyond software development: a retail marketing campaign

One of our customers decided to apply agile on retail marketing campaigns across 13 European countries.

Before agile they organized everything quarterly. Every quarter their campaigns had a number of open issues that spilled over and took time to resolve the following quarter. The backlog of open issues was ever increasing and pressure was mounting every quarter.

When they applied agile they split the teams into smaller units of 5 people or less. They ran projects in shorter iterations (monthly sprints instead of three month iterations). They observed a number of key benefits:

• Very few issues spilled over from one quarter to the next
• They were able to eliminate the historical backlog
• Team morale improved dramatically

Again this is one specific example. Stephen Denning has written an excellent book “The Leaders Guide to Radical Management” about applying agile principles to management in all kinds of businesses.

Learn more

If you’re a time-pressed business person, read Israel Gat’s short book “The Concise Executive Guide to Agile”. He gives a good overview of agile that focuses on the numbers and how to introduce agile in your enterprise.

If you’re based in the UK, “The Agile Leader” is a team of consultants and coaches who deliver Agile transformation to organisations.

Try Goshido, our collaboration & project management platform. Goshido is so flexible it can be used for projects in any part of your organization.

Photo Credit

whoalse by Allen

Five principles to improve productivity, reduce churn & increase profits

Posted on 18. Nov, 2011 by ger in Leadership, New Ways to Work

Five books describing a new approach to business

There’s a revolution happening in the way businesses are being run. This post will distill five key principles of this transition from five “new approach” business books. These principles will help you increase productivity, reduce staff turnover and increase profits.

Many books and blog posts have been written about this new approach to business. Many present case studies from companies like Apple, Best Buy, Enterprise, Semco, Salesforce, and WL Gore. The Whole Foods Market story is profiled in Gary Hamel’s “The Future of Management”.

The Whole Foods Story

Whole Foods Market is made up of many empowered teams. Each team:

• Has autonomy and is in essence a small business inside the store
• Has freedom but is held accountable
• Transparently publishes their performance (profit/hour)
• Can veto new hires
• Can decide what to stock

Each store is benchmarked 10 times a year. The pressure to perform comes from peers not managers. This non-hierarchical structure means decision making is distributed and small problems don’t fester before being noticed and addressed.

While this might sound new-age and chaotic, Whole Foods Market is the most profitable food retailer in the US (per sq foot). Whole Foods Market rallies around a clear purpose. “We want to improve the health and well-being of everyone on the planet through higher quality foods and better nutrition. We can’t fulfill this mission unless we are highly profitable.”

Other Success Stories

Other companies have made similar radical transitions and seen performance improvements:

• Salesforce switched their product development to agile and increased productivity by 38% and doubled their revenues over a two year period
• WL Gore has $2B in revenues and has been run as an innovation democracy for 40 years
• Best Buy started a “results only work environment” and increased productivity by 41% and reduced staff turnover costs by 90%
• Thogus Products a small manufacturing company increased output 67%

These revolutionary techniques come labelled in many ways: radical management, future management, agile businesses and protean organizations. Whichever label you choose, companies that use these techniques are surviving and prospering. Companies who stick to the old techniques of cost cutting, salary reductions and layoffs lose productivity, customers and frequently enter a downward spiral from which recovery is extremely difficult.

The key principles

Empowered teams of engaged individuals

Scott Page studied groups solving complex problems and found a cognitively diverse group of people outperforms a group of like minded experts. Teams which are given autonomy and control perform better. When people at the grassroots of the organization have a clear line of sight to customers they can see how they are contributing to the organizations goals.

Delivering true customer value

Unhappy clients can damage a brand. People with a line of sight to the customer feel more motivated. The meaning of their work is not the toy they’re assembling or the profit the company will make, but the delight on the face of a child. Companies like Enterprise have used net promotor scores to delight customers and turnaround their business. In contrast, David Carroll’s YouTube video “United breaks Guitars” has been watched over 11 million times (at the time of writing).

Using short iterations value adaptability over predictability

Projects with long timelines and complex Gantt charts repeatedly miss budgets and deadlines. The iterative approach was used to great success on Polaris submarine program in the 1950’s and 1960’s. By reducing the amount of work in progress and breaking large projects down into four weeks long or smaller iterations, teams can become far more effective.

Information radiators

Lack of management transparency has resulted in a number of disasters. Problems are brushed under the carpets. Well-meaning questioning is rooted out as dissent. When teams create dashboards to show progress there’s no need for status reports. Anyone can see information about the project. The best performing organizations have universal accountability.

Introspection and action

It’s hard to imagine how stopping a production line for a defect could be a good idea, but it is. The team must first recognize reality and the issues that exist but that’s less than half the battle. Taking remedial action is usually the hard part. Changing people’s behavior to fix systemic issues is even harder.

“Implementing continuous self-improvement requires a fundamentally different kind of mind-set from traditional management. It involves creating an environment in which the organization draws on the full talents and capacities of the people who work there… It’s about powering up the internal energy of teams so that they transcend their limitations and create products or services that generate client delight.” – Stephen Denning

The time to act is now

Maybe you’re thinking “yes this is important, we’ll do something about it soon.” Maybe you’re too busy. If your business is not improving it’s standing still. Companies who delay will: miss opportunities, lose customers, and be outmaneuvered by nimble competitors.

Learn more

Thank you for reading. We hope you found something useful. Please try Goshido, our collaboration & project management platform. Goshido can help you and your teams to apply new business principles to improve productivity.

If your company is an Enterprise Ireland client you can avail of training and support to introduce Lean and Agile techniques to your business.

Some books we recommend

Here are links and summaries to some great books on the “new approach” to business.

Stephen Denning’s book The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management applies agile techniques to the organization as a whole, not just a single team or the product development group. Denning translates Agile and Scrum from software development into general business terms.

The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working by Tony Schwartz, Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy creates a road map for a new way of working. At the individual level, they explain how we can build specific rituals into our daily schedules. At the organizational level, they outline new policies and practices that energize great performance.

In Succeeding with Agile, Mike Cohn describes success factors in applying an agile technique called Scrum in your organisation. It is mainly written from a software development perspective but there’s some valuable suggestions on team dynamics and the need for enlightened leadership. Chapters 10 and 12 describe the mind shift needed to become a “servant leader” of self-organizing teams.

Gary Hamel in The Future of Management makes the case that management innovation fuels long-term business success. He profiles a number of companies who have successfully reinvented management for their organizations.

In What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management, Jeffrey Pfeffer describes conventional business wisdom and the problems it can cause. He focuses on three common themes: understanding feedback effects, self-managing teams, and avoiding overcomplication.

Slides from Agile Tour 2011 – Principles of Scrum

Posted on 07. Nov, 2011 by ger in Events, New Ways to Work

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at AgileTour Dublin 2011. AgileTour aims to communicate the benefits of Agile for businesses and create leaders in Agile in all regions of the world.

I spoke about getting started and improving your organization using Scrum. You can get my slides from our website.

Other speakers included Colm O’hEocha from AgileInnovation, Fran O’Hara from Inspire Quality Services, Robert McGarry from Ignition Team, Richard Bowden from Cloud Consulting, and Alan Spencer from D&B. You’ll find details of the other talks on the Agile Tour website. Alan was speaking at the same time as me, so I missed his talk. From his slides it looks like he was discussing the benefits of Agile for business in general, a subject that’s close to our hearts too.

Thank you for reading

We hope you found something useful. Please try Goshido, our collaboration & project management platform. Goshido applies new principles for how work can be organized; the perfect blend of Agile, Lean, Productivity and Attention Management.

JiveWorld Recap: Social Project Management is Here to Stay

Posted on 14. Oct, 2011 by tom in Events, New Ways to Work

At JiveWorld 2011 we learned some key insights into how the world of work is being transformed by technology. We also demonstrated the integrated Goshido Jive application which combines the best of both products. Among the audience I could sense a tangible belief that we are at the cusp of one of the most important technology & management transitions ever seen. The companies who make this transition will be more agile and successful than the ones who don’t.

Jim Worth has put together a wiki summarizing many aspects of JiveWorld. Jive will be making videos & presentations available in the near future. In this post we’ll focus on the key takeaways from the Goshido point of view:

• The people are the platform:

  This was the message of Wednesday’s keynote, and we couldn’t agree more. Even in the most regimented businesses, people are still THE competitive differentiator. Jive really is about engagement, sharing and discovery. Goshido is about action. One plus one, in this case, can lead to a very significant sum.

• Jive’s customers are committed:

  Everyone we spoke with was committed to improving the way work gets done in their businesses. This might mean changing process, or culture.

• It’s not either/or:

  We were wondering if companies were using Jive for internal or external social business processes. It turns out that there were a wide mix of use cases, befitting the mix of industries and functional groups represented. Sometimes internal collaboration is the goal, sometimes customer facing opportunities are being addressed. In some cases companies are doing both. For example, Patrick Darling of Intel described how they built Intel Newsroom, a super-successful community-based news hub. Newsroom makes Intel’s PR faster to deliver, more social and easier to search.

• Adoption is still a challenge:

  For both project management and social business solutions, the key is adoption. The not-so-good news is that there is still resistance to change. The really good news is that there is plenty of momentum and lots of room for improvement.

• The new system of record:

  The alphabet soup of traditional business software extends from ERP to CRM. Jive Software is more people centric. Jive has re-imagined business communication from the ground-up to help you unlock business value in the social capital of your enterprise. Jive can become the new “system of record”, business software that’s as easy to use as consumer web applications. We believe Goshido can extend Jive to become the “system of action” for your organization.

• ROI is top of mind:

  Many Jive customers reported significant returns on their investment in social business technology. This is a transition that has quantifiable benefits. For example, Dianne Kibbey spoke about how Premier Farnell created a thriving community for electronic design engineers.

• Innovations and customer centric-engineering:

  In the Thursday keynote, Jive demonstrated some of the coming innovations in the platform. In a nice touch, the product development team stood up and gave a round of applause to the many customers in the room. It turns out the whole team had flown in the night before and spent the following day talking to customers at presentations, lunch and demos.

Thank you for reading

We hope you found something useful in this post. Please try our product Goshido, the project collaboration & management solution designed for the people who do the work. Teams all over the world are using Goshido to get work done. When everyone on your team is focused on the things that matter, work flows and you can accomplish the extraordinary.

Goshido + Jive: Making Project Management Social

Posted on 05. Oct, 2011 by tom in Events, New Ways to Work, Product, blog

There’s a revolution happening in the way businesses are being organized. Traditional command-and-control hierarchies are evolving into an emergent-and-adaptive network of people working across organizational boundaries. The best performing organizations have universal accountability. Goshido helps organizations be more agile and naturally accountable.

This week we’re at JiveWorld where we’re showing our latest integration, which connects Goshido with the Jive Software platform. This integrated offering will soon be available in the Jive Apps Market, and we’re convinced that it will help advance our goal of transforming how knowledge workers engage and collaborate.

A great idea in a Jive discussion could become a complex project for an entire team, executed in Goshido. Knowledge work projects don’t always follow pre-programmed roadmaps, but most project management solutions are designed as if they do. With Goshido, anyone can connect actions together into projects that can evolve and grow.

Goshido is project management for people who are doing the work. Unlike traditional project management solutions, Goshido scales to handle complex projects while remaining easy to use. Most project management solutions focus on planning. Goshido helps you focus on execution.

The nature of work has changed. Goshido helps you keep pace with that change. Our software helps teams to execute projects – to keep all the moving parts moving. Hundreds of teams all over the world are using Goshido to get work done. When everyone on your team is focused on the things that matter, work flows and you can accomplish the extraordinary.

Thank you for reading

We hope you found something useful. Please try Goshido, our collaboration & project management platform. Goshido can help you and your teams to take action in the absence of orders and communicate with clarity.

Project Collaboration Roundup: structured fighting, project timebombs, productivity guidelines & Enterprise 2.0

Posted on 23. Sep, 2011 by tom in Guides, New Ways to Work, Roundup, blog

We know that it’s hard to stay on top of all of your activities. That said, it’s rare that we think of our projects as ticking time bombs. This week we have some useful rules and advice about productivity, and lots of good thinking on collaboration and new ways of working socially.

John Morehouse by KrissZPhotography

Clay Shirky on collaboration: structured fighting

In a story by Joe Brockmeier posted on ReadWriteWeb, a talk by the always thought-provoking Clay Shirky hits on some important points, and an interesting metaphor. As we like to preach here at Goshido, large projects are really made up of lots of small projects, and lots of actions.

Are your projects out of control?

First, the bad news. According to a study conducted by Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, BT Professor and Founding Chair of Major Programme Management at the University of Oxford one in six projects are “out of control.” Late, over budget, and out of control is no way to go through life. When I saw the phrase “ticking time bomb,” I certainly took notice.

Perhaps some rules for productivity would help?

A presentation from Dan at Lostgarden covers eight common workplace topics and how you should approach them. It’s important to remember that productivity is more than just more units produced per unit worked, and the pdf or powerpoint (take your pick) provides some strong guidance.

The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business – by Laurie Buczek

And ideas about how to fix it from the trenches. Three key takeaways:

• Focus on creating a natural collaborative experience
• Focus on providing an easy & intuitive user experience
• Focus on dissolving collaborative islands- don’t create more with social tools

Thank you for reading

We hope you found something useful. Please try Goshido, our collaboration & project management platform. Goshido can help you and your teams to take action in the absence of orders and communicate with clarity.

Photo by KrissZPhotography, available under a Creative Commons attribution license