Re- (New) IT for Digital world

 

Two decades back Nicholas Negroponte In “Being Digital”, book on the future of digital technology, talks of the transformation of the world from atoms to bits, a transformation he terms irrevocable, irreplaceable and exponential. We are witnessing Nicholas prediction in coming to reality.

The new Global Enterprise paradigm is increasingly shifting power into the hands of the end consumers. This empowerment will make consumers more connected, intelligent, more capable of taking good decisions, and certainly more demanding. 

Technology has blurred the lines between the digital and traditional methods of dealing with a consumer of any Global Enterprises. The Business Process and IT is no more separate, in most of the industry verticals the Business is driven by IT.   Constant Innovation around IT has become the new normal to the Enterprises to meet rapidly changing consumer expectations and behavior dynamics.

There will be a constant demand from the consumer for compelling IT experiences and stories. Consumer tend to switch places where he is more empowered, also switching cost is becoming more negligible across industry verticals.

More connected consumers, automated processes, and sophisticated analytics place unprecedented demands on IT functions. Many Enterprises are struggling to cope, and they seek to deliver on new demands by adding piecemeal elements to their existing operations.  This is easier said than done. Reinventing the IT function at Global Enterprise requires far-reaching changes, from talent to infrastructure, delivery models, partnership model and will takes multiple years to complete. Business and consumer is not ready to wait for multiple years. The only way we can meet their rising expectations is through a dual approach of renew and new, where we transform existing systems across the IT stack - from infrastructure to applications - to yield higher efficiency and a much better experience, while creating completely new systems to deliver what the consumer desire.

Fortunately, companies can adopt an approach that delivers results quickly while still reshaping IT for the long term. This two-speed approach requires first building a “high-speed” IT function to work alongside the existing IT function, focusing on one or two valuable business areas such as web and customer relationship management

Technology has blurred the lines between the digital and traditional methods of dealing with a consumer of any Global Enterprises. The Business Process and IT is no more separate, in most of the industry verticals the Business is driven by IT.   Constant Innovation around IT has become the new normal to the Enterprises to meet rapidly changing consumer expectations and behavior dynamics.

More connected consumers, automated processes, and sophisticated analytics place unprecedented demands on IT functions. Many Enterprises are struggling to cope, and they seek to deliver on new demands by adding piecemeal elements to their existing operations.  This is easier said than done. Reinventing the IT function at Global Enterprise requires far-reaching changes, from talent to infrastructure, tools, delivery models, partnership model.

~Pras

 

Why blame and critique #SAFe?

 This is my response to #Ken ( #Scrum ) and # David (#Kanban)

Everyone has an opinion and everyone has the right to share it, creative criticism is a welcome. I am sure there are more room under Agile umbrella.

“Being a consumer of Agile  ( I find a difference in perspective people using Agile and people use Agile for living), it’s about mere commonsense on what is required to bring a business excellence in the given context.  It’s a no brainer that problems plaguing large-scale Enterprise include communication and coordination errors at multiple levels people, process  as well as technology integration and infrastructure issues.  In large Enterprises Programs are complex with multiple LOB/ teams / legacy involved, also importantly  large programs are driven by disruptive technologies like Mobile, cloud etc..,   

Synchronization of multiple touch points and early integration testing form the two key ingredients in large-scale programs, and SAFe suggest ways to solve many issues that may arise during these stages – Portfolio->Program->Team.

It’s quite natural  that people look at something which  resonates to their context.  The timing and messaging of SAFe hits bulls eye, no wonder it’s the talk in the town.  You asks CIO of  any large organization  ( fortune 100 -50), what bothers them is show me the success of Agile? Let us wait and watch if SAFe is able to show something, as any consumer does, we will look for a new FACE..”

 

Cheers

Prasad

A thread to real Agile

 

"Manage well”.. I am sure there is no on here who have not received this wish/advice. Mange well in exams, games, play, projects, ‘spouse’ etc.. did we manage well ?? or why could we manage well.. was there any secrete sauce to ‘Manage well’ ?

So what is managing well means for you??

Here are my take on this generous wish / desire ‘Manage well’..

More than a wish for us it is a desire to manage well.., because we equate this to Success, some successful satisfaction ( I will write something about Successful satisfaction later)

So, coming back to ‘Manage well’, we need this when we are in a situation, like exam, project, job, marriage, games etc… and in every situation what are we going to ‘Manage’, nothing but ‘Variables’

So when we are in a situation,

1. Certain variability we know

2. Certain we do not know

3. Certain variable we know that we don’t know about it

4. There are many variable we don’t know that we don’t know

Now let us reflect situations we really managed well and we were successful, the reason is we are in complete cognizant about 1 & 2. Why in some situation we are less successful, because it is more of 3 & 4..

Let us take a situation, Indian cricket team visiting Australia, they are going for their first test match-- every one wishes Indian team to ‘Manage well’ ( this is just an hypothetical example )

What variability Indian cricket team know – bouncy pitches, super-fast bowlers, huge ground , less ground support

What variability they do not know - which players are in great form, how much grass they leave, how many pace bowlers they pick, winning a toss what Clark is going to do..

What variable they know that they do not know - how much runs Australia will score in first innings, how lenient Umpire is about LBW etc.

What variable they don’t know that don’t know - how to run between wicket L, how to apply and spend time in crease ..

So, how Indian team can be victorious in the first test? I leave it your imagination !!!

So from a personal front, when you are in a situation try do a mapping of the critical variables.. the more you are in 1 & 2 zone.. you are in Control ( again I will write more about Control later). We are at best when we feel, we are in control of the variables.. so what you do when you are in not in control ??

So IT business perspective,

In the first phase of IT revolution, we were trying to automate certain business process using computer programs / packages. Where IT folks were clear about what business problem ( variable) they are trying to automate and what is its solution (variable). Only very few programming language and package existed. No focus on efficiency and effectiveness of automation. Automation itself was great USP..

In the second phase of IT revolution, business problem remain known, solutions were challenging, more focus on performance, usability, security. Many solution alternates, cost implications and maintains issues ( all of these are variable ). IT group started losing control, started implementing ‘process’ frameworks / standards etc… , got a feeling they are back in control, do they ??

According to me we are in third phase of IT revolution, where there is no distinction between IT & business process. Disruptive technologies like Mobility , cloud, social engineering, Internet of things drives business and its consumer behavior. So we are behind unknown problems and unknown solutions, highest of 3 & 4. We are in total loss of control J, so how do we ‘manage well’?

The situation we are in third phase, lot of variables makes us un comfortable , create fear failure… .

So here is ‘Mantra’ to regain control

· Short feedback loops, frequent learning cycles and early feedback [ this helps to un cover many 2, 3 & 4)

· Let us fail early and effectively – let us be empirical

· Better interaction on Business users and IT folks – are we building right things

This ‘Mantra’ is nothing but Agile / lean philosophy.. so, Agile gives us insight about variability’s and very cycle / sprint will uncover many 3 & 4. Thus help us to gain back the feel of control and hence ‘MANAGE WELL’ in turn to SUCCESS..

So Agile is not the end it is a means via we do manage well…

Will connect with you folks on my random & crazy thoughts

So, manage well…

 

Building right product a new mindset

Today most of the Software is build for a domain where we are not sure about both problems and solution.  So there is uncertainty in all phases of software development. In the context of software development being a complex adaptive systems, how testing should align with this changing paradigm of known to unknown?  It is calling for a fundamental change in the approach of a test engineer’s role &responsibility. The test objective, strategy & approach needs to transform to address the reality in the world, cannot be inward out! Testing should be the way to transform Unknowable – Unknown – Knowable – Known cycle.  It becomes important to ask, are we testing the right  ‘it’ before testing ‘it’ right. 
Recently I read few books The lean startup, four steps to the epiphany, Pertotyping at work .  This enabled me  to  question and provoke  our fundamental beliefs of software product development   and provided views and perspective of  - Complex adaptive systems, Cyfen learning dynamics, ‘Pretotype – Google way’
By the way I become a big fan of this http://www.pretotyping.org/pretotype-it---the-book. Fake it before make it...
 

3 things you should mind for Agile project

I am going to share 3 key aspects which made a huge turnaround in transforming a typical waterfall to agile project.
Brief about the project

Building a cutting edge analytics engine for one of top 10 analytics company

Never outsourced before

Struggling with time to market

Need to incorporate frequent feedback from end user

New team, from different back ground

2 weeks sprint
Customer wanted ‘agile’
We had ‘great’ agile immersion program, team energized, ‘great’ agile tools ..
but after 3 sprints
Customer is unhappy, many escalations, strained relationship
Management ‘doubtful’ of the outcomes and output
Lack of confidence and backbiting in the team

As a program manager, after spending a week with each team
members, stakeholder and customer touch points … did go with 3 item agenda to change the mindset ..
Be truthful to yourself – be declarative , awareness of a safety net for being
truthful [ this helped in understanding learning curve, dependencies etc.]
Mind set for looking and being ‘detailed oriented’
[ this helped in doing a effective release and sprint planning]
How to have unconditional ‘collaboration’
– moving away from cooperative mindset, demolished nonsense of ‘daily standup’ established ever flowing communication mindset. Set up a collaborative Performance Appraisal system
These 3 practices embedded in every aspect of work and activates, customer was also communicated same..
After 2 sprints ..
Customer understood – what can be done and what cannot be done
Team knows what it takes complete user stories – better estimation
Effective communication started flowing- silent folks started communicate

Crux of the story - happy team, happy customer and happy management...

Regards

Prasad

Agile Community of Passion at Symphony

Community of Passion are Self organizing and self governing groups of people who share passion for the common domain of what they do and strive to become better practitioners. They create value for their members and stakeholders through developing and spreading new knowledge, capabilities and fostering innovation
George Por

Agile CoP is a special kind of ‘social network’ that comes together because of a passion about Agile and its practices.
Objectives :
a)Peer- to peer help in problem solving
b) Developing and validating best practices
c) Upgrading and distributing knowledge in daily use
d) Fostering unexpected ideas and innovation
e)Connecting to external Agile world

My Kanban Notes, the key takeaways

Kanban in nut shell Visualize the workflow: Split the work into pieces, write each item on a card and put on the wall Use named columns to illustrate where each item is in the workflow
Limit WIP (work in progress) – assign explicit limits to how many items may be in progress at each workflow state.
Measure the lead time (average time to complete one item, sometimes called “cycle time”), optimize the process to make lead time as small and predictable as possible.
Queue limits are designed to avoid premature work. The limit should be large enough to keep the team busy (i.e. there is always something in it for the team to start work on), but small enough to avoid premature prioritisation (i.e. having things sitting in the queue for too long before they are begun).Ideally the queue should be FIFOWIPlimits are designed to reduce multi-tasking, maximise throughput, and enhance teamwork.Reducing multitasking is beneficial for two primary reasons. 1) 20% time is lost to context switching per ‘task’, so fewer tasks means less time lost (from Gerald Weinberg, Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking) 2) Performing tasks sequentially yields results sooner. ...........................................................................................Throughput is also maximised by decreasing WIPSimple examples of this effect are traffic jams, where traffic speed reduces as more traffic builds up, and CPU load, where application performance goes down as CPU load increases. Little’s Law for Queuing Theory:Total Cycle Time = Number of Things in Progress / Average Completion RateTherefore, to improve cycle time there are two options; reduce the number of things in process or improve the average completion rate. Of the two, reducing the number of things in progress is the easier, and once that is under control, then the more challenging changes to improve completion rate can be applied...........................................................................................WIP limit sizes can depend on type of work and size of team and should be adjusted to achieve maximum flow. One approach is to start small (e.g. a limit of 1) and increase as necessary. Another is to start larger (e.g. a limit of half the team size) and reduce until the sweetspot is achieved.
The consequences of using a kanban system are that the Product Backlog can be eliminated, because the immediate queue is the only work of interest, timeboxed iterations (i.e.Sprints) can be eliminated, because work is pulled as necessary, and estimation can be eliminated, because work is not planned into iterations.
.................................................................................................
. ...............................................................................................Flow & Cadence
Flow describes how the work in the system can delivery maximum valueIn lean enterprises, traditional organizational structures give way to new team-oriented organizations which are centred on the flow of value, not on functional expertise.Lean emphasises ‘One Piece Flow’ (means moving one piece at a time between stages in a workflow as opposed to moving batches of work between stages in a workflow)The ‘One Piece’ in a Kanban system for software development can be thought as the Minimal Marketable Feature (M Denne & H Cleland-Huang in Software by Numbers).A minimal marketable feature is a chunk of functionality that delivers a subset of the customer’s requirements, and that is capable of returning value to the customer when released as an independent entity.The consequence of applying the concept of Flow is that emphasis is placed on using larger, value-focussed MMFs, rather than smaller, more incremental Stories.
...........................Cadence is the approach to achieving commitment and reliability with a kanban systemA regular cadence, or ‘heartbeat,’ establishes the capability of a team to reliably deliver working software at a dependable velocity. An organization that delivers at a regular cadence has established its process capability and can easily measure its capacity.Throughput = WIP / Cycle TimeThroughput allows forecasting of future capability, without needing to specify what might be delivered. Cycle Time allows commitment by becoming an SLA with the business
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Summary : They key points of Kanban, Flow and Cadence are:A Kanban System manages the workflow in a way which allows the Product Backlog, Timeboxed Iterations and Estimations to be eliminated. Flow is about effectively delivering maximum value by focussing on optimising the value stream of larger MMFs Cadence allows iteration input and output to be de-coupled and achieves commitment and reliability via measurement rather than planning